Zhou Dynasty

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The Zhou was the longest of the Chinese dynasties, conventionally dated from about 1046 BCE — when the Zhou people overthrew the Shang — to 256 BCE, when the last Zhou king was deposed by the rising state of Qin. Its history splits in two. The Western Zhou ruled a broad, loosely feudal realm from centers near modern Xi’an until 771 BCE, when invasion forced the court east to Luoyang. The Eastern Zhou that followed is the long twilight: the kings reigned in name while real power passed to contending states, in the eras later historians called the Spring and Autumn period and, more violently, the Warring States.

The Zhou rose at the western edge of the world the Shang had ordered. They were a people of the Wei River valley, allies and sometime subjects of the Shang court, and their conquest, in the tradition’s telling, was the work of two generations: King Wen, who gathered the allegiance of the western states without living to strike, and his son King Wu, who carried the campaign east and broke the Shang army in a single dawn engagement at Muye, near the Shang capital. The date of that battle is the anchor of all early Chinese chronology, and it is known with unusual precision for so remote an event: a short inscription cast into a bronze vessel by an officer named Li, one of the earliest Zhou bronzes recovered, records that the victory fell on the morning of a jiazi day with the planet Jupiter at its zenith — the only contemporary epigraphic witness to the day of the conquest, and the kind of datum that has let astronomers and historians argue the year toward 1046 BCE. King Wu died soon after the victory, and the consolidation fell to his brother, the Duke of Zhou, who governed as regent for the boy-king Cheng, put down a revolt of Shang loyalists and Zhou princes, and is remembered as the architect of the early order — and as the sage whose institutions Confucius would spend his life trying to recover.

To justify their conquest, the Zhou advanced the idea that would outlast them by millennia. They held that the right to rule was a Mandate of Heaven (tianming) — granted to a just ruler and withdrawn from a corrupt one, so that the fall of the Shang was not usurpation but Heaven’s verdict. The doctrine cut both ways: it legitimated the dynasty and, by the same logic, licensed its eventual replacement. The Shang had ruled by descent and by their privileged access to the high god Di and the royal ancestors, read through the cracked bones of divination; the Zhou claim was different in kind. It made the warrant moral and conditional. Heaven watched the ruler’s conduct, and its favor was a lease, not a freehold — forfeit through cruelty, neglect of the people, and ritual disorder. The early proclamations preserved in the Book of Documents (Shujing) hammer the warning home: the Shang had once held the Mandate and lost it, and the Zhou, having received it, could lose it the same way. The doctrine thus carried within it the seed of every later justified rebellion. It became the standard frame through which Chinese thought read the rise and fall of every regime, and the ruler took from it his enduring title, the Son of Heaven.

The realm the early Zhou built was not a centralized empire but a graded network of obligation. The king held the royal domain directly and parceled out the conquered east to kinsmen, allies, and the heirs of the defeated, each enfeoffed with a territory, a rank, and the charge to maintain its altars and answer the king’s call to war — an arrangement later called fengjian, a term that joins the senses of establishing a lord and demarcating his land, and read by some as a feudalism of sorts. Many of these grants are recorded in the inscriptions cast inside ritual bronzes, where a lord set down the king’s command, the gifts that accompanied it, and the merit it rewarded, so that the vessel itself became a charter and a record addressed to the ancestors. For two centuries the system held, the western kings campaigning against the peoples of the steppe margins and ordering the rites that bound the lineages to the throne. Then it failed. In 771 BCE the last Western Zhou king, You, was killed when his capital in the Wei valley fell to a coalition that included the Quanrong, the western Dog Rong, and the court withdrew east to its secondary center at Chengzhou, near modern Luoyang. The move marks the break between Western and Eastern Zhou — and between a working monarchy and a fiction of one.

In the Eastern Zhou the kings kept the ritual primacy and lost the power. Real authority drained to the great regional states, whose rulers warred, allied, and absorbed their weaker neighbors while still, for a time, professing to act in the king’s name. The first stretch takes its name from the Spring and Autumn Annals, the terse state chronicle of Lu traditionally edited by Confucius, covering roughly 770 to the early fifth century BCE; in it a succession of dominant lords held a loose hegemony as protectors of the Zhou order even as that order hollowed out. The second stretch, the Warring States, conventionally opened in the fifth century BCE — often dated to 475 or, by another reckoning, to the partition of the state of Jin in 403 BCE — and ran until 221 BCE. It was an age of larger, fewer, fiercely administered states fighting wars of mass infantry and annexation, of iron tools and weapons spreading through agriculture and the army, of the older aristocratic etiquette of war giving way to calculation. The Zhou king, by then a minor lord on a shrinking patch of land, was extinguished in 256 BCE; the unification was completed thirty-five years later by Qin.

