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Written chronicles of Chinese history began to be kept beginning in the 9th century BC, and we have later copies of some of them. Other sources of information about early China are archaeological finds and a very rich collection of myths, legends, rumors, and traditions recounted by later writers. There are a great many contradictions and ambiguities in all of this material, but the archaeological finds are gradually coming into alignment with the written sources, and the story is becoming clearer.
This web essay is intended to provide a basic background for college courses on Chinese history or anthropology. It covers the Neolithic period and Bronze Age through the middle of the Zhōu 周 Dynasty [period 04].
This essay uses simplified characters. When the traditional characters are different, or when the Romanized spelling is not given in the running text, they are provided in a balloon available by holding your cursor over the character on the screen. Characters with more information available by this method have light dotted underlining. Period and reign numbers refer to a standardized table of Periods of Chinese History.
Traditional Chinese historiography begins the story of Chinese civilization on the Central Plains 中原 about five thousand years ago with a period of the so-called "Five Emperors" 五帝 (although nine monarchs have been assigned to this period, period 01).
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| Sīmǎ Qiān, who died about 90BC or so, was the official historian under Emperor Wǔ 武 (reign 06b-6), who had him castrated for offensive political advice. Rather than committing suicide honorably, Sīmǎ Qiān continued to work on China's most famous book of history. |
Our major textual source for many of these figures is a history of China called The Records of the Historian 史记written by Sīmǎ Qiān 司马迁, who lived in the early Hàn 汉 dynasty [period 06b], a couple of thousand years after the people he described.
Although there are tales about each of these as a great, even miraculous, historical figure, their exact status is difficult to be certain about. Assuming the existence of these people, some of their "names" may in fact have been the names of groups, possibly dominant kinship or "ethnic" groups. For example, "the Yán Emperor" or "Emperor Yán" 炎帝 may have been the name of group of people — possibly a clan (definition)) or phratry (definition) — and not that of an individual person at all.
And indeed the title "dì" 帝 given to them, although later meaning "emperor," probably either was not used in their era or had an entirely different meaning.
The first of the great culture heroes was Fú Xī 伏羲 [reign 01a-1], also called Tài hào 太昊. Some suggest that Tài hào is a kind of dynastic title, and that his personal name was Fú Xī (or Páo Xī 庖羲). He was regarded as reigning for a thousand years, and his sister Nǚwā 女娲 is said to have invented humans, and then having persuaded Fú Xī to enact mating restrictions on them, thus creating the institution of marriage.
The next leader, also considered to have reigned a thousand years or so, was Emperor Yán 炎帝 [reign 01a-2]. Also known by a "personal name" of Shén Nóng 神农 ("spiritual farmer") or Liè Shān 烈山 ("noble mountain"), he is considered to have "invented" agriculture.
Sīmă Qiān regarded the Yellow Emperor 黃帝 as the founder of Chinese civilization, and even today Chinese will sometimes describes themselves as descendents of the Yellow Emperor.
The Yellow Emperor, is said to have lived to the age of 117 and to have governed his realm for a full century. Like his predecessors, he is also credited with wonderful inventions, including clothing and medicine. (The "Yellow Emperor's Scripture of Internal Medicine" 黄帝内经 dates from the IVth or IIIrd century BC, but still invokes his name as a symbol of its association with the tradition of the invention of medicine.) And it is to his reign that tradition dates the invention of writing by a certain Cāngjié 仓颉, who is said to have been a brother of Fú Xī and to have had three sets of eyes, and after whom a Chinese-character input system for computers is now named.
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Chīyóu as seen in a modern Hong Kong children's book. He has traditionally represented as a kind of monster. 袁珂 2005 中國古代神話. 香港;商務印書館. P. 59. |
Most Chinese historians today are inclined to think that the Yellow Emperor was a real person. He may have been a "tribal chief" 部落首领. Nearby, to the south and to the west, competing tribes would have corresponded to the Yán Emperor and to his nemesis, a "person" named Chīyóu 蚩尤, lord of a tribe called the Jiǔlí 九黎. Both Chīyóu and the Yán Emperor were traditionally held to have been the Yellow Emperor's enemies and competitors (and competitors of each other), against whom he fought and whom he eventually conquered. The Yellow Emperor's dominance over and alliance with the Yán Emperor to conquer Chīyóu became, according to legend, the basis for the unification of Chinese civilization, understood as centered forever on the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River valley 黄河流域.
Two other major figures among the nine rulers of the "Five Emperors" period are Yáo 尧 (or Táng Yáo 唐尧 or Táo Táng 陶唐) [reign 01a-8] and Shùn 舜 [reign 01a-9]. From earliest times Yáo and Shùn were praised for their virtue, and Shùn is the first in the list of famous filial exemplars held up for imitation from late dynastic times to the present. He was so virtuous, we are told, that even wild animals came to help him plow his family land. Recognizing Shùn's high moral character, Yáo passed on the throne to him rather than to his own children.
Chinese scholars today tend to regard Táo Táng, Yáo's "title," as the name of a group (possibly a clan) of which Yáo was a member. Shùn is sometimes called Yú Shùn 虞舜, and the same logic would make him a member of the Yú "clan," presumably an ally of the Táo Táng "clan."
