Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  Fig. 6.10 Bone sculpture from Zhouyuan.

  However, the main direction of Zhou expansion during the early period seems to have been the eastern Shandong peninsula against the local inhabitants referred to by the Zhou as the “Eastern Barbarians” (Dongyi). The inscriptions suggest that this took place mainly in the reign of King Kang and continued into early King Zhao when a series of campaigns were launched into this far eastern region. One campaign was fought by the royal Eight Armies with its base in the former Shang capital area that had reached seashores in the east where the soldiers captured substantial amounts of seashells, a type of currency used in the Western Zhou state (Fig. 6.11):

  Xiaochen Lai gui (JC: 4238)

  Alas! The Dongyi greatly rebelled and Bo Maofu led the Eight Armies of Yin to attack the Dongyi. It was the eleventh month when [he] dispatched troops from Ke Garrison, along Eastern XX to attack the sea coastal areas. When he returned to Mu Garrison, Bo Maofu received the king’s command to award the troops cowries that he led them to attack and captured from Wuyu. Xiaochen Lai was acknowledged his merits, and was awarded cowries, with which [he] makes the treasured sacrificial vessel.

  Some inscriptions also record that the Zhou king personally led campaigns in the region, assisted by the rulers of the regional states in western Shandong. It is impossible to demarcate accurately the areas affected by Zhou’s military advances, but information from the inscriptions shows beyond doubt that the campaigns were aimed at conquering the hilly regions in the eastern Shandong Peninsula, traditionally known as the heartland of the “Eastern Barbarians.” Archaeological surveys in areas along the north shore of the eastern peninsula, particularly cases of inscribed bronzes found in the region and showing political connections to the Zhou central court, offer good support for possible Zhou activities in eastern Shandong.

  Fig. 6.11 The Xiaochen Lai gui-tureen (h. 24.5 cm, diam. 20.0 cm) and its inscriptions on the eastern campaign.

  Zhou’s relationship with the southeast during the early period, particularly the Yangzi Delta, has been a historical debate. However, there is no solid evidence for Zhou political contact with the Yangzi Delta around the Tai Lake, the heartland of the later state of Wu whose royal ancestry was traced back to the Zhou royal house in traditional historiography; but this seems more likely to have been a far-fetched connection created to legitimate Wu’s hegemony in the early fifth century BC in a world that was still dominated by the ideal of Zhou. However, substantial contacts with the Huai River region are suggested by a series of wars between the Zhou and the so-called “Huai Barbarians” (indigenous people of the Huai region) documented in many inscriptions dating to the early mid-Western Zhou period. A recently discovered inscription indicates that contacts with the Huai River region might have begun much earlier, as the Duke of Zhou was credited for having organized extensive campaigns to attack the southern states. But there is no mention of war with the “Huai Barbarians” in any inscription after King Cheng until the beginning of the mid Western Zhou.

  Warfare is the subject most frequently recorded in the inscriptions during the early Western Zhou, and this fully indicates the importance of war to the mind of the Zhou elites in the first century of the dynasty. However, later in the reign of King Zhao, the Zhou embarked on a plan to conquer the middle Yangzi region. The region, as mentioned in Chapter 5, had a much longer history of bronze culture and possibly also of state building than eastern Shandong and raised a much more formidable resistance to the Zhou. When a second campaign was launched by King Zhao in his nineteenth year, aiming most likely at the polity called “Hu Fang,” the Zhou were totally defeated. Not only the royal Six Armies, representing nearly a half of Zhou’s military formation, had vanished in the Han River, but King Zhao himself was killed during the campaign. Certainly no individual had ever cast a bronze to celebrate this disastrous end of the reign of King Zhao, but there are enough inscriptions that can help us reconstruct the developments leading to the eventual defeat of the king.

  Despite his ultimate failure, King Zhao is celebrated in Zhou inscriptions as the king who had broadly opened land to the south. In 1980, archaeologists excavated a cemetery at Huangpi to the east of the Han River and north of the Yangzi River. Tombs in that cemetery were filled with Zhou cultural contents including inscribed bronzes that show close links to individuals in the Zhou central courts. Thus, although further expansion to the south was curbed by the strong resistance of the indigenous peoples, the reign of King Zhao might have indeed been an important period of Zhou expansion into the middle Yangzi region.

  Selected Reading

  Rawson, Jessica, “Western Zhou archaeology,” in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 352–449.

  Shaughnessy, Edward L., “Western Zhou History,” in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 292–351.

  Hsu, Cho-yun, and Katheryn Linduff, Western Chou Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

  Li, Feng, Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis, and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045–771 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  Li, Feng, “‘Feudalism’ and Western Zhou China: A Criticism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63.1 (2003), 115–144.

