by John Keay
Unfortunately for the historian, although avid diviners, the Zhou rarely troubled to inscribe their fire-cracked turtleshells with a written summary of ‘charge’ and response. But such information may have been recorded on less durable materials, for this was almost certainly the case with oracular communications conducted using a new and increasingly preferred medium. Kinder to turtles, the new medium involved a random disposition of sticks, which could be reused. The sticks were stalks of the yarrow plant or milfoil, and they were cast, perhaps like spillikins, six at a time, so that they fell to form hexagrams (six-sided figures) that the diviner then interpreted. Much lore, some art and some mathematics were involved; but it is safe to assume that the results were written down because the ‘reading’ of hexagrams provided the inspiration for ‘The Book of Changes’ (Zhou yi or Yijing, I-ching). This classic text, recorded in the ninth century BC, consists of verses that incorporate divinatory terms plus images that may have been those that the diviner ‘read’ in the hexagrams.
They also employ a technique typical of Chinese verse, and indeed literature and art as whole, which engages the reader by juxtaposing, or correlating, naturalistic images with human concerns to delightfully subtle, if sometimes obscure, effect. The same associative technique appears in another near-contemporary (but non-divinatory) classic. This is ‘The Book of Songs’ (Shijing, also called ‘The Book of Odes’), on which Confucius is supposed later to have worked. The first of the ‘Songs’ – mostly ritual hymns, heroic verses and pastoral odes – provides a standard example of the correlational technique. The mewed call of an osprey is juxtaposed with a marriage proposal to convey, through terse imagery, onomatopoeia and pun (all largely lost in translation), a heavy sense of sexual expectation.
Guan, guan cries the osprey
On the river’s isle.
Delicate is the young girl:
A fine match for the lord.9
(More than two millennia later, this same poem remained part of an educated person’s repertoire. In The Peony Pavilion, a play written in 1598, the demure heroine experiences a sexual wanderlust when her tutor introduces her to it; or as her maid puts it to the tutor in a delightful English translation: ‘Your classical exegesis/Has torn her heart to pieces.10)
Classics like the Shijing and Yijing reveal aspects of ritual practice and social life in early first-millennium BC China as well as the prevalence and development of literary culture. Historians, of course, would prefer something more factual and, as if to oblige, the Zhou compensated for their inarticulate oracle shells by incorporating inscriptions on their bronzes. Some of these are of considerable length and feature events or personalities known from other textual sources. They have been of great assistance in extending the chronology of the Zhou, which is famously anchored on an eclipse recorded in the texts and identified astronomically as occurring in 841 BC, ‘the first absolute date in Chinese history’.
Most of the bronze inscriptions describe, or simply record, the bestowal of gifts, honours, offices, commands or lands. Taken in conjunction with stylistic changes in the bronzes themselves, with their archaeological setting and its wide distribution, and with later textual information, they confirm that, in the words of Jessica Rawson, ‘the Zhou achievement was truly remarkable’. Although ‘too little considered . . . [it] imprinted itself indelibly, not only on its own day, but on all succeeding generations’.11
LESS SPRING THAN AUTUMN
Painstaking analysis of Zhou mortuary sites and buried hoards, both of them rich in bronzes, has led Rawson to another conclusion: that an extraordinary change, indeed ‘a revolution’, overtook Zhou ritual practice in the first years of the ninth century BC. Quite suddenly bronze vessels became larger and more standardised in form, and they often comprised sets of identical items; their designs betrayed an interest in recreating archaic forms; their inscriptions were much more formulaic than previously; and they were accompanied by a new repertoire of bronze bells and jades.
It was a ritual ‘revolution’ to the extent that these changes implied a grander, noisier and more staged liturgy under firmer central control and involving greater public spectacle. Its standardisation throughout the northern ‘Central Plain’ must have owed something to better communications; cultivation was evidently being extended and neighbouring fiefs were beginning to abut. Moreover, the inscribed bronzes were apparently doubling as archival records, like the Shang’s oracle bones, and being collected, displayed and hoarded as prestigious family heirlooms. But since they recorded royal favours, those who cherished them, and who in some cases had actually had them cast, were not their royal donors but their recipients, some of comparatively humble origin. The Zhou, in other words, were broadening their base of support while enhancing their own precedence.