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Qīng Dynasty woodcut of Emperor Shùn, shown plowing with the assistance of an Elephant. (Click to enlarge.) 李然 2000 二十四孝图说.上海:上海大学出版社. P. 9. |
Shùn in his turn, we are told, passed the throne on to a virtuous man named Yŭ 禹, who won great admiration for managing to control the flooding of the Yellow River (for which he is often called "Yǔ the Great" 大禹, who is considered the founder of China's first dynasty.
These legends tell us little of what really happened, of course. People don't suddenly invent clothes or agriculture or marriage, as these myths recount. Even if the great heroes and villains of these stories actually existed, they did not exist in the way that the stories represent them (which is perhaps another way of saying that they didn't exist).
What we know from archaeology is that people in what are today the various river systems of China had settled and taken up agriculture by about 8,000 BC, roughly the same time in which agricultural adaptations developed over much of the rest of Eurasia after the retreat of the Würm glaciation. This period is called the Neolithic. (More About the Neolithic)
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Museum diorama of Bànpō, a Neolithic Village Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei |
There are a great many Neolithic village sites now known. Among the most important, because it has been so thoroughly excavated, is Bànpō 半坡, a site that you can visit as a tourist in the city of Xī'ān 西安 in Shǎanxī 陕西 Province (the same city where your tour guide will take you to see the famous Underground Army, built during the reign of the first full-fledged emperor of China, Qín Shǐhuángdì 秦始皇帝 [reign 05a-1]).
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| Luxury pottery from Bànpō. The fish design, common at Bànpō, has been interpreted by some as a kind of logo for a "clan." |
Bànpō dates from about 4000 to 3000 BC and is part of the Yăngsháo 仰韶 family of sites, named for a "type site" (definition) located in the core Yellow River region between about 5000 and 2700 BC. Like other Yăngsháo sites, Bànpō exhibits ample pottery, often beautifully decorated, and materials used for hunting, fishing, and farming. The village is surrounded by a moat the function of which is unclear. It is unlikely that it would have provided very sustained defense against other people, especially in the absence of any sort of piling on the inside of it (such as one finds in norther European fortified settlements), so a good spculation is that it was designed to keep domestic animals where they belonged at night, and to keep wild animals out. (Some writers have argued that it shows the village was a clan settlement, but there is no obvious logic to support that.)
Buildings at Yăngsháo sites can be reimagined based on the postholes preserved as discolorations in the soil, and they have a remarkable sameness about them, with two exceptions. One is that there is a mix of square and round structures with no obvious difference in function. And the other is that there is a very occasional, slightly larger structure, usually interpreted as a space for joint activities. Bànpō conforms to this general pattern
Because Emperor Yŭ was succeeded (against his will) by his son, he has been regarded as the founder of the first Chinese dynasty, called Xià 夏 ("summer," a word which some people speculate once meant "elegant" or which may have referred to a kind of palace represented today by the character 厦).
Yŭ is credited not only with controlling the Yellow River floods, but, as monarch, with establishing cities, devising a system of appointed administrative officials, and setting up China's earliest code of laws. He is also traditionally considered to have established the first system of tribute exacted from surrounding peoples. The Xià, although not necessarily Yŭ's reign, is also credited by later writers with establishing prisons, a rationalized army, and an administrative calendar.
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| Putative tomb of Yǔ the Great in Zhèjiāng Province, which claims him as a native son, whethr or not he really existed. |
Dates in all of this are quite impossible to pin down with accuracy, although there are some traditional numbers. Following the traditional numbers, the Xià Dynasty would have extended from 2207 to 1766 BC, but more recent guesses would date Xià Dynasty slightly later, from about 2100 to about 1600. According to the Chinese government's "Xià, Shāng, and Zhōu Dating Project" 夏商周断代工程, the Xià Dynasty probably began about 2070 BC.
So far there is no direct archaeological evidence for a dynasty of this name — that is to say, no inscriptions have turned up from this period with the word "Xià" on them, since we have no inscriptions from this period of any kind — but obviously there is archaeological evidence of society along the Yellow River at this period. The archaeological horizon referred to as Lóngshān 龙山 (named after an archaeological site of the same name) might include the period associated with Yáo and Shùn. By Sīmă Qiān's time the phrase "Three Dynasties" 三代was in use and referred to the Xià (period 02) and its two successors, the Shāng 商 (period 03) and the Zhōu 周 (period 04).
The later Shāng and Zhōu dynasties have been archaeologically confirmed and interpreted as something we can reasonably call states. As their predecessor, the Xià may also have been quite state-like. A number of archaeological sites seem to fall into this period and to be located in what might have been the terrain ruled by a Xià royal house. Most of them are locate in or near the modern city of Luòyáng 洛阳 in Hénán (HEN) Province and in the southern part of Shānxī (SX) province.
