by Li Feng
The Western Zhou bronze inscriptions suggest that the Zhou king appointed officials to take charge of certain rural areas in the royal domain in Wei River valley of Shaanxi during the tenth to early eighth centuries BC, with general titles such as Supervisor of Land or Supervisor of Construction conferred on these local officials. The county shows no direct connection to the early royal administrative system of the Western Zhou, although the Zhou royal practice might have been well known to the regional rulers. The nature and political position of the county can be better explained by its history and geopolitical context. Between 740 and 690 BC, when King Wu of Chu conquered a small polity on Chu’s western border,9 he did not give it to his kinsmen as in the past, but appointed a magistrate to govern it directly for the king. Chu subsequently conquered a number of former Zhou regional states in the Nanyang Basin in southern Henan and converted each of them into a county.10 Before these events took place in the south, the state of Qin, now relocated in the western part of the Wei River plain, created a number of counties in southeastern Gansu and eastern Shaanxi in 688–687 BC.11 In the state of Jin, ministers were frequently given power over a number of counties in areas newly conquered during the seventh to sixth centuries BC. In short, early counties were all located in strategically important border areas, and indeed many of them incorporated land and population of the newly conquered territories. These were usually also areas where virgin lands were located, and the state was eager to open these new lands to exact taxes from a free labor force. The introduction of iron to China and the subsequent use of iron tools helped accelerate this process (Box 8.1).
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Box 8.1 The Beginning of the Iron Age in China
Iron-working was the most revolutionary advance in technology, with far-reaching social and political impact in pre-imperial China. Although cold-working of iron had previously been possible, due to the extremely high melting temperature of iron (1538 °C), human societies learned to handle this material in its liquid form only after millennia of working with bronze. Similar to other regions in the world, the early history of iron in China was marked by the use of meteoric iron, the earliest piece being found at Taixi in Hebei Province from a mid-Shang culture context (c. 1300–1200 BC). The first evidence for iron-smelting technology was three bronze weapons with iron blades or handles found in the elite tombs of the state of Guo in Sanmenxia in western Henan, dating to c. 800–750 BC. There have been some 100 iron objects reported from eastern China dating before the end of the Spring and Autumn period (481 BC), and analysis shows that the technology of smelting and liquid-casting was already widespread by the beginning of the fifth century BC. But by and large, bronze still played a more important role in the social life of Spring and Autumn China.
During the Warring States period, although bronze was still used to cast vessels used for ritual and entertainment purposes, it was replaced by iron as the most widely available metal for casting weapons such as swords, halberds, and arrow-heads and agricultural tools such as axes, chisels, shovels, hammers, hoes, sickles, etc. Iron was also used to make helmet and chariot parts and horse harnesses. Even some vessel types were cast in iron such as those from the Chu state tombs in Changshan in Hunan and Jiangling in Hubei. There can be no doubt that in many states iron tools and weapons were mass-produced in workshops directly controlled by the government. Archaeologists have identified more than twenty iron production sites that can be fully or partly dated to the Warring States period, and many of them were located in the state capitals. Some of the state capitals, for instance, that of Yan in Yixian, Hebei Province, apparently had multiple iron production centers (Fig. 8.1), although these centers might have simultaneously engaged in the production of bronze, jade, and bone objects. From the single site no. 21 in the Yan capital in Yixian, as many as 1,678 iron tools, weapons, and other types of iron objects were unearthed, along with a large quantity of iron ingots, molds, and debris. The mass production and wide use of iron dramatically increased agricultural production in the many states and improved their killing capacity in war against each other.
Fig. 8.1 Iron objects from burial pit no. 44 from Xiadu of Yan, Hebei Province: 1, butt-end of a weapon; 2, hoe; 3 and 4, halberds; 5, short sword; 6, helmet.
