Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  The Zhou case provided an ideal platform for this operation. The Zhou are mentioned frequently in the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions of Wu Ding (King 21) period in Anyang, and the received genealogy of the Zhou royal house goes back to at least the end of the Xia Dynasty when the Zhou ancestor Buku allegedly quit his office in the corrupted Xia regime and went to live among the barbarians. Not only that, the received records suggest that for most part of their early history the Zhou people lived in a place called Bin, presumably to the west of the Shang kingdom (Map 6.1). While there has been no dispute in the past 2,000 years regarding the location of Bin in the upper Jing River valley in Shaanxi, a few modern scholars have proposed that the Fen River valley in southern Shanxi was home to the Zhou people based primarily on the phonetic similarity between “Bin” and the name of the “Fen” River in archaic Chinese. Although this second location conveniently places Zhou in the immediate neighborhood of Shang, it has been collaborated by virtually no archaeological sites that can be surely dated to the pre-dynastic Zhou time and still show strong connections to the dynastic Zhou culture.

  Map 6.1 Location of the pre-dynastic Zhou cultural sites and the Zhou conquest campaign of 1045 BC.

  In the Shaanxi region, however, mainly along the Wei River and Jing River valleys, archaeologists have excavated a large number of sites with deposits dating from the pre-dynastic Zhou period (contemporary with late Shang). There has been a considerable disagreement among scholars with regard to their identification with the historical Zhou people, complicated by debates about the date and periodization of a number of sites. Out of this complication, the site of Nianzipo (early stratum) in the upper Jing River valley seems to have been commonly accepted as belonging to an earlier stage of development than most sites found on the Wei River plain. This date is not only based on careful pottery typology, but has also been confirmed by the apparently archaic styles of bronze vessels found in the site, comparable to the earliest types of bronzes found in Anyang (Fig. 6.1). Further support to the early date of Nianzipo was provided by Carbon-14 dating that safely placed the site before the end of the thirteenth century BC, roughly two centuries before the founding of the Western Zhou Dynasty. In a number of ways the Nianzipo pottery assemblage displays features that continued thereafter to characterize later pre-dynastic and even dynastic Zhou cultures in the Wei River valley; particularly features in the way oracle bones were prepared for divination at Nianzipo show strong connections to Zhou divinatory practice but not to the Shang tradition. Incidentally, the site is located in the upper Jing River valley, and this fact lends some support to the historically documented Zhou activities in the upper Jing River region, although Nianzipo might not be the site of Bin.

  Fig. 6.1 Bronzes and oracle bone from Nianzipo: 1, 2, ding-cauldrons; 3, pou-wine container; 4, oracle bone.

  It is obvious that pre-dynastic sites located in the Wei River valley, usually later in date than the early stratum of Nianzipo in the north, show a typical mixture of cultural elements that can be analyzed under three pottery production traditions (Fig. 6.2): (A) elements probably developed in the Shaanxi region, typical for the joint-lobed li-tripod and broad-shouldered jars; (B) elements that had their origins in regions to the northwest, as representative in the divided-lobed li-tripod;2 (C) elements such as gui-tureen and dou-high plate that were clearly identified with the Shang cultural tradition in the east. These elements are variously assembled at different locations along a wide spectrum and, except for a few sites that display nearly purely B or C type elements, in most cases it is difficult to determine whether the site was occupied by a Zhou or non-Zhou population. In fact, recent analyses show that even the dynastic Zhou material culture was no less a body of mixed elements than the pre-dynastic Zhou culture. The inconclusiveness of the search for a pre-dynastic Zhou cultural identity indeed reflects the silent and ambiguous nature of the archaeological record, something that urges the archaeologists to rethink their working assumptions.

  Fig. 6.2 Examples of late pre-dynastic bronzes and pottery. Bronze types include yan-steamer, gui-tureen, and ding-cauldron; pottery types include li-tripod and guan-jar.