The Yellow river flows out of the mountains of western China and then makes a series of abrupt turns in a kind of box. Most of the archaeological action takes place at the lower-right-hand corner of the box, where the river, flowing southward, suddenly turns eastward again and heads across the central plain to the sea. As it is heading down the right hand side of the "box," the river forms the border between the province of Shănxī 陕西 (SN "west of the gorge") and Shānxī 山西 (SX "west of the mountains").
(You can click on the map below to toggle the rivers on and off. The map uses the official Chinese government povince abbreviations. For a full list of province names, click here.)(Because English writers do not mark tones, Shănxī and Shānxī end up looking alike, so an extra vowel is arbitrarily written into the former one to provide a difference: "Shaanxi" on the west of the river, "Shanxi" on the east. In this essay, I will do that too (Shăanxī in contrast to Shānxī), even though I will also mark the tone.)
The province of Shăanxī (SN) continues on the south side of the bend in river. But the province of Shānxī (SX) does not. On the south of the east-west river lies the province of Hénán 河南 (HEN "south of the river"). A great many archaeological sites are found both on the north (Shānxī [SX] side) and south (Hénán [HEN] side) of the river. (A little further along the course of the river the provincial boundary heads north so that Hénán lies on both sides of it, and eventually the river, bending gently to the north itself, and then the river heads from Hénán into Shāndōng 山东 (SD "east of the mountains") Province and then to the sea. In antiquity and at the present time, it empties into the Bóhăi Sea 渤海 to the north of Shāndōng. In the Yuán 元 and Míng 明 dynasties [periods 19 and 20], the course of river shifted to empty into the Yellow Sea 黄海 on the south side of Shāndōng, causing catastrophic floods as it changed course.
A smaller river, the Wèi 渭水 flows eastward across central Shāanxī (SN) and feeds into the Yellow River just at the point where the Yellow River turns away from the Shăanxī border. A great many early archaeological sites are found along the Wèi river. In general, you can think of the Wèi river as the "western" end of the Neolithic scene in the Yellow River Basin, as against the "eastern" part lying along the Shānxī-Hénán border.
Several archaeological sites seem candidates as Xià settlements because they are located in about the right place and were occupied at about the right time. They could have fallen within a political system that later writers called Xià, or they could have been competing little states, or they could shared cultural traits that one might usefully term "Xià civilization" even if they were not all politically united. Depending upon the degree of centralization, one or another site might even be reasonably described as a/the "Xià capital." The prime candidate at this time is Èrlĭtóu 二里头, a site in Yănshī 偃师 County in Hénán (HEN) Province.
Click here for a listing of major archaeological sites with materials relevant to the long period leading up to and including the Xià.
The majority guess among Chinese researchers at the moment is that Xià may have been the name of a tribal confederation, headed by a dominant kinship based "clan" named Sì 姒, occupying a region in northern Henan (HEN) Province and in southern Shanxi (SX) Province, places occupied, according to later records, by people called Xiàhòu 夏后.
In the absence of further archaeological evidence, it is hard to know, but scholarly opinion at present sees the Xià polity, however unified at its center, as quite small but influencing other small "statelets" surrounding it. Some of these some of the time would have been subordinate to the Xià leadership, and would perhaps have offered tribute (as recounted in later texts). Others would have engaged in rebellion or conspired to overturn it. Something like this is the pattern of the later Shāng Dynasty, and the early part of the Zhōu Dynasty after that, and it corresponds to the behavior of many late Neolithic kingdoms in other parts of the world. China was not really united until the Qín 秦 Dynasty was established in 221 BC, after all, and even then borders with neighboring peoples needed careful attention, so it is surely correct to see early régimes as constantly embroiled in ever shifting systems of confederation and warfare.
Sīmă Qiān tells us that after the death of Yŭ the Great intended to pass his position on to a man named Yì 益, just as he had received the "throne" from Shùn because of his reputation for virtue. However, Yŭ's son Qĭ 啟 did battle with Yì, killed him, and succeeded in assuming his father's position of command [reign 02a-2].
Sīmă Qiān is not our only later source that seeks to make sense of the Xià tradition. Another work, less securely authenticated, is something called the Bamboo Annals 竹书纪年. From this we learn the names of a succession of Xià monarchs (typically designated by the title wáng 王, usually translated as "king" in English).
From these later writers we learn that long before his death, he made sure that his designated successor would be his own son Tàikāng 太康 [reign 02a-3]. Forever after, the normal rule of royal succession in China was from father to son.
Tàikāng did not have an easy time of it, we are told. The realm was attacked by a chieftain named Yì 羿 and his follower Hánzhuó 寒浞, chiefs of a "clan" called the Yŏuqióng 有穷, one of a group of peoples dwelling to the east of the core Xià area, whom later writers usually called "Eastern Barbarians" or Yí 夷.
It was some 20 years after Tàikāng's death, in the reign of a "king" known as Shàokāng 少康 [reign 02a-7] that the Xià rulers regained the upper hand, and Shàokāng's successor Zhù 杼 [reign 02a-8] succeeded in making the "Eastern Barbarians" subordinate to the Xià. (That left only the "Northern Barbarians" or Dí 狄, the "Western Barbarians" or Róng 戎 (or Jiāng 姜), and the "Southern Barbarians" or Mán 蛮 for later periods to deal with.