  1 The high prestige of the Zhou Dynasty can be seen in the fact that the word “Zhou” was subsequently used as the dynastic title of five regimes in Chinese history: Northern Zhou (AD 557–581, founded by Yuwen Jue), Wu Zhou (AD 690–705, founded by Wu Zetian), Later Zhou (AD 951–960, founded by Guo Wei), Great Zhou (AD 1354–1367, founded by Zhang Shicheng), Wu Zhou (AD 1674–1681, founded by Wu Sangui).

  2 For a discussion of pre-dynastic pottery types from the Wei River valley, see Jessica Rawson, “Western Zhou archaeology,” in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 375–385.

  3 See David W. Pankenier, “The Cosmo-Political Background of Heaven’s Mandate,” Early China 20 (1995), 121–176.

  4 See Edward Shaughnessy, “‘New’ Evidence on the Zhou Conquest,” Early China 6 (1981–2), 66–67.

  5 For a discussion of the historical development in the early years of the Western Zhou, see Edward Shaughnessy, “The Role of Grand Protector Shi in the consolidation of the Zhou Conquest,” Ars Orientalis 19 (1989), 51–77.

  6 See Li Feng, Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou (1045–771 BC) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 165–170.

  7 See Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Late Western Zhou Taste,” Études chinoises 18 (1999), 143–178. For a more detailed discussion of the typological and decorative progression of Western Zhou bronzes, see Jessica Rawson, Western Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, 1990), pp. 15–125.

  8 Most typical of the view is Herrlee Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, vol. 1, The Western Chou Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 317–387.

  9 Li Feng, “‘Feudalism’ and Western Zhou China: A Criticism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63.1 (2003), 115–144.

  10 On the status and role of the regional states, see Li, Bureaucracy and the State in Early China, pp. 235–270.

  11 On the weakening of the Western Zhou, see Li Feng, Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045–771 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 110–121.

  12 The recent discovery of bronze inscriptions shows that King Cheng ruled for at least twenty-eight years, following the regency of the Duke of Zhou which lasted seven years. King Kang, on the other hand, has been traditionally assigned a reign of somewhere between twenty-four an
d thirty years.

  13 For a study of this interesting finding, see Victor Mair, “Old Sinitic *Myag, Persian Maguš, and English ‘Magician’”, Early China 15 (1990), 27–47.

  14 Jessica Rawson, “Carnelian Beads, Animal Figures and Exotic Vessels: Traces of Contact between the Chinese States and Inner Asia, ca. 1000–650 BC,” in Mayke Wagner and Wang Wei (eds.), Archäologie in China, vol. 1, Bridging Eurasia (Berlin: Deutsches Archäeologisches Institut, 2010), pp. 5–12.

  7 The creation of paradigm: Zhou bureaucracy and social institutions

  The Western Zhou dynasty saw the rise of a core part of classical literature that has been passed down to our days. On the other hand, there are literally thousands of bronze vessels with inscriptions whose number has been steadily growing over the past half century due to archaeological excavations and uncontrolled looting by tomb robbers. Unlike the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions whose number is very limited outside of Anyang, inscribed bronzes have been found all over North China and a part of South China from cemeteries or residential sites of the Zhou or non-Zhou elites. This makes the Western Zhou one of the most important periods for the spreading of literacy in Chinese history. Also different from the Shang divinatory records that are often fragmentary and almost always inconsequential, a core group of several hundred Western Zhou bronze inscriptions are remarkably lengthy. It is true that a large number of inscribed bronzes were used in the religious context of ancestral worship; however, the historical events they record are almost always unrelated to the ancestral ritual in which their material bronzes were used. Instead, they record a wide range of topics such as military merit, official performance, royal orders, marriage, lineage genealogy, economic deals, diplomatic exchange, legal treaties, and so on. Certainly, the actual use of bronzes in Western Zhou society was not confined to the religious scene either. The improvement in the quality of the written evidence available to us allows for a much better, or more consistent, understanding of the political and ritual institutions as well as social conditions of the Western Zhou than of Shang.

  Clans and Lineages: The Social Organization of the Zhou Elites

  The Zhou were the first people in China to introduce the institution of clan names (xìng; or later, “surname”) as the hallmark of the system of lineage. As clans were themselves kin groups bound together by a common ancestry, clan names usually were related to the maternal origins of the clan’s distant ancestors. Lineages, on the other hand, were recent and contemporary social, political, and economic entities of the Zhou elites that usually existed in relatively smaller units and usually were related to each other through clan ties. By convention, as fully evident in the bronze inscriptions, while male Zhou elites were referred to by their lineage names (shì), elite women usually carried their clan names as part of their personal designations. The bronze inscriptions also suggest that the use of clan names as part of female names was based on the principle of marital differentiation under the common practice of polygamy among the Zhou elites. It has been suggested by scholars that the introduction of clan names might have been necessitated by the need to regulate marriage relationships among the various