Far from being a spent force then, by the early 800s BC Zhou authority, at least in ritual matters, was being projected more effectively than Shang authority had ever been. Rawson takes this to mean that the Zhou kings not only saw themselves as the successors of a unitary Shang state but ‘believed . . . that the natural condition of China was such a single state’ and proclaimed this political model with tenacity, despite the tensions it generated, ‘within the more naturally fragmented Chinese region’.12
None of which is exactly contradicted by the dynastic dirge found in the written texts. Ritual rigidity need not, after all, imply political authority. The Zhou could have re-emphasised their formal precedence to compensate for military misfortunes; and their subordinate vassals could have conformed in ritual matters to disguise their political defiance. Alert to that correlational technique found in ‘The Book of Songs’, one should not perhaps look for explicit convergence. But it has to be said that this archaeological evidence for an ascendant Zhou is inconsistent, if not downright incompatible, with the written narrative of a declining Zhou.
According to the written sources, in 957 BC the Zhou king Zhao launched an ill-advised attack on Chu, a large tribute-paying but perhaps nonfeudatory neighbour on Zhou’s south-eastern border. The Zhou were roundly defeated, six armies being ‘lost’ while the king himself ‘died’ – possibly drowned, probably killed. Thirteen years later King Mu, his successor, did rather better against the ‘Quan Rong’, a people on Zhou’s north-west frontier, but was unable to prevent the permanent breakaway of Zhou’s easternmost vassals. ‘The royal house declined and poets composed satires,’ says Sima Qian, main author of the first-century BC history known as the Shiji. The next king had to be ‘restored by the many lords’, presumably because his throne had been usurped; and his successor must have encountered further trouble in the east, for he had occasion to boil alive the chief of Qi (in Shandong) in a cauldron.
About 860 BC – so at the height of Zhou’s ‘ritual revolution’ – ‘great Chu’ took the offensive, invading Zhou territory and reaching a place called E in southern Henan. ‘The [Zhou] royal house weakened . . . some of the many lords did not come to court but attacked each other.’ Chu reinvaded in 855 BC, ‘the many lords’ continuing troublesome. The 200th anniversary of the Zhou’s triumph at Muye found their young king in exile. A regency modelled on that once headed by the Duke of Zhou took over and not until fourteen years later did it stand down for the exile’s son, Xuan.
King Xuan reigned long (827–782 BC) and aggressively. Vassal territories were reclaimed, tribute and trade relations with Chu may have been re-established, and western incursions by a people called the Xianyun (probably the same as the Quan Rong) were repulsed. But Zhou joy was short-lived. Heavy-handed intervention in Lu, another Shandong state, proved counterproductive, and ‘from this time on, the many lords mostly rebelled against royal commands’, says the Shiji.
The accession of King You in 781 BC was greeted by a cacophony of heavenly disgust, with a major earthquake, landslides and both a solar and a lunar eclipse. ‘How vast the woe!’ declared one of the Songs of such an appalling conjunction.
The hundred rivers bubble and jump,
The
mountains and mounds crumble and fall,
The high banks become valleys,
And the deep valleys become ridges,
Woeful are the men of today!13
Implicit in all this was criticism of the king himself. As with the last of the Shang kings, any ruler facing imminent disaster had previously to have been hopelessly discredited as a favoured Son of Heaven. King You supposedly ignored all the omens, flouted tradition by manipulating the succession in order to gratify his favourite consort, and alienated his remaining vassals by repeatedly summoning them to the defence of the realm against imaginary invaders. Apparently Bao Si, the beguiling consort in question, particularly enjoyed this wheeze. But the vassals soon tired of it, and when in 771 BC the Xianyun did indeed attack, King You’s cry of ‘wolf’ went unheeded. Left to their own devices, the Zhou were routed, their capital destroyed and their king killed.
Zhou fugitives, having hastily buried many bronzes for safe-keeping (and for the subsequent delight of archaeologists), headed east to their alternative capital at Luoyang. There, with the support of some still-loyal feudatories, King Ping, You’s son, was restored and the ancestral temples reconstituted. The Zhou were not finished; over 400 years remained to them. But now creatures of their erstwhile vassals, they reigned without ruling. Once emperors in all but name, they clung henceforth to such influence as their ritual precedence afforded, like popes in all but patronage.