Tradition holds that the last king of the Xià Dynasty was a terrible tyrant named Jié 桀 or Jiéguĭ 桀癸 [reign 02a-18], whose grotesque behavior all but begged his people to overthrow him. There is no particular reason to doubt that Jié was a monster. However the notion of a dynasty falling because of the moral failings of its last monarch is such a routine theme in Chinese historical writing that we do have a right to be suspicious of later descriptions of Jié. (On the other hand, perhaps it was the misbehavior of Jié that led to this handy explanation to be used for the fall of later dynastic houses.)
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| Shāng Dynasty ceramic vessel from Tomb 331 at Ānyáng |
Among the groups lying to the east of the central Xià realm (specifically in Shāngdōng [SD] Province) were people known to history as "the Shāng" 商, who attacked the Xià, won, and became the Shāng Dynasty [period 03] under a leader called Tāng 汤 or Chéngtāng 成汤. Ancient writers count him as the first "king" of the Shāng Dynasty, under the dynastic title Tiān Yĭ 天乙 ("Second unto Heaven").
It was not easy. We are told that it took eleven expeditions and involved wiping out several other small groups. The decisive battle against Jié was fought about 1600 BC at a place called Míngtiáo 鸣条 (near modern Kāifēng 开封 in Hénán (HEN).
With Jié defeated, Tāng established a "capital," we are told, at a nearby place named Bó 亳. (Some authorities suspect this was located at modern Shāngqiū 商丘 in Hénán [HEN]. Others argue that the ancient text is actually referring to a place called Western Bó 西亳, the present Yǎnshī 偃师, also in Hénán (HEN) Province, the site where the possible Xià "capital" of Èrlĭtóu is located.)
Chinese researchers today, pursuing the notion that the groups of people referred to by ancient writers were probably kinship-based "clans" or "tribes," each sharing a kind of "surname," interpret the record to suggest that the Shāng people shared the surname Zĭ 子, and that their genealogy centered on a rather shadowy ancestral figure named Xiè 契. (The character, which today means "a bond" and is pronounced qì in that meaning, and it is sometimes mispronounced Qì when referring to the Shāng ancestor as well.)
Xiè was held to have been one of the subordinates of the sainted "emperor" Shùn from before the founding of the Xià Dynasty and to have been appointed an official in charge of waterworks under Yŭ, the unwitting founder of the Xià dynastic house. Bearing in mind that the Xià left no written records, and the Shāng scarcely any, we can nevertheless easily imagine the delicious irony that later writers would have found as the subordinate Shāng people, after generations of subjugation under the increasingly oppressive Xià, finally managed to take control.
Rather confusingly, the Shāng are said to have engaged during Xià times in a series of legendary migrations, perhaps as many as eight, although all within Hénán HEN and Shāndōng SD.
Two of the leaders of these movements were people named Xiāngtŭ 相土 and Wánghài 王亥, whom the Shāng royal house later honored as important ancestors. In its first three hundred years of existence after it was established, the Shāng régime is reported to have "moved" again, in this case by moving the "capital" settlement another five times. Finally, probably about 1300 BC or so, King Pángēng 盘庚 [reign 03a-20] moved the Shāng capital to a place called Yīn 殷 (the present Ānyáng 安阳 in Hénán (HEN) Province, where it remained to the end of the dynasty nearly three hundred years later. For this reason, some earlier English writers used to speak of the "Yīn Dynasty." In Chinese the late Shāng is cometimes called the Yīn Shāng period.
Later tradition recounts that the reign of one king, King Wŭdīng 武丁 [reign 03a-23], was particularly glorious in his ability to subdue other tribes, and, in the absence of other evidence, his reign (if he existed) is considered to represent the maximum extent of Shāng expansion.
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| Modern marble pendant in the form of a prehistoric jade bì. |
Obviously it is frustrating to have no textual evidence from the Xià. In fact we have very little indeed from the Shāng either. What is clear is that there was a substantial degree of "class" differentiation. It is reflected in differential tomb goods, and in the elaboration of luxury products of no known utilitarian value. An example is jade. Chinese uses the term jade (yù 玉) to refer to any of a range of shiny smooth stones, but all are characterized by being hard to find and hard to work. One never sees tools made of jade, but ornaments are common. In later times jade was sometimes considered to have healing powers, and a few jade objects may have had magical uses. Most, however, were clearly prestige items, with bigger and better pieces reflecting higher social status. (More About Jade)
By far the most common jade ornament was called a bì 璧. No-one knows what it was used for, but art museums around the world own examples of jade bì, and Chinese curio shops still sell small jade pieces in the same shape intended to be worm as ornaments or good-luck charms.
As far as we can reconstruct the situation today, it appears that the worship of the ancestors of the royal house represented a ritual act by which Shāng rulers asserted and celebrated the legitimacy of their political and economic domination of the region they were able to control. Important to this ritual system were the fabulously expensive bronze ceremonial vessels for which this dynasty and the succeeding Zhōu 周 dynasty are famed.
