by Li Feng
The Nature of the Western Zhou State
As discussed in Chapter 6, the Western Zhou state has long been examined in the framework of “feudalism” which suggests a false comparison with medieval Europe; this has resulted in a chain of misunderstandings of the Western Zhou political system. Most importantly, the comparison misled previous scholars into believing that the relationship between the Zhou king and the various regional rulers was based on contracted reciprocity as in the lord–vassal relationship in Europe; it also misled scholars to interpret the nature of the Zhou regional states in terms of “feudal fiefs.” But neither of these claims is true. It has been shown further that other sociopolitical models such as “city–state” and “territorial state” are also inadequate in characterizing the Western Zhou state.15
In order to capture the nature of the Western Zhou state and to highlight its comparative values, I have recently described it as a settlement-based state that was founded on delegatory rules. On the one hand, the current Zhou king ruled with a power that was understood in Zhou political philosophy as originating with King Wen, the dynasty’s true founder as the recipient of the Mandate of Heaven. On the other hand, the Zhou king delegated his administrative power to the numerous regional rulers who acted as his local agents. In such a political system, the right of the regional rulers to decide policies over all domestic matters in their respective states was fully recognized by the Zhou king, but the regional rulers were not independent “sovereign” rulers. It was the kinship structure of the royal lineage that provided the main avenue along which the Zhou king delegated his political power – granting power to the regional states. Thus, the regional rulers were not only local agents of the Western Zhou king, but were also members (or marriage partners in cases of non-Ji-surnamed states) of the king’s lineage bound together by a common ancestral cult. They owed allegiance to the Zhou king and participated in the larger Western Zhou state not merely because of their fear for the actual military might of the king which was also important, but on understanding of the source of their own power which commanded moral and legal obligations and the reverence for a common ancestor.
The fundamental mission of the Western Zhou state was to control the thousands of settlements (yi) scattered over the valleys and plains of North China. These settlements were organized into a huge web by the political power of the Western Zhou state and its numerous regional agents. This was the settlement-based state, and it was kin-ordered. That the Western Zhou state can be regarded as a huge layered network of settlements has two important implications in geopolitical terms: (1) The state did not exist as an integral geographic landmass demarcated by a linear border, but was marked by the very physical existence of the settlements under its control; (2) because the state existed as clusters of settlements by which it was defined, there were empty spaces within the state’s perceived “territory" of authority. There were also overlaps in space between clusters of settlements that belonged to different regional states (Fig. 7.4). This condition of existence of the regional states provided an important starting point for a whole range of socioeconomic changes that occurred after the political power of the Western Zhou state waned (discussed in Chapter 8).
Fig. 7.4 Conditions of existence of the Zhou regional states.
In the Zhou royal domain in central Shaanxi which was an independent zone in the Western Zhou administration, the spatial configuration of the state was a little different from the normal pattern of existence of the regional states in the east. Here, the royal cities such as the capitals Feng, Hao, and Qiyi served as focuses of political power and social integration. Around the royal centers were located the various lineage bases that were linked to the royal centers through the social and economic ties of the lineages. As shown by the inscriptions, each lineage center, usually located in the rural areas of the Wei River valley, was in turn surrounded by numerous smaller and affiliated settlements where activities of production of the lineage were carried out. It is likely that by the late Western Zhou some of the prominent lineages in the western part of Wei River valley such as the lineage of San had already developed internal layers in the organization of their settlements as well as a central administration that was created to control their settlements.
The Spreading of Literacy and the Creation of Classical Literature
The archaeological evidence suggests that the Western Zhou was a very crucial period in the expansion of literacy in China, or East Asia. A good indication of this process is the discovery of inscribed Western Zhou bronze vessels and weapons all over North China and a part of South China, posing a sharp contrast to the geographically limited existence of writing during the Shang period. The contrast shows that the culture of reading and writing was implanted widely in the numerous regional centers as the result of the migration of the Zhou elites from the Wei River plain to these remote areas, bringing along perhaps also their educated Shang subjects. However, literacy did not spread just over geographical space, but also extended across the various social realms of the Western Zhou. The bronze inscriptions show that writing played a crucial role in the administrative process of the Zhou government, and official appointments by the Zhou king were regularly delivered in writing. Apparently, the over 100 appointment inscriptions all derived their core information from such written letters which the candidates received in the royal court. The bronze inscriptions show further that writing presented on perishable materials was in wide circulation beyond the royal court, particularly in activities of significant economic consequences such as sale of goods or property; land registers and perhaps even contracts were also used by the aristocratic lineages in deals of transaction. Certainly we have cases that bronze vessels were cast to seal such deals, or simply to carry a copy of the original document of a territorial treaty.16 In the military context, we also have cases where a scribe was asked to keep records on the misconduct of some disobedient soldiers during a campaign.17
Moreover, the inscriptions on bronzes are themselves testimony of a broad extent of literacy. Many of these bronzes were used in the ancestral temples and their metal texts witnessed by members of the respective lineages. Others were used in various social gatherings that took place in the family’s domestic quarters where accounts of the virtue of the ancestors or the merits of the family’s recent members cast on bronzes were cherished by their relatives and friends in the family’s social circle. In both scenarios, the inscribed bronze vessels helped create a wide readership that was necessary for the maintenance and further expansion of literacy in Western Zhou society. Although literacy remained in the possession of the social elites whose number was small, a considerable number of people in that social group must have learned to read and appreciate the art of writing and calligraphy so as to make the manufacture of the large number of long texts meaningful at all.