So ended the Western Zhou (c. 1045–771 BC) and so began the Eastern Zhou (772–256 BC). But because the Zhou kings would now play only a referee’s role in the political mêlée, the latter is less often referred to as a dynastic period – ‘Eastern Zhou’ – than as a dynastic hiatus. This hiatus, a recurrent phenomenon in Chinese history which will merit attention, is divided into two parts: the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period and the ‘Warring States’ period. Both terms derive from the titles of relevant historical texts, with the ‘Spring and Autumn’ Annals (Chunqiu) covering the years 770–481 BC and the ‘Warring States’ Annals (Zhanguoce) the years 481–221 BC. Although the cut-off date between the two periods is debatable (475 or 453 BC are often preferred), basically the whole span witnessed intense competition between the multiplicity of one-time feudatories, now considered ‘states’, within and around the crumbling Zhou kingdom along the lower Yellow River.
During the three centuries of the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period there were more of these ‘states’, they were smaller, and the scale of conflict was contained at a not too disastrous level. Something like 148 semi-sovereign entities are mentioned in the Zuozhuan, a commentary on the ‘Spring and Autumn’ Annals; clearly, not only the Zhou but also their subordinates had been freely indulging in the fissiparous ‘feudal’ enfeoffment of relatives and dependants. But thanks to a process of gradual conquest and elimination, the active participants in the political tournament became fewer, larger and more formidable. The 148 dukedoms, city-states, combined townships and assorted enclaves shrank to thirty or so, and during the ‘Warring States’ period these would be further consolidated into seven, then three, major participants. As the contest neared its climax, the stakes grew higher and warfare more intense. ‘Spring’ contrived a canopy of constitutional respectability to hide Zhou’s shame; ‘Autumn’ shredded this political foliage; and in its wintry aftermath, ‘warring state’ would clash with ‘warring state’ in a fight to the death.
The details would be enough to drown any tender narrative. An ambitious study recently contrasted this bellicose aggregation-into-empire of ancient China’s ‘states’ with the opposite tendency in early modern Europe – the rejection of unitary empire and the entrenchment of a multi-state system as a result of equally internecine competition. But whereas the study accepted a list of eighty-nine wars involving the European ‘Great Powers’ during the roughly four centuries prior to AD 1815, no less than 256 wars were individually identified for northern China’s ‘Great Powers’ during the roughly four centuries prior to 221 BC – and this after the exclusion of all purely civil conflicts and any of an external nature or involving nomadic peoples.14
Happily many of these wars appear to have been brief and fairly bloodless. They were also subordinate, even incidental, to the far more complex game of political alliances and stratagems that constituted contemporary statecraft. Bribe and bluff turned the tables quite as often as warfare, the wasteful nature of which, together with its unpredictable outcome, made it a recourse of last resort. No strangers to the balance of power, the Chinese ‘states’ set lofty standards in realpolitik. Scruple-free statesmen would later turn to the ‘Spring and Autumn’ Annals for inspiration; Machiavelli might have scanned them with profit. As the Zuozhuan (‘Zuo’s Commentary’ on the often enigmatic ‘footprints’ of the annals themselves) makes clear, the heroes of the period were not halberd-wielding warriors and charioteers but strategists, schemers and honey-tongued spokesmen.
Nevertheless, a just-possible synchronism, plus the epic character of the Zuozhuan with its frequent battles, intrigues and debates, has invited comparison with the Homeric and Sanskrit epics. Gods are notable by their absence in the Chinese text; but counterparts for bluff Hector or lofty Priam of the Iliad put in an appearance, while the exploits of Chonger, a central character in the Zuozhuan, mirror those of Rama or the Pandavas in the Indian classics.
Chonger was the son of the ruler of Jin, a large state loyal to the Zhou which extended north from the Yellow River into Shanxi province. His chances of the succession were remote, however, his mother being a Rong (that is non-Xia or non-‘Chinese’) and his appearance being physical proof of this handicap; his ribs were said to be fused together and there was something odd about his ears. ‘Chonger’ literally means ‘double-eared’, a sobriquet presumably preferable to ‘single-eared’ but here taken to indicate some peculiarity, perhaps pendulous lobes. Sealing his fate by being implicated in a plot, in 655 BC the youthful Chonger fled into exile and so embarked on a nineteen-year saga of picaresque adventure.