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The word for “county” is Xian, which is written in the inscriptions with the same graph that stands also for the word Xuan, meaning “to suspend” or “to hang.” Therefore, the counties (Xian) were the “suspended” border areas of military importance for the states. In the old state model that continued to affect the status of land since the Western Zhou, newly conquered areas would be given as awards by the ruler to his sons or brothers to become their estates. Counties were those newly acquired/conquered areas in manageable units that were suspended from the traditional process of land redistribution by the state ruler to the nobility along a kinship structure. In other words, the counties were reserved land units put under direct control by the state and the ruler. In order to compete with other states, the state ruler needed these land units at his immediate disposal, governed by magistrates directly appointed by him, which could provide him with ready-to-use tax revenue and manpower. A Chu county is said to have been able to provide troops equal to that of a small state, measured by 100 war chariots at minimum. Previous studies have also tried to pin down the relative numbers of counties in the major states by the fifth century BC, yielding about thirty for Chu, forty to fifty for Jin, and forty to fifty for Qin.12 Apparently some of these figures might have been exaggerated, and even the verifiable counties could not all be the same in terms of their size and composition.
However, they shared certain features as a new type of social political organization, the most important being universal taxation and military service that were placed directly on the shoulders of individual farmers. The power of the traditional lineage, if it had survived the conquest and conversion to county, was kept to a minimum; in the county, the state had never before come so close to the farmers as farmers to the state. Some counties, particularly in Jin, might have been held by members of an official family for a few terms, but such an arrangement was rather rare, and the political situation of the period actually made it impossible for a county to be held by a family over many generations. The texts offer many examples where magistrates were transferred, dismissed, and even executed on order of the king for their misconduct. Even in such cases where a county was awarded to an official, it is more likely that the award was meant only as the gift of the tax quota available from the targeted county. This was very different from the hereditary estates the traditional aristocratic lineages received under the Western Zhou. In short, the invention and spreading of the county totally reshaped ancient Chinese society which had hitherto been based on the organization of the lineages that mediated between the state and the populace. In the social and political history of China, the emergence of the county was undoubtedly a milestone. It was the inter-state warfare following the fall of the Western Zhou that provided the initial impulse for the conversion of peripheral lands to counties and the reason for rulers to want to keep them as such.
Decline of the Lineage System and the Rise of the Shi Status
What has constantly eluded the focus of previous studies was the destructive impact the county might have had on the traditional lineage system. With the demise of royal power and the collapse of the Western Zhou state, a Zhou world, though continuing to exist culturally and ritually, had lost its point of moral support. Inter-state war was not the only war the Spring and Autumn period elites fought; more often, they had to fight wars immediately across their neighborhood. Thus, the stories we hear most often of the period, besides inter-state wars and diplomacy, are those of state rulers murdered by their ministers or ministers killed by their own domestic officials. Civil strife was a common feature of society, but it acquired a new character under the special social and political circumstances of the Spring and Autumn period. It was no longer the game of the upper cla
ss, but had come to involve more and more elements from the lower strata of the society.
The evidence for this upward movement in an age of the declining aristocracy was analyzed by Cho-yun Hsu nearly a half century ago. It was shown there that among the some 500 individuals that were politically active, the number of sons and brothers of the state rulers took up 53% of the total at the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period, but this proportion decreased to nearly no mention by the end of the period. This decline was accompanied by the rise of the ministerial families – usually unrelated to the state rulers by blood – which had established their dominance in most states by the middle of the Spring and Autumn period. Another steady growth appears in the number of the lower elites called Shi (see below) which had risen from no mention to taking up roughly 22% of the total at the end of the Spring and Autumn period. Overall, if we take the statistics 100 years into the following Warring States period (by mid fourth century BC), we can see that the number of individuals of obscure origins had grown by then to occupy 60–70% of the offices.13 The analysis reflects well the profound social changes that were taking place in China during the eighth to fourth centuries BC. Furthermore, Barry B. Blakeley’s regional analysis revealed the imbalance of this social transformation among the many states with the states of Song, Zheng, Lu, and Chu as the more conservative where the rulers and the collateral lineages remained relatively stronger, and the states of Jin, Qi, and Zhou as more progressive where the independent lineages (no kin relation to the ruler) achieved a much higher degree of dominance over the three centuries.14 Blakeley also shows that, for instance in Qi, people of obscure origins were expanding their hold on offices at different levels, and even in conservative states like Lu and Chu their numbers increased gradually over time, although it seemed more common that they occupied lower offices.
