The Zhou dynasty ( JOH; Chinese: 周; pinyin: Zhōu, pronunciation: [ʈʂóʊ]) was a royal dynasty of China that existed for 790 years from c. 1046 BC until 256 BC, the longest span of any dynasty in Chinese history. During the Western Zhou period (c. 1046 – 771 BC), the royal house, surnamed Ji, had military control over territories centered on the Wei River valley and North China Plain. Even as Zhou suzerainty became increasingly ceremonial over the following Eastern Zhou period (771–256 BC), the political system created by the Zhou royal house survived in some form for several additional centuries. A date of 1046 BC for the Zhou's establishment is supported by the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project and David Pankenier, after David Nivison and Edward L. Shaughnessy had previously dated the establishment to 1045 BC.
The later Eastern Zhou period is itself roughly divided into two parts. During the Spring and Autumn period (c. 771 – c. 481 BC), power became increasingly decentralized as the authority of the royal house diminished. The Warring States period (c. 475 – 221 BC) that followed saw large-scale warfare and consolidation among what had formerly been Zhou client states, until the Zhou were formally extinguished by the state of Qin in 256 BC. The Qin ultimately founded the imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC after conquering all of China.
The Zhou period is often considered to be the zenith for the craft of Chinese bronzeware. The later Zhou period is also famous for the advent of three major Chinese philosophies: Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism. The Zhou dynasty also spans the period when the predominant form of written Chinese became seal script, which evolved from the earlier oracle bone and bronze scripts. By the dynasty's end, an immature form of clerical script had also emerged.
History
Foundation
Traditional myth
According to Chinese mythology, the Zhou lineage began when Jiang Yuan, a consort of the legendary Emperor Ku, miraculously conceived a child, Qi "the Abandoned One", after stepping into the divine footprint of Shangdi. Qi was a culture hero credited with surviving abandonment by his mother three times, and with greatly improving agriculture, to the point where he was granted lordship over Tai, the surname Ji, and the title Houji "Lord of Millet", by the Emperor Shun. He even received sacrifice as a harvest god. The term Houji was probably a hereditary title attached to a lineage.
Buzhu—Qi's son, or rather that of the Houji—is said to have abandoned his position as Agrarian Master (農師; Nóngshī) in old age and either he or his son Ju abandoned their tradition, living in the manner of the Xirong and Rongdi (see Hua–Yi distinction). Ju's son Liu, however, led his people to prosperity by restoring agriculture and settling them at a place called Bin, which his descendants ruled for generations. Tai later led the clan from Bin to Zhou, an area in the Wei River valley (modern Qishan County).
The duke passed over his two elder sons Taibo and Zhongyong to favor the younger Jili, a warrior in his own right. As a vassal of the Shang kings Wu Yi and Wen Ding, Jili went to conquer several Xirong tribes before being treacherously killed by Shang forces. Taibo and Zhongyong had supposedly already fled to the Yangtze delta, where they established the state of Wu among the tribes there. Jili's son Wen bribed his way out of imprisonment and moved the Zhou capital to Feng (present-day Xi'an). Around 1046 BC, Wen's son Wu and his ally Jiang Ziya led an army of 45,000 men and 300 chariots across the Yellow River and defeated Di Xin at the Battle of Muye, marking the beginning of the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou enfeoffed a member of the defeated Shang royal family as the Duke of Song, which was held by descendants of the Shang royal family until its end. This practice was referred to as Er Wang San Ke.