Accompanied by a band of loyal and capable companions, Chonger first spent some years among the Di, another non-Xia people, and then wandered extensively throughout the Zhou states and south as far as the great state of Chu in the Yangzi basin. Useful contacts and insights were acquired and feats of statecraft performed. Also contracted were debts-tobe-repaid, scores-to-be-settled and brides-to-be-deserted – in equal measure. With a growing reputation for outspoken courage and with plentiful evidence of Heaven’s favour, the prodigal Chonger returned to his native Jin on the death of his ruling half-brother and duly succeeded him as Jin Wen Gong (‘Duke Wen of Jin’) in 636 BC.
A year later Jin’s forces restored the legitimate Zhou king after he had been temporarily ousted from his embattled enclave at Luoyang. Then in 634 BC they defeated an invading army from Chu at a place called Chengpu. It was the first battle in Chinese history that was recorded in sufficient detail for modern military historians to produce a plan of engagement showing rectangular troop concentrations and arrowed lines of advance.15 A hundred war chariots and a thousand foot-soldiers were captured for presentation to the Zhou king, who now feted the once outcast Chonger as the saviour of zhongguo (‘the central states’) and officially recognised him as ba, a title that may be rendered as ‘overlord’ or ‘protector of the realm’.
Terms like ba, gong and zhongguo pose a problem since they are conventionally translated into non-Chinese languages in a somewhat random fashion. Ba, for instance, is commonly rendered as ‘hegemon’, a Greek title awarded to one of the near-contemporary Hellenic city-states, usually Sparta or Athens, in recognition of its primacy and leadership. In China the ‘hegemony’ also changed hands; the ruler of Qi in Shandong had previously held it, and Jin would later be succeeded as ba by Chu, Wu, Qin and others. But in its Chinese context, the term was meaningless without the legitimacy and overall authority, albeit nominal, of the Zhou. Accepting his appointment at the third time of asking – a deferential convention – the Jin ruler made this cl
ear: ‘Chonger ventures to bow twice, touching his head to the ground, and respectfully accepts and publishes abroad these illustrious, enlightened and excellent commands of the [Zhou] Son of Heaven.’16
Lip-service to the Heavenly Mandate and to the idea of a single ruling lineage survived, and it set apart those who adhered to it – the so-called Xia (sometimes Hua-Xia) people – from peoples who did not, such as the Rong and the Di. In both the Greek and Chinese worlds a literate and increasingly urban society now shared a sense of superior distinction that transcended internal conflicts. The Greek states sublimated their differences at the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, where the first games were supposedly staged as early as 776 BC. Less famously, the Chinese states, while observing certain conventions in their cut-throat statecraft as if it too were a competitive sport, also held athletic games. Instituted by the up-and-coming state of Qin in the early ‘Warring States’ period, they included trials of strength, dancing, archery, chariot-racing and some sort of butting contest involving horns.17
While the Greek ‘hegemon’ serves as a rendering of ba, it is the ‘duc’ or ‘duke’ of the Romance languages which is invariably used to translate gong; hence ‘Duke of Zhou’ for Zhou gong. In similar fashion ‘marquis’ is used for hou, ‘viscount’ for zi, and so on down through the rungs of the European aristocracy and the rankings of the Zhou elite to ‘esquire’ or ‘knight’ for shi. This convention was adopted because social and economic relationships in ancient China seemed to conform to what European historians understand by ‘feudalism’. But the analogy should not be taken too far. Zhou China and medieval Europe differed – by, at the crudest, some 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) and 1,500 years. Additionally Marxist historians, while insisting on a prior age of slavery under the Shang, have quibbled over just when the supposed transition to feudalism may have taken place; and others have doubted whether Chinese feudalism ever involved the contractual relationships that underpinned the European system (and led, for instance, to English barons demanding a Magna Carta).18 But the use of ‘duke’, ‘marquis’, etc. continues, and it has led to the introduction into Chinese history-writing of other exotic and perhaps misleading terms, such as ‘manorial lands’ and ‘seigneurial rights’.