The period’s lasting weight is intellectual, and it is the disorder itself that produced it. As the inherited order came apart, and rival courts sought any advantage and any thinker who could supply one, there arose the most fertile age of Chinese thought — the contention later remembered as the Hundred Schools. The schools answered, in their different keys, a single pressing question: how a person and a state should be ordered when the old certainties no longer held. Confucius, active in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, taught a ritual and ethical cultivation aimed at social harmony, the remaking of the self through study and the rites until conduct became second nature — a program whose later elaboration belongs to Confucianism. Mencius, in the next century, sharpened the political edge of the Mandate, arguing that a king who ruined his people had made himself a mere fellow and might be removed without the crime of regicide. Against the Confucian wager on ritual and learning, the texts associated with Laozi and with Zhuangzi set a way of accord with the Dao, the spontaneous course of things, and a suspicion of the very effort to order — the seedbed of what later crystallized as Taoism. The Mohists preached impartial care and a utilitarian frugality and built a disciplined organization to practice it; the Legalists abandoned moral suasion altogether for codified law, reward and punishment, and the cold mechanics of state power — the doctrine Qin would ride to victory. Others ranged across logic, agriculture, military strategy, and the correlation of the cosmos. Out of this ferment came the vocabulary, the problems, and the rival answers that later ages would inherit whole.

Tradition credits the era, too, with shaping the Yijing — the I Ching — from an older divination manual into a text carrying layers of cosmological commentary. The base layer, the Zhouyi or “Changes of the Zhou,” is a Western Zhou handbook of milfoil divination: sixty-four hexagrams, each a stack of six broken or unbroken lines, with terse statements attached, its concerns the omens of harvest, war, marriage, and journey. The American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy, comparing its language with dated bronze inscriptions, placed the compilation of the core in roughly its present form in the last quarter of the ninth century BCE, in the reign of King Xuan. The philosophical overlay — the Ten Wings, which read the hexagrams as a microcosm of cosmic process and supplied the generative scheme of the Supreme Polarity giving birth to the two modes, the four images, and the eight trigrams — came later, across the late Warring States into the early Han, and was traditionally but wrongly ascribed to Confucius. The transformation of a diviner’s manual into a classic of cosmology was thus a work of centuries, much of it after the dynasty had ended.

How much of all this the Zhou themselves systematized, and how much was read back into the period by the empires that inherited it, is a question the documentary record sets sharply. The received accounts were largely compiled after the dynasty had ended; the contemporary evidence is the bronze inscriptions, the excavated manuscripts, and the archaeology, and the long task of modern sinology has been to weigh the one against the other. What the retrospect is not in doubt about is the period’s standing. Later Chinese culture treated the early Zhou as a lost age of order — the model the Confucians wished to restore, the reign of the Duke of Zhou held up as the pattern of just government — and the foundational texts of both Confucian and Daoist tradition reach back to its closing centuries for their setting and their voice. The dynasty that fell to Qin supplied the vocabulary in which China would argue about order for the next two thousand years.

Sources and scholarship

The standard modern synthesis of the period is The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which gives the Shang, Western Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring States each a chapter on institutional history and one on material culture, drawing equally on transmitted texts, bronze inscriptions, and excavated manuscripts; Shaughnessy’s own chapter on Western Zhou history traces the conquest, the postconquest settlement, and the mid-dynastic reforms, and weighs the significance of Zhou political theory for all later Chinese historiography. The foundational study of the contemporary record is Shaughnessy’s Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (University of California Press, 1991), which establishes how the inscribed ritual vessels are read as primary documents. The transmitted account of the whole pre-imperial age was given its canonical shape by Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji, c. 100 BCE), the Han historian’s chronicle from which the dynastic frame, the dates, and many of the founding narratives descend.

For the intellectual flowering, A. C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (Open Court, 1989) remains the leading account of the Hundred Schools as a single connected debate. The career and teaching of the central figure are surveyed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry Confucius, which situates him in the late Zhou and against the canon he claimed only to transmit. On the Yijing as it took shape in and after the Zhou, the same encyclopedia’s Chinese Philosophy of Change (Yijing), by Tze-ki Hon, dates the stratification of text and commentary and explains the cosmological turn the Ten Wings effected. The public-domain anchor for the Daoist texts that reach back to the period is James Legge’s The Texts of Tâoism (Sacred Books of the East, 1891), which carries the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi in their classic English rendering; Legge’s The Yî King (1882, 2nd ed. 1899) remains the standard public-domain English Yijing.

→ In the library: The Tao Teh King (Legge, 1891) · The Texts of Tâoism — Daodejing & Zhuangzi (Legge, 1891)

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