To understand the nature of this historical process, we should take a closer look at the situation in the state of Jin, one of the more progressive states analyzed by Blakeley. The early struggle between Jin’s ducal house and its minor branch at Quwu in the seventh century BC had led to the elimination of most of the old collateral lineages of Jin. Shortly afterwards, the new collateral lineages founded by the sons of the victorious Duke Wu were extinguished by Duke Xian in 671 BC who further drove all of his own sons into exile to ensure the succession of the favored Duke Hui. After the return of Duke Wen of Jin in 636 BC and Jin’s quick rise to hegemony, the political map of Jin was completely redrawn and it was the ministers who had previously accompanied the duke during his long exile who gained firm control of power and continued to struggle against each other over the next century. In 607 BC the ministerial Zhao family murdered Duke Ling and took actual control of the ducal house, eliminating some other influential families. At the beginning of the sixth century BC the fierce political struggle further buried a number of other ministerial families, leaving only six (Hann, Zhao, Wei, Fan, Zhonghang, and Zhi) which by 514 BC had together destroyed the Qi and Yangshe families and converted their lands into ten new counties. In 490, the Zhao family eliminated Fan and Zhonghang, and three decades later the Zhi family was destroyed by Hann, Zhao, and Wei, the only survivors of the struggle in Jin. The political struggle that overtook many states in the Spring and Autumn period was indeed a highly self-destructive process that cast fatal blows to the traditional lineage system as a whole.
The county’s erosive role on the traditional lineage system in the context of domestic conflicts can be seen in two ways. First, the institution of counties, once invented as a result of inter-state warfare, provided a model ready to be used by the state ruler or the ministers, for the same economic and military advantage it could offer, to reorganize lands confiscated from their domestic enemies as in the incident of 514 BC in the state of Jin mentioned above. It is not impossible that acquiring such lucrative units was among the purposes of some of the domestic wars. Although this point is not clear in the records, it is nevertheless safe to say that as a result of the domestic conflict the county gradually made its way from the periphery to the interior of the states. Second, the counties were economic competitors of the lineages. In the counties, lineage tradition was weak and farmers, besides the taxation and military service they owed to the state, had no other obligations. Although the situation might have varied from state from state, we know that a number of states actually offered tax exemptions for opening peripheral virgin lands under administrative control by the counties. Thus, the counties might have provided a major attraction to farmers who would flee their original lineages both for the economic opportunities and for personal autonomy without obligations to the lineage heads. Studies of intellectual history show that the Spring and Autumn period rulers and ministers were seriously concerned about the dispersal of the people and searched for ways to return a mobile population to agricultural production.15 The covenant tablets from Houma in Shanxi offer a particular category of inscriptions that prohibited the covenanters, most likely heads of the branches of the Zhao family, to take on land and people (see Box 8.2 below). Although scholars disagree on the purposes for which such terms were sworn,16 the inscriptions seem to unveil the undeniable fact that a significant number of farmers with broken lineage ties were available and posed a social problem in the state of Jin.