Culture
According to Nicholas Bodman, the Zhou appear to have spoken a language largely similar in vocabulary and syntax to that of the Shang; a recent study by David McCraw, using lexical statistics, reached the same conclusion. The Zhou emulated Shang cultural practices, possibly to legitimize their own rule, and became the successors to Shang culture. At the same time, the Zhou may also have been connected to the Xirong, a broadly defined cultural group to the west of the Shang, which the Shang regarded as tributaries. For example, the philosopher Mencius (372–289 BC) acknowledged that King Wen of Zhou had ancestry from among the Xirong, as King Wen's descendants, the Zhou kings, claimed descent from Hou Ji, a legendary culture hero possibly related to the Xirong through his mother Jiang Yuan. Additionally, the late 4th-century BC Zuo Zhuan comments that the baron of Li Rong (驪戎男), after being defeated by Jin, married his daughter Li Ji off. According to historian Li Feng, the term "Rong" during the Western Zhou period was likely used to designate political and military adversaries rather than cultural and ethnic "others". Cultural artifacts of the Western Rong coexisted with Western Zhou bronzes, indicating close bonds between the Rong and the Western Zhou.
Western Zhou
During the Western Zhou (1045–771 BC), King Wu maintained the old capital for ceremonial purposes but constructed a new one for his palace and administration nearby at Haojing. Although Wu's early death left a young and inexperienced heir, the Duke of Zhou assisted his nephew King Cheng in consolidating royal power. Wary of the Duke of Zhou's increasing power, the "Three Guards", Zhou princes stationed on the eastern plain, rose in rebellion against his regency. Even though they garnered the support of independent-minded nobles, Shang partisans, and several Dongyi tribes, the Duke of Zhou quelled the rebellion, and further expanded the Zhou Kingdom into the east. To maintain Zhou authority over its greatly expanded territory and prevent other revolts, he set up the fengjian system. Furthermore, he countered Zhou's crisis of legitimacy by expounding the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven while accommodating important Shang rituals at Wangcheng and Chengzhou.
Over time, this decentralized system became strained as the familial relationships between the Zhou kings and the regional dynasties thinned over the generations. Peripheral territories developed local power and prestige on par with that of the Zhou.
The conflicts with nomadic tribes from the north and the northwest, variously known as the Xianyun, Guifang, or various "Rong" tribes, such as the Xirong, Shanrong or Quanrong, intensified towards the end of the Western Zhou period. These tribes are recorded as harassing Zhou territory, but at the time the Zhou were expanding northwards, encroaching on their traditional lands—especially the Wei River valley. Archaeologically, the Zhou expanded to the north and the northwest at the expense of the Siwa culture.
When King You demoted and exiled his Qiang queen in favor of the commoner Bao Si, the disgraced queen's father the Marquis of Shen joined with Zeng and the Quanrong. The Quanrong put an end to the Western Zhou in 771 BC, sacking the Zhou capital at Haojing and killing the last Western Zhou king You. With King You dead, a conclave of nobles met at Shen and declared the Marquis's grandson King Ping. The capital was moved eastward to Wangcheng, marking the beginning of the Eastern Zhou period.
Eastern Zhou
The Eastern Zhou period (771–256 BC) was characterized by an accelerating collapse of royal authority, although the king's ritual importance enabled more than five additional centuries of rule. The Spring and Autumn Annals, the Confucian chronicle of the early years of this process, gave the period its name as the Spring and Autumn period. The partition of Jin during the mid-5th century BC is a commonly cited as initiating the subsequent Warring States period. In 403 BC, the Zhou court recognized Han, Zhao, and Wei as fully independent states. In 344, Duke Hui of Wei was the first to claim the title of "king" for himself. Others followed, marking a turning point, as rulers did not even entertain the pretense of vassalage of the Zhou court, instead proclaiming themselves fully independent kingdoms. A series of states rose to prominence before each falling in turn, and in most of these conflicts Zhou was a minor player.
The last Zhou king is traditionally taken to be Nan, who was killed when Qin captured Wangcheng in 256 BC. Duke Wen of Eastern Zhou declared himself to be "King Hui", but his splinter state was fully disassembled by 249. Qin's wars of unification concluded in 221 BC with Qin Shi Huang's annexation of Qi.