  On the other hand, the archaeological picture may still reflect at least a part of the social reality – a population of highly mixed origins might have inhibited the Wei River plain in a broad network of cultural and political exchange with the outlying regions in the century before the Zhou conquest of Shang. Therefore, pending the material identity of the Zhou people, the archaeological works have indeed contributed to clarify the cultural context from which the Zhou people rose to power. By the time represented by these late pre-dynastic sites mentioned above, there is no doubt that the center of the Zhou people was already relocated in the west part of the Wei River valley following their historical migration under the Ancient Duke sometime in the later twelfth century BC. In other words, it can be said that the material culture with which the Zhou people can be identified and which gradually became the dominant tradition in North China after their conquest of Shang was indeed formed by elements already present in the various sites in the west part of the Wei River valley contemporary with the late Anyang period. However, the specific identification of sites with the Zhou people or other ethnic groups can always be debated.

  Zhou literary tradition in fact documents Zhou’s activities in the northwest indicating that a military campaign had taken them to the upper Jing River region following an incident of diplomatic interference in the territorial dispute between two small polities in the time of King Wen (Cultural King), grandson of the Ancient Duke. Zhou’s relation with the mighty Shang kingdom in the east was even more celebrated in the Book of Poetry as King Wen’s mother was a Shang princess and his wife was also from the east. This close tie with Shang is vividly demonstrated by records in the oracle-bone inscriptions produced by the Zhou themselves, found in the pre-dynastic Zhou capital, Qiyi (present-day Zhouyuan) (Box 6.1). Surprisingly, the inscriptions on these bones and shells suggest that in addition to their own ancestors, the pre-dynastic Zhou house literally worshipped the Shang ancestors, including the most recently deceased Shang kings. The inscriptions offer an unequivocal sense that the Zhou, after establishing themselves as a regional power in the Wei River valley, had at least for some time to accept the political reality that Shang was the superpower in North China.

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  Box 6.1 The Zhou Oracle Bones

  Although the Shang are better known for their oracle-bone inscriptions, the Zhou were doubtless also practitioners of oracle-bone divination. Since the 1950s, a number of sites in eastern China have yielded pieces of inscribed bones from strata or structures of Zhou cultural content. However, the number of pieces from these sites was very small and their inscriptional contents hard to contextualize. A much larger corpus of oracle bones from Zhou cultural contexts includes some 293 inscribed fragments from two pits (H11 and H31) that were dug into a building foundation excavated in 1977 in the pre-dynastic Zhou capital in Zhouyuan. Since the discovery, both the date of the bones and the date of the building structure in which they were found have been in serious debate. Roughly speaking, a large portion of these materials were produced before the Zhou conquest of Shang in 1045 BC; in other words, they were contemporary with the reign of the last Shang king in Anyang. The rest were produced in the early decades of the Western Zhou dynasty.

  Topics covered by these inscriptional fragments are of a wide range, but those that can be better contextualized include divinatory records about ritual sacrifices offered to the deceased Shang ancestors and kings including Tang, Wu Ding (King 21), Wen Ding (King 27), and Di Yi (King 28). This has led some scholars to argue that the bones were produced by Shang diviners and brought to the Zhou capital after the conquest. But from their material features to the styles of writing and calligraphy the bones are so different from the oracle bones in Anyang that there can be little doubt that they were produced in a cultural environment that was of Zhou (Fig. 6.3). Other topics menti
oned in the Zhouyuan oracle bones include sacrifice to King Wen, royal hunting trips, reports to Heaven, etc. It is also interesting that three pieces mention the state of Chu and two of them clearly report on the visit of the Chu leader to the Zhou center.

  Fig. 6.3 Example of a Zhou oracle-bone inscription from Zhouyuan.

  Another corpus of some 600 inscribed bones has been discovered since 2003 at the Zhougongmiao site, located 18 km to the west of Zhouyuan. These new oracle-bone inscriptions are doubtless much more numerous and richer in content, mentioning the names of a list of important figures in early Zhou history including King Wen and his father Ji Li, the Duke of Shao, the Duke of Bi, brothers of King Wu, and most importantly the Duke of Zhou who was likely to have been the protagonist of the divinatory activities behind many of the inscribed bones. However, the new oracle bones from Zhougongmiao remain largely unpublished at present.

  Example:

  On the guisi day (#30), sacrifice was offered at the temple of the Cultured and Marshal Di Yi (Shang king). Divining: “Will the king (of Zhou) offer shao-sacrifice to Cheng Tang (Shang founder)? . . . exorcism and worship . . . Will [he] not offer three sheep and pigs? It is appropriate.”