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Box 8.2 The Covenant Tablets from Houma
A total of some 5,000 jade or stone objects were excavated in 1965–6 from 326 pits in a small cemetery located about 3.5 km to the east of the Jin capital in Houma, Shanxi Province. These jade or stone objects were found buried in specially prepared small pits together with livestock including cattle, horses, and sheep, killed as sacrificial offerings during the covenant ritual. There are about 600 tablets with recognizable texts of covenants written in red that are concentrated in forty-three pits in the northwest corner of the cemetery (Fig. 8.2). The majority of these texts belong to a category that is called the “Loyalty Covenant” (example text 1.9 below) in which the covenantors, members or non-members of the Zhao lineage, swore personal loyalty to the covenant host Zhao Jia. Other categories include the “Pledge Texts” in which former allies of the enemy Zhao Hu declare the termination of their relations and pledge personal attachment to the new lord Zhao Jia (example text 156.20 below); the “Confiscation Texts” sworn for the purpose of preventing the minor lineages from incorporating into their possessions the people and properties of the dispersed enemy family; the “Curse Texts” that propose particular harms to those covenantors who would dare to violate the covenanted terms. These texts offer us fresh insights into the social relations as well as political dynamics of the late Spring and Autumn period.
Fig. 8.2 Covenant tablet 156: 20 from Houma.
Tex 1.9
[If] I, Hu, dare to fail to strip bare my heart and vitals in serving my lord; or dare to fail to thoroughly adhere to your covenant and the mandate granted in Ding Gong and Ping Si; or dare, in any respect, to initiate breaking of the faith, or dispersion [of the alliance], causing an interruption in the guardianship of the two temples; or dare to harbor the intention of restoring Zhao Hu and his descendants to the territory of the state of Jin or join in a faction to summon others to covenant [with them]; may our former rulers, far-seeing, instantly detect me; and may ruin befall my lineage.
Tex 156.20
[I], An Zhang, pledge myself at the dwelling place of my lord. Insofar as [I] dare to overstep the bounds [of this alliance] and communicate with Zhao Hu’s camp, or with his descendants; or with [names of 22 enemies]; or join in a faction to summon others to covenant with them; [or if I], Zhang, physically harm Jia (you) or your descendants; [or] in any manner restore [the above-listed enemies] to the territory of the State of Jin; then, [may the far-seeing spirits] forever [stand ready to] detect me; and may ruin befall my lineage. Or if, after this pledge, [I] dare to fail to [cause] the sorcerers and seers, invokers and scribes to offer victims and other foodstuffs, and regularly sacrifice to the former rulers of Jin in t
heir ancestral temples; then, [may the far-seeing spirits] forever [stand ready to] instantly detect me; and may ruin befall my lineage. I, as for the descendants of Men Fa, [if] meeting them upon the road, [I] do not kill, may the [former] rulers spy me out.
Modified from translations by Susan Weld
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The rise of the Shi status, variously defined as “officials,” “warriors,” and “stewards of noble households,” must be understood in the context of the fierce political struggle and the profound socioeconomic changes described above. It has been noted in Chapter 7 that even in the Western Zhou the lower orders of the aristocracy did have a share of offices in the Zhou royal government; however, the members of the social group rising in the Spring and Autumn period with the self-identification of Shi, “Man of Service,” distinguished themselves by the fact that their living came to depend solely on the service they were able to provide to the state or those in power, and no longer on the hereditary right of their lineages, if their lineage still existed. Confucius himself was a good example. His ancestral family derived its origin from the ducal lineage of Song, but caught in the conflicts with the Hua family that took power in 692 BC, his great-grandfather was forced to flee to the neighboring state Lu. Since then the Kong family descended to the status of Shi and Confucius’ own father served as a warrior attached to the Zang family of Lu. Such was probably very common in the Spring and Autumn period. When the lineages had demised, with their land and people annexed by other lineages or incorporated into counties by the conquering states, it was their aristocratic heritage, most importantly education and warrior spirit, that they could rely on for their future, as the states and rulers were looking for talented and brave young men to serve in their governments. Certainly, there were also people rising to the status of Shi from perhaps the commoner class. Confucius is said to have included some of these people among his students such as his famous disciple Zengzi.17 In an age of rapid political change, one’s status as Shi, which originally implied a place in the lower order of the aristocracy, was no longer a social identity that could be simply assumed at birth or taken for granted, but came under different views and was subject to serious debate and constant negotiation.18