Tribal peoples, prominently the Qiang, were directly west of Qin and Han China (and peoples called the Qiang had bordered China to the west since at least Shang times). The Qiang were relatively disorganized: as one Han general noted, "the reason why it is easy to control the Qiang is that as soon as there are influential men they attack each other, so naturally they cannot unite." Despite their divisiveness, however, the Qiang caused consistent trouble for the Han, "rising in rebellion for generation after generation" as one late Western Han memorial notes. This was not helped by the fact that large numbers of Qiang were resettling within China's western borders.

To the northwest there was a region the early Chinese called the Western Regions, largely equivalent to modern Xinjiang, that was filled with both nomadic peoples and oasis cities. Later it would fall under Xiongnu then Han rule, but during Qin times neither the Xiongnu nor the Han empire would have existed.

That being said, the Qin are conceived as the first Chinese dynasty simply because Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and even Yunnan were not considered part of China until relatively recently and still contain large numbers of non-Han minorities today. The Qiang were not really "Chinese" in the same way the Qin were.