Qin Shi Huang's court did not rest its claim to rule on Legalist administrative theory alone; it also adopted the five-phase cosmological system, wuxing, that correlated the five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water with colors, directions, seasons and, crucially, with the legitimating power of a ruling dynasty. A study of astrology and cosmology in early China traces how the Qin identified their own rule with the phase of water, associated with the color black and with the direction north, and adjusted court ritual, official dress and even the format of official documents to match that cosmological assignment.
The theory held that dynasties succeeded one another as one phase conquered or gave way to the next, so a dynasty's assigned phase was simultaneously a claim about cosmic order and a prediction about its own eventual succession, a built-in acknowledgment that no dynasty, including the Qin's own, would rule forever. Later dynasties, beginning with the Han that replaced the short lived Qin within two decades, continued to work within this same correlative framework, debating and periodically reassigning their own phase, so that the cosmological vocabulary the Qin had adopted to legitimate its rule outlived the dynasty by many centuries, becoming a standard tool of Chinese imperial legitimation rather than a Qin peculiarity.