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  The Zhou Conquests of Shang

  Late in the fifth month of 1059 BC, the five major planets of the solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury) gathered in a narrow area measuring only about 7º by 2º in declination in the northwestern sky visible from the Zhou capital at the foothills of the Qi Mountains. Modern science has confirmed this date of the planetary conjunction which happened in the 32nd year of the late Shang king according to the written records, transmitted in the Zhou literary tradition as a Red Crow that perched on the Zhou altar to the soil. This very rare astronomical phenomenon that occurred only every 516 years was likely to have been taken as the sign of Heaven’s Mandate to Zhou and occasioned King Wen’s declaration of kingship, hence officially breaking away from the Shang regime.3 More importantly, this belief in King Wen’s receipt of Heaven’s Mandate has made the ideological foundation of the Zhou state and was continuously celebrated in the Zhou inscriptions throughout the entire Western Zhou period.

  It seems likely that in the ten or so years of King Wen’s rule as king, the Zhou had managed to eliminate most of the pro-Shang communities located in the Wei River valley, thus achieving Zhou’s regional hegemony over the western periphery of Shang. It was even possible that in the east the Zhou forces attacked some polities located in southern Shanxi and thus not far from the Shang center. Symbolizing the growth of Zhou power, a new capital, Feng, was constructed on the west bank of the Feng River occupying the central position on the Wei River plain, shortly before King Wen passed away in 1049 BC.

  At the death of King Wen, the Zhou leadership must have been quite impatient to begin a final combat with the Shang who at about this time had embarked on a number of major military campaigns in the Shandong region against the Ren Fang and perhaps also some other indigenous polities in the Shandong region. Combining information in the received texts and that which can be learned from the bronze inscriptions, modern scholars have recovered some important details about this epic-making campaign. In the middle of the twelfth month of 1046 BC, after the completion of the three years’ mourning for his father, King Wu (the Marshal King) set out on a campaign to the east and arrived with the Zhou troops at Muye (wild of shepherd) on the southern outskirts of the Shang capital Anyang by the middle of the first month of 1045 BC.4 The Zhou were joined by their variously allied tribes and communities from the western lands, in confronting an enemy that was reported to have largely outnumbered the invaders. The battle was apparently very bloody. It began on the morning of the jiazi day (#1) and continued into the following night, leading to a complete victory for the Zhou by the next sunrise, as suggested by the inscription on the Li gui, discovered in Shaanxi in 1978 (Fig. 6.4). The last Shang king retreated to his palace and set himself on fire together with his beloved concubines.

  Fig. 6.4 The Li gui (h. 28 cm, diam. 22.0 cm) and its inscription recording the Zhou conquest.

  Li gui (JC: 4231):

  King Wu campaigned against Shang. It was the morning of the jiazi day (#1). Jupiter was upright, and we defeated [them] at the dusk [of the day]. By the dawn, we had occupied Shang. On the xinwei day (#8), the king was at Jian Garrison and he rewarded official Li with metal. [Li] herewith makes [for] Duke Zhan [this] treasured sacrificial vessel.

  This historic battle which inaugurated the foundation of the Western Zhou dynasty was a major confrontation between the union of tribes and communities that inhabited the mountains and valleys in western China and the Shang and pro-Shang peoples of the eastern plains. Without fully understanding the long-term impact of this confrontation, King Wu adopted a temporary occupation policy by stationing two of his brothers near the Shang capital, and the conquered Shang people were placed under Wugeng, a son of the last Shang king, as their nominal ruler. The main body of the Zhou army returned west with the king. When King Wu died in 1043 BC, only two years after the conquest, and when the Duke of Zhou became the de facto leader at the Zhou court, his two older brothers, joined by Wugeng and his former Shang subjects on the eastern plains, rose in a total rebellion against the Zhou court in the west. It took another three years for the Zhou to regain control over the east but this had also led the Zhou to push further to regions like northern Hebei and western Shandong in pursuing Shang remnants and eliminating possible future rebels. In the south, the Zhou troops might have reached the area to the north of the Huai River.