In complete agreement with the situation of literacy we learn from the inscribed bronzes, some of the written works on perishable materials had apparently survived the fall of the Western Zhou and were then passed down to the age of Confucius. The most important are the Book of Changes (Yijing), and parts of the Book of Documents (Shangshu) and the Book of Poetry (Shijing). Since these texts have been transmitted mainly in the Confucian tradition, hence conveniently called the “Confucian Classics,” they had enormous impact on Chinese civilization and beyond. However, it must be noted that at least a very large portion of the components of these texts were created some 300 years before Confucius was born, thus having nothing to do with Confucianism in origin.
Book of Changes
The most “ancient” among the “Classics.” Generally speaking, the book is a collection of mutually unrelated clusters of divination records. Some of these records were probably formed as early as the pre-dynastic Zhou time based on sources similar to the oracle-bone inscriptions from Zhouyuan. Each cluster is headed by a hexagram mark (similar formations also appear on late Shang to early Western Zhou bronzes) which is explained by a hexagram state
ment. This statement is then followed by six line statements, each tying to a line (or number) in the hexagram formation. It is likely that these statements were put together to form an integrated work some time during the mid to late Western Zhou, and the completed work was then used as a manual for actual divination. But how it was or should be used in divination has remained a mystery for more than 2,000 years. The newly discovered manuscript of the Book of Changes in the Shanghai Museum suggests that by at the latest the fourth century BC, the book had already taken a form very similar to what we have received in modern times.18 By the early Han Dynasty, the text had already come to be accompanied by ten commentaries attributed to Confucius. Additional commentaries on the texts were found in a Han Dynasty tomb in 1973, dated to the mid first century BC.
Book of Documents
Strictly this is a collection of government documents from ancient times, and it is regarded as the embodiment of Western Zhou values and the manifestation of a model government, founded by King Wen and King Wu, and consolidated by the Duke of Zhou. The earliest part of the book, usually called the “Five Announcements,” are authentic Western Zhou works most likely to have been produced by scribes in the government during the early decades of the dynasty, and all of them have something do to with the Duke of Zhou. Whether these government documents ever had a chance to be cast on bronze is unknown; perhaps not likely because their contents are not directly tied to the life of the individual elite. But similarities between them and the bronze inscriptions are clear at the level of the archaic language. They contrast sharply with the language of the latest parts in the book which purport to speak about earlier periods in history – the Xia and Shang Dynasties – but which are retrospective compositions of the Warring States period. Another cluster of about seven chapters which purport to speak about the early Western Zhou were probably composed during the middle to late period of the dynasty. The question about when and how the various documents in the Book of Documents came to be associated with each other to form an integral book is still debated. The tradition credits Confucius with having selected these chapters and put them into a book, but this cannot be verified on the current evidence. However, since lines from its chapters are quoted frequently in Warring States texts under such names as “Xia Documents,” “Shang Documents,” or “Zhou Documents,” divisions that still exist in the received edition, it is likely that by the late fourth century BC these chapters must have begun to be transmitted as parts of the whole textual entity, if not as three separate texts.