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Yīn (late Shāng) period bronze vessel from Gāochéngtáixī 篙城台西 in Héběi (HEB) Province 黃士強 1982 中國全集;考古中國. 台北;錦繡出版有限公司. P. 103. |
The enormous labor that went into the design and production of these objects suggests that they were extremely important. The same view is suggested by the tradition that when nobles deserted the tyrant Zhòu at the time of the fall of the Shāng royal house, they carried with them bronze ritual paraphernalia, which they turned over to the attackers to facilitate the foundation of a new dynasty.
Anthropologists sometimes speak of certain pre-modern states as "theatre states" because of their dependence upon public ritual to stress their relationship to cosmic realities and their right to rule. There is every reason to believe that there was such a tradition among the little states that grew up in China, which may have competed with each other for in the production of bronzes and copper mines (or earlier in the production of luxury ceramics and clay sources) in order to sustain "theatre-state" governments. (The process of using theatrics to sustain political power is called "mystification." Click here for a brief essay on the subject.)
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Elaborate bronze vessels like this one may have played a critical role in sustaining state power. National Palace Museum |
It appears that the object of at least some of this ritual attention was the line of ancestors of the reigning monarch. Many specialists spculate that most Chinese in early antiquity did not worship their ancestors as they came to in later times. Rather, ancestor worship may have been a special feature of a reigning royal house. We do know that in Shāng times ancestors seem to have been very important because questions were put to them in divination of which we have records: the earliest coherent texts in Chinese history.
The divination was conducted using the scapula (shoulder bones) of oxen and the plastrons (bottom shells) of turtles, a process called "scapulomancy." The divination involved applying heat to the bone or shell until it cracked, and then interpreting the direction of the crack. In some cases the questions being asked were engraved on the bones or shells. In a few cases, so were the answers. Modern scholars do not know what all of the symbols mean, although a few of them are obviously lineal ancestors of later Chinese writing. They enable us to see that the questions involve crops and weather and other concerns related to the welfare of the realm. But that is about all.
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| Ox scapulae and tortoise plastrons were used in divination. By chance, they are our earliest documents in Chinese. |
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Inscriptions on the inside of some bronze vessels give some information, including the system of names used to designate them. Avery Brundage Collection, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco |
Curiously, even though we rarely know their exact function, we know the many names of the bronze vessels of various shapes because often there are inscriptions inside which identify them: "This dǐng 鼎 was made by so-and-so for so-and-so" doesn't tell us much about the vessel, but it does show that it was called a dǐng!
The characters used on the bronzes are similar to those on the oracle bones. It appears that some of these objects were presented to courtiers as a reward for service to the king. But in other cases it appears that they were intended only for extremely limited use and only by the right people. The most likely conclusion, both for the oracle bones and for the bronzes, is that the deities being consulted or commemorated were ancestors of the royal house, and the underlying issue was political legitimacy. Intersecting with this was the symbolization of wealth and prestige among subordinate members of the ruling elite.
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Ceramic dǐng from Èrlĭtóu in Hénán (HN) Province National Museum of History, Beijing |
The dǐng form seems in fact to have been rather special. For many Chinese the ultimate evidence of the political importance of the bronzes was the fact that Yŭ the Great was said to have had nine dǐng cast when he founded the Xià dynasty to symbolize state power in each of the nine segments into which his realm was divided. Further, strict sumptuary laws restricted how many dǐng might be used by different levels of courtiers in their sactifices.
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Some students of ancient China are eager to see shamanism as a major force. This Hàn dynasty figurine is identified in the museum label as a shamen with no evidence beyond a funny hat and beard, neither of which was necessarily associated with shamanism. San Diego Museum of Art |
Some scholars, impressed by the importance of ritual and divination, speculate that diviners were important figures in the governance of these ancient states, both those that are mainstream dynasties and the countless small competitors that they eventually assimilated. Early sources speak of people called wū 巫 who apparently went into trance and performed healing or divination, possibly in the end related to the shamanic traditions of northeast Asia. (Definition) But there is no special reason to believe that it was the wū who performed state ritual or manipulated the oracle bones. Indeed, by late Zhōu times they seem already to have been held in very low regard, as have been their successors throughout the rest of Chinese history down to the present.
Modern specialists have tried to piece together from such sources a "best-guess" view of the way in which the Shāng polity may have been organized, distinguishing an "internal" area 内服 that appears to have been directly controlled by the Shāng king from various external regions 外服 that could be controlled only indirectly.
A possible third category might include yet more or less independent polities 方国 that paid only lip service at best to the Shāng monarch. For the internal areas, it was possible to appoint officials to represent the king in governing them. For the external categories, it seems more likely that original "chiefs" or other local warlords were inevitable, and were linked to the royal house by the conferral on them of grandiose titles, in particular hóu 侯, sometimes translated "duke" or "lord," and diàn 甸, sometimes translated "marquis." As one might expect, they had a good deal of independence, which was greater in times when the central Shāng authority was weak.