  The post-Western Zhou literature tends to exaggerate how young King Cheng was when this happened, in order to promote the role of the Duke of Zhou as the real founder of Zhou’s political order through his tireless effort in this difficult period. The bronze inscriptions suggest that King Cheng was in fact leading military campaigns in the east. However, there is no doubt that the Duke of Zhou and Duke of Shao, another brother of the deceased King Wu, both played prominent roles in consolidating Zhou control over the eastern regions. The Duke of Zhou is recorded in the inscription as having conquered former Shang allies located in the Shandong region including most importantly Yan and Bogu. The Duke of Shao (known as the Grand Protector), whose important role in the Zhou court even outlasted that of the Duke of Zhou, is credited with having pacified five local rulers in the east who were presumably loyal to the Shang regime.5 Much of what we can say about the Western Zhou state was the result of the second conquest, rather than the first conquest under King Wu.

  The Royal City Network and the Material Culture of Zhou

  In contrast to the late Shang state whose political and religious energy was focused on a single major city – Anyang, Zhou royal power rested on a network that linked multiple royal centers located on the Wei River plain. These cities included first of all the pre-dynastic capital Qiyi (referred to as “Zhou” in the inscriptions) which continued to prosper during the entire Western Zhou period (1045–771 BC). The capital Feng, on the west bank of the Feng River, was constructed under King Wen, and the capital Hao on the east bank of the river, was constructed under King Wu and is referred to in the bronze inscriptions as the “Ancestral Zhou” (Zongzhou). Even though scholars past and present have raised doubts about the identification of some of these cities with the Zhou royal centers mentioned in the bronze inscriptions, there has been a general consensus about their status and locations. Beside the above three cities, the bronzes’ inscriptions also frequently mention the capital Pang, located somewhere to the southeast of Hao, and Zheng, located to the west of Qiyi. It is very possible that these five cities are collectively mentioned in the inscriptions as the “Five Cities” that formed the top level of the Zhou local administration (Map 6.2). In the east, a new city, Chengzhou near present-day Luoyang, was constructed soon after the Zhou conquest and had since the day of its foundation served as the administrative center of the Western Zhou state on the eastern plain. It is significa
nt that we find the Zhou king frequently appearing in any one of these cities (Zheng during the middle Western Zhou) where he met with officials, announced appointments, and held state ritual and banquet.

  Map 6.2 The Zhou central area: royal domain.

  Although the sociopolitical functions of the these cities might have been slightly different from one another, for instance, Qiyi (Zhou) might have been where all the royal ancestral temples were located, they had achieved a comparable level of complexity and all served as bases for the Zhou. Perhaps because of their special political status as royal centers, the Zhou court frequently appointed officials with overall responsibilities in all five cities. These responsibilities ranged from religious services to local security; during the late Western Zhou, we know of an official who was given responsibility for controlling the farming populations that resided in the five cities. The inscriptions show clearly that these responsibilities were categorically different from the regular responsibilities charged to officials belonging to a specific city.6

  It is understandable that the major cities are also the concentrations of archaeological works. So far the sites of three cities, Feng, Hao, and Qiyi, have been confirmed by archaeology, while the locations of Pang and Zheng are still being sought. Archaeologists have uncovered a large number of palace and temple foundations at the three central sites under investigation along with a huge quantity of artifacts either from their residential areas or from the associated cemeteries of the three cities. Each category of the materials constitutes an independent area of intensive research to determine their specific dates and explore their cultural meanings, but perhaps a highlight of their main features can help clarify the material characteristics of the Zhou civilization as manifested at these central sites. The bronze culture of the early Western Zhou inherited the solemn and mysterious nature of Shang bronzes, with its characteristic use of various types of animal masks. On high-quality vessels, the Zhou craftsmen were able to create a more elaborate appearance of the bronzes by frequently using high-rising flanges and even raised projections of pendants that were cast in advance and were inserted into the molds when the body of the vessel was cast (Fig. 6.5). Overall, the profile of the early Western Zhou bronzes incorporated more curved lines, which made them look more graceful and better proportioned when compared to Shang bronzes. Almost all types of bronzes fashioned in the late Shang survived into the early Western Zhou, but the centrality of such wine vessels as jia-pitchers, and gu- and jue-cups seems to have been lost, giving way to a new emphasis on the set of food-serving vessels including ding-cauldron and gui-tureen. Even within the same type of bronzes, for instance, the gui-tureen built on a high square base (such as the Li gui) was doubtless a Zhou invention. Although the early Western Zhou craftsmen in the foundries located at the central sites operated largely within a production tradition heavily influenced by Shang practice, by the middle phase of the early Western Zhou they had created an assemblage of styles that are fully distinguishable from their Shang predecessors (Fig. 6.6).