The Eastern Zhou is also remembered as the golden age of Chinese philosophy: the Hundred Schools of Thought which flourished as rival lords patronized itinerant scholars is led by the example of Qi's Jixia Academy. The Nine Schools of Thought which came to dominate the others were Confucianism as interpreted by Mencius and others, Legalism, Taoism, Mohism, the utopian communalist Agriculturalism, two strains of the School of Diplomacy, the School of Names, Sun Tzu's School of the Military, and the School of Naturalists. While only the first three of these would receive imperial patronage in later dynasties, doctrines from each influenced the others and Chinese society in sometimes unusual ways. The Mohists for instance found little interest in their praise of meritocracy but much acceptance for their mastery of defensive siege warfare; much later, however, their arguments against nepotism were used in favor of establishing the imperial examination system.
Culture and society
The Zhou heartland was the Wei River valley; this remained their primary base of power after conquering the Shang.
Mandate of Heaven
Zhou rulers introduced the Mandate of Heaven, which would prove to be among East Asia's most enduring political doctrines. According to the theory, Heaven imposed a mandate to replace the Shang with the Zhou, whose moral superiority justified seizing Shang wealth and territory in order to return good governance to the people.
The Mandate of Heaven was presented as a religious compact between the Zhou people and their supreme god in heaven. The Zhou agreed that since worldly affairs were supposed to align with those of the heavens, the heavens conferred legitimate power on only one person, the Zhou ruler. In return, the ruler was duty-bound to uphold heaven's principles of harmony and honor. Any ruler who failed in this duty, who let instability creep into earthly affairs, or who let his people suffer, would lose the mandate. Under this system, it was the prerogative of spiritual authority to withdraw support from any wayward ruler and to find another, more worthy one. In this way, the Zhou sky god legitimized regime change.
In using this creed, the Zhou rulers had to acknowledge that any group of rulers, even they themselves, could be ousted if they lost the mandate of heaven because of improper practices. The book of odes written during the Zhou period clearly intoned this caution.
The Zhou kings contended that heaven favored their triumph because the last Shang kings had been evil men whose policies brought pain to the people through waste and corruption. After the Zhou came to power, the mandate became a political tool.
One of the duties and privileges of the king was to create a royal calendar. This official document defined times for undertaking agricultural activities and celebrating rituals. But unexpected events such as solar eclipses or natural calamities threw the ruling house's mandate into question. Since rulers claimed that their authority came from heaven, the Zhou made great efforts to gain accurate knowledge of the stars and to perfect the astronomical system on which they based their calendar.
Zhou legitimacy also arose indirectly from Shang material culture through the use of bronze ritual vessels, statues, ornaments, and weapons. As the Zhou emulated the Shang's large scale production of ceremonial bronzes, they developed an extensive system of bronze metalworking that required a large force of tribute labor. Many of its members were Shang, who were sometimes forcibly transported to new Zhou to produce the bronze ritual objects which were then sold and distributed across the lands, symbolizing Zhou legitimacy.
Feudalism
Western writers often describe the Zhou period as feudal because the Zhou's fengjian system invites comparison with European political systems during the Middle Ages.
There were many similarities between the decentralized systems. When the dynasty was established, the conquered land was divided into hereditary fiefs (諸侯, zhūhóu) that eventually became powerful in their own right. In matters of inheritance, the Zhou dynasty recognized only patrilineal primogeniture as legal. According to Hsi-Sheng Tao, "the Tsung-fa or descent line system has the following characteristics: patrilineal descent, patrilineal succession, patriarchate, sib-exogamy, and primogeniture"
The system, also called "extensive stratified patrilineage", was defined by the anthropologist Kwang-chih Chang as "characterized by the fact that the eldest son of each generation formed the main of line descent and political authority, whereas the younger brothers were moved out to establish new lineages of lesser authority. The farther removed, the lesser the political authority". Ebrey defines the descent-line system as follows: "A great line (ta-tsung) is the line of eldest sons continuing indefinitely from a founding ancestor. A lesser line is the line of younger sons going back no more than five generations. Great lines and lesser lines continually spin off new lesser lines, founded by younger sons".