(Official titles are difficult to translate exactly between languages, and especially when languages change over time. The five major terms used in later Chinese noble titles, with their conventional English translations, are: gōng 公 = "duke," hóu 侯 = "marquis," bó 伯 = "count or earl," zĭ 子 = "viscount," nán 男 = "baron." Having two conflicting arbitrary conventions for rendering "hóu" in English — or "duke" in Chinese — does little to clarify Chinese history for English readers.)
The records record a list of thirty-one Shāng kings, beginning with Tiānyĭ and ending with a man with the reign name of Dìxīn 帝辛, known to history as King Zhòu 纣王. Like Jié, the last king of Xià, so also Zhòu, the last king of Shāng has always been seen by later historians as one of the great monsters of Chinese political history. His oppression of the people, and his ignoring the advice of worthy and loyal ministers, is commemorated today in a Míng 明 Dynasty [period 20] novel, "Romance of Canonizations" 封神演义. Full of all sorts of interestingmythological material, the novel, builds on storytelling traditions dating back at least to the Sòng 宋 Dynasty [period 15] about the fall of the King Zhòu of Shāng and the succession of the next dynasty, the Zhōu. The underlying story, however, is clearly very much earlier than that. (It is easy in English to mix up King Zhòu 纣 and the Zhōu 周 dynasty. The pronunciation differs only in tone.)
Thus every Chinese reader knows of King Zhòu's terrible treatment of his loyal ministers loyal ministers Bǐgān 比干, Wēizǐ 微子, and Jīzĭ 箕子, and of his great foolishness in ignoring their advice. And they have heard of his arrogance in offending the goddess Nǚwā 女娲 and of her sending seductive young she-demons to distract him from the affairs of state and bring about the destruction of the Shāng. Although in the XVIth century novel the story, "Canonization of the Gods" 封神演义 has been much improved by the introduction of gods and demons, its underlying themes of the evil of Zhòu and the ascent of the Zhōu dynasty are unchanged from remote antiquity.
The Zhōu dynasty was China's longest, dating from somewhere about 1100 to 222 BC: about eight hundred years. It is in the Zhōu period that we begin to have an ample written tradition. Indeed, the writings of the Confucian tradition date from the Zhōu dynasty. And because of this written tradition, we know at least a little bit about the Zhōu people before they became the ruling dynasty of the whole middle and lower Yellow River basin.
The dominant "clan" in the Zhōu "tribe" (and hence the reigning descent line of the Zhōu Dynasty) was named Jī 姬. The Jī family, if not the entire Zhōu people, lived in the middle reaches of the Wèi river, the Shăanxī (SN) Province tributary of the Yellow River mentioned earlier.
Just as the Shāng royal house claimed to be descended from Xiè, one of the subordinates of the famous Emperor Shùn, who had lived before the establishment of the Xià dynasty, so the Zhōu royal house claimed to be descendants of a certain Hòujì 后稷, putatively surnamed Qì 弃 ("abandoned"), Shùn's "Minister of Agriculture" 农师. Some investigators have argued that this legend suggests that the Zhōu, more surrounding groups, were successful in or dependent upon agriculture.
Like the Shāng before them, the Zhōu had traditions of having migrated, and most historians accept that the dynastic transition did indeed involve people coming from the Wèi valley to the west.
A Zhōu leader named Gōngliú 公刘 is said to have been the person who led the Zhōu people to "migrate" and establish a settlement at a place called Bīn 豳 (to the west side of the present Xúnyì 旬邑 County in Shăanxī (SN) Province. The Zhōu people are said to have lived in Bīn for nine generations — roughly two hundred years — and it was sentimentally regarded as their home region.
But a later migration, by another shadowy leader named Gŭgōng 古公 ("Ancient Lord") moved them to a place called Zhōuyuán 周原 ("Origin of the Zhōu People") in Qíshān 岐山 County in Shăanxi (SN) Province. Tradition holds that under Gŭgōng's leadership the group was divided into subunits called Yì 邑 (a term which later came to mean "city").
It is unclear what other changes may have taken place while the Zhōu were governed from "Origin of the Zhōu People," but it seems likely that the group grew and that additional levels of administrative apparatus developed. Gŭgōng himself affected not just the title "king" 王, but even "Great King" 太王, perhaps because some of his subordinates had come to be called kings, or perhaps as an assertion of superiority over the Shāng state with which the Zhōu were more and more in competition. Later Zhōu tradition considered Gŭgōng to be the founder of the Zhōu dynasty.
Gŭgōng had a son named Wáng Jì 王季, who succeeded him and aggressively expanded Zhōu influence. He was eventually assassinated by agents of the nervous Shāng régime, but his own son, Zĭchāng 子昌, was even more competent, and under the title King Wén 文王 hecontinued to strengthen the Zhōu state internally as well as to attack the various Róng and Dí "Barbarians" to the north and west. King Wén also moved the Zhōu "capital" to the town of Fēng 酆 somewhere to the west of modern Xī'ān 西安 in ShăanxĪ (SN) Province.
For the floundering Shāng royal house, all of this Zhōu expansion, especially the move of the Zhōu "capital" to locations ever closer to the Shāng heartland, should have led to a good deal of nervousness. But nobody ever said King Zhòu was very smart, and tradition holds that he spent his time with palace ladies (or demons disguised as palace ladies if we believe much later folklore), and he paid no attention to the gathering political clouds.