Book of Poetry
The oldest anthology of poetry in the world, an inventory of 305 poems divided into three sections: the “Odes” (“Major Odes” and “Minor Odes”), “Liturgies,” and “State Airs.” It is impossible to date precisely every single poem in the Book of Poetry as there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the circumstances under which the poems were composed. However, most modern scholars agree on a rather broad span of time, 1000–600 BC, during which the poems were produced. Since Confucius (551–479 BC) is recorded as systematically commenting on these poems in the newly discovered Warring States period texts in the Shanghai Museum, an anthology similar to the present text was probably in circulation by the middle of the sixth century BC. The latest segment in the book is the “State Airs,” a total of 160 poems most likely to have been collected from the various regional states in the seventh to fifth centuries BC. The “Odes” section is considerably earlier, though not every poem there is necessarily earlier than everything in the “State Airs.” It is very likely that many poems in the “Minor Odes” expressing clear political sentiments were composed by individuals associated with the Zhou court from the late Western Zhou to the early years of the Spring and Autumn period, and their contents confirm historical events recorded in the late Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. The “Major Odes” includes some poems that could have been composed at a much earlier time, but others may be as late as the latest poems in the “Minor Odes.” The Zhou “Liturgies,” on the other hand, were songs sung at the ancestral temples in the Zhou capital. As such, some of the poems there might have been transmitted from a time as early as the Zhou conquest of Shang, but others might have been composed at a more recent time retrospectively extolling the virtues of the Zhou ancestors. Despite their discrepancies in time, the 305 poems offer us valuable perspectives on the society and culture of the Zhou dynasty from its beginning to the sixth century BC.19
The End of the Western Zhou
Through much of the ninth century and into the early eighth century BC, the Western Zhou state was troubled by a number of factors. In the southeast, groups from the Huai River region who had launched a major invasion in the time of King Mu continued to present a threat to Zhou’s security in the following reigns. The unrest amounted to a total rebellion in the reign of King Li by various groups in the Huai River region and south Shandong, perhaps as a response to the rebellion of the ruler of E in northern Hubei, formerly responsible for Zhou’s security in the middle Yangzi region. However, the new threat posed by a people called “Xianyun” from the northwestern highlands seems to have been more pressing and was very close to the Zhou home. From the late phase of the mid Western Zhou period, the Zhou elites had to go through a long series of battles with these invaders. Both the Book of Poetry and the bronze inscriptions such as the Duoyou ding offer firmly contextualized descriptions of this prolonged warfare, pointing to the Jing River valley as the main battleground, only a little more than 100 km from the Zhou capital (Fig. 7.3). Facing such a dangerous situation, the Zhou king could call on little help from the regional states that were far in the east and had by now gained considerable independence from royal court. On the other hand, the Zhou court was itself vexed by a number of policy debates that worked to dissolve the solidarity of the Zhou elites.
The end of the Western Zhou Dynasty in the eleventh year (771 BC) of the last Zhou king, You, has been famously told in the traditional literature in a very dramatic way. According to this account, King You had a favorite concubine named Bao Si. This young lady was of a mysterious nature and would never smile, nor would she even speak often. Somehow haunted by her power, King You tried hundreds of ways to please her but eventually failed to amuse her. One day, it happened that there was a false report that the northwestern barbarians had come to attack the Zhou capital. In a hurry King You went up the Lishan Mountain near the capital and lit beacon fires to summon the regional rulers from the east to come to his rescue. However, when the many rulers rushed into the royal capital area, they found no enemies at hand and thus caused huge chaos by crashing into each other’s lines. Seeing this huge mess that happened under the mountains, Bao Si then burst out laughing! Having finally discovered a way to amuse his lady, King You thus lit beacon fires again and again until nobody came to his help any longer. A few years later when the barbarians really did attack the Zhou capital, King You failed to call on any help and was killed under the Lishan Mountain. The Western Zhou Dynasty thus came to a sudden end.
Recent critical analyses have shown that this account is essentially fictional. The problem that finally brought the Western Zhou Dynasty down had its origins in the generational transition from the long reign of King Xuan (827–781 BC) to that of King You. This was a fierce political struggle between the group of senior officials led by the “August Father” (Huangfu) who had served at prominent positions under King Xuan, and the newly rising King You and his party. The two parties openly split in 777 BC and this resulted in the former’s departure from the capital to the east and the crown prince’s exile in his mother’s home state, Western Shen, most likely to have been located in the upper Jing River valley. Taking advantage of his temporary political victory, King You set out to reorganize the Zhou central government and then, after a few years, sent the royal army to attack Western Shen and demand the prince. This was a step taken to ensure the succession of another younger heir given birth by his favored concubine Bao Si. However, the royal army was d
efeated by the joint forces of two states on the northwest border, Western Shen and Zeng, which were helped by Zhou’s traditional enemy, the Xianyuan. Subsequently, the allied forces from the northwest marched down the Jing River valley and captured the Zhou royal capital in the first month of 771 BC, killing the fleeing King You and his companions at the foot of the Lishan Mountain.20 The Western Zhou Dynasty fell.