On the Zhōu side, King Wén's son, King Wŭ 武王 succeeded to the Zhōu leadership about 1100 or so. It was King Wŭ, with a grand coalition of other anti-Shāng elements, including no doubt many Shāng people themselves, who took on King Zhòu's army in its final battle
The final battle, when it came, was not so much a Zhōu invasion as it was a rebellion against King Zhòu of Shāng by his oppressed "allies" and outraged subjects. It took place on the plains of Mùyĕ 牧野 not far from the Shāng capital, which at that time had been moved to Cháogē 朝歌, near modern Qí 淇 County in Hénán (HEN) Province. King Zhòu's army deserted en masse to the Zhōu alliance, and the king fled back into his burning palace and perished in the flames.
King Wŭ of Zhōu was now the monarch of a united "China" (as much of the modern country as had ever been united before), the first effective monarch of a true Zhōu Dynasty [period 04].
The long centuries that make up the Zhōu Dynasty (from about 1100 to 222 BC) are divided by historians into two parts. The first is called the Western Zhōu 西周. It was established with the fall of the Shāng (probably about 1046, although the traditional date is earlier) and the establishment of a center of administration at Gǎojīng 镐京, not far from the plain where the Shāng forces surrendered.
Much as they had hated King Zhòu, the Shāng people had little love for their new Zhōu Dynasty rulers, whom they may well have regarded as boorish, if vigorous, and not particularly desirable overlords. To maintain the peace, King Wŭ is said to have assigned the dead tyrant's son, a certain Wŭ Gēng 武庚 as the puppet ruler of the old Shāng capital settlement. There was no special reason to believe that the Shāng people had any particular love for Wŭ Gēng. After all, he was the son of the hated King Zhòu, and it is hard to think that he would have been thought very saintly. King Wŭ might have had any of several possibilities in mind:
However, unsure about whether he could trust Wŭ Gēng — he probably couldn't — King Wŭ also assigned three of his own half-brothers to go and serve as courtiers to Wŭ Gēng so they could keep an eye on him. Their names were Guǎn shū 管叔, Cài shū 蔡叔 and Huò shū 霍叔. (It is unclear whether the element shū was part of their names or a kind of title. Today the word refers to a father's younger brother.) They were collectively referred to as the "three supervisors" 三监.
Allowing Wŭ Gēng to live was probably a military mistake. The Chinese expression is "freeing a tiger to return to its lair" 放虎归山 to attack again in the future. And that is what he did.
Wŭ Gēng bided his time, and then, when King Wŭ's young son, King Chéng 成王 ascended the throne, he was met by a rebellion by Wŭ Gēng, assisted by none other than King Wŭ's half-brothers Guăn shū and Cài shū, and even including those famous Eastern Barbarians, the Yí, who had been allies in the uprising against the Shāng.
Fortunately, in King Chéng's court there was an able general and statesman, a certain Duke Dàn 旦, who not only put down the rebellion, but marched on to extend Zhōu rule over the Yí territory, and expanded southward into the Huái River 淮河valley, which runs eastward across the Central Plain about mid-way between the Yellow River and the Yangzi River. He then built a permanent settlement on the site that is today the city of Luòyáng 洛阳 in northern Hénán (HEN) Province, a place that was destined to become a capital of many later governments.
Duke Dàn's efforts on behalf of the young monarch stood in strong contrast to the betrayal of Guăn shū and Cài shū, and he lives on in history as the model of a loyal subject, a frequent moral examplar held up in the books of the Confucian canon of later Zhōu times, where he is simply referred to as the "Duke of Zhōu" 周公. Had he seized power, he would have been just another minor footnote in the bloody history of military coups. As an upright, ingenious, and loyal supporter of his young king, his memory has lived for over two thousand years.
All of this comes to us from much later accounts. The Shāng people, after all, have left us virtually no texts, and our Zhōu writings come from late in that dynasty — in fact they are much later copies of texts putatively composed in the Zhōu. So most of what we know comes from writers who lived several hundred years after the events they describe.
Modern reconstructions of the political system of the Zhōu state see it as (probably) a continuation of the Shāng division between directly ruled and distantly influenced lands, with the power of the central government difficult to wield effectively as distance from the center was greater. Still, it would have incorporated additional features as well.
One reconstruction postulates that although the central king or wáng bore the unique title "Son of Heaven" 天子 in his quality as monarch, he was also regarded simultaneously as the zōngzhŭ 宗主 or leader (zhŭ 主) of the ruling clan or zōng 宗. His sons (by many wives) acted as his agents across the land, administering great fiefs in theory as sub-leaders on behalf of the clan, with the title "little clans" 小宗. These great fiefs they divided among their own sons, who held lesser titles. The titles "ministers" 卿大夫 and "shì" 士 occur at these lower levels. (By later times the word shì came to refer to members of a class of scholar-bureaucrats, but it seems not to have done so in early Zhōu times.)
However not all land was divided out among the king's sons, it appears. The immediate area of the "capital" settlement was referred to as the King's Land or wáng jī 王畿, where the word jī refers to land on the very outskirts of a large settlement. This land was administered for the monarch by a royal agent, providing direct royal income. Some other nearby lands were also allocated to important figures in the administration and they ruled them directly. Later dynasties freely use such terms as sītú 司徒, "ministers," and dàchén, 大臣 "great lords," in referring to them, in contrast to the clan-linked titles mentioned above. This suggests that a model built exclusively on rule by a single clan may not be accurate.
That is also suggested by the fact that lands beyond the wáng jī that were not fiefs of royal sons and their offspring were, like all lands, still the property of the Son of Heaven, but were allocated to lesser lords (with the title hóu 侯), who held them on behalf of the king, not the clan, in a kind of feudal system.
Thus, although the Zhōu "feudal" system is seen as having been founded upon ties of kinship, the details remain obscure, and it is clear that some of the lords did not share the surname (Jī 姬) of the royal house (although they may have had other kinship links). Indeed the most important lordly family names — if that is what they were — correspond with the names of small states that emerged as the Zhōu later began to disintegrate in the 700s: Jìn 晋, Lǔ 鲁, Qí 齐, Sòng 宋, Wèi 卫, and Yān 燕. The presence of multiple surnames among the enfiefed nobility suggests that the system must have been more complicated than is implied by simply referring it to a clan system.
Experts differ on whether the term "feudalism" should be used outside of Europe. (Click here for more about this.) For those willing to extend the term, Shāng and Zhōu China were feudal, and elements of feudalism continued for a few centuries even after the establishment of the imperial system of central administration with the founding of the Qín dynasty[period 05] in 221 BC. But the curious mix of kinship and (perhaps) non-kinship must have made it a very complicated system in actual practice.
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Phoenix Palace 凤雏宫殿, a Western Zhōu palace site at Qíshān 岐山in Shǎanxi (SN) Province Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei |
The late Zhōu writer Mencius 孟子 refers to something called the "well-shaped field system" 井田制 as a bureaucratic invention of the early Zhōu period, although when it began or what it consisted of is a bit hard to understand. Apparently land was divided into subunits — the written character for a well is 井, so the name implies a division into nine parts. The center portion of this was farmed by peasants on behalf of nobles (and called "common fields" or "lords' fields" 公田 and the other eight portions were farmed by peasants for themselves 私田. The system is known to have been applied in later times, often with sanctimonious rationales about the restoration of an ancient and hence wonderful system. But there is no direct evidence for the early Zhōu period. However, as in other feudal systems, some kind of system obviously would have been in place for the allocation of farm produce and labor to the lords holding the land as royal fiefs.
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Museum model of a Western Zhōu swamp house in the lower Yangzi Valley Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei |
As in other dynasties, there are traditions associated with the many reigns that make up the Zhōu. Most historians agree that the first firm date in Chinese history was 841 BC, which corresponds with the ascension of a king called Gònghé wáng 共和王 and the beginning of a traditional of careful year-by-year chronicles, although many of them are extremely spare, with a kind of "one thing after another" quality. From these accounts, We know of battles and successions and natural disasters. But far and away the most important documents that have come down to us from the Zhōu period are the texts that make up the Confucian Canon (link), both because they provided the most widely consulted texts for most of the rest of Chinese history, and because of the insight that they are able to give us on the ideas of intellectuals in late Zhōu times.
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King Yōu dallying with his concubine Bāosì as represented in a modern children's book 蔣明凡2004 中華五千年. 香港:國泰印藝有限公司. Vol. 1, p.34 |
The Western Zhōu period [period 04b] fell on hard times during the reign of its last king, Yōu wáng 幽王 [reign 04b-13, 781-771 BC], when a confluence of military misfortunes, misadministration, and natural disasters led to widespread rebellion, while King Yōu dallied with a beautiful palace maiden named Bāosì 褒姒, leading to his death in a rebellion (on the slopes of beautiful Mt. Lí 骊山 in Shăanxī [SN]). (If this sounds strangely similar to the fall of the Xià and the Shāng, it should not surprise us. The motif is repeated over and over by moralizing Chinese historians.) Although the dynasty was revived, the concentration of power at the center was forever weakened.
The Zhōu dynasty essentially fell apart in earnest beginning in 722 BC, which is the date traditionally associated with the beginning of the Spring & Autumn 春秋 Period [period 04d 722-481 BC], which was followed by the more ominously but realistically named Warring States 战国 Period [period 04e, 403-222 BC], an entirely unsatisfactory couple of centuries in which to be born.
Both of these periods are considered to make up parts of the "Eastern Zhōu" [period 04c 770-256 BC]. Confucius (551-479) lived during the Spring & Autumn Period, and spent much of his life lamenting the passing of the Western Zhōu days, when, he imagined, people behaved properly, especially toward kings, who were, for their part, virtuous.
The same tumultuous Spring & Autumn Period saw the consolidation of Daoism, a complex combination of lines of thought and belief associated with a mysterious figure named Lăozĭ 老子. Lăozĭ is usually assumed to be a single historical figure, but the name literally means "old sage(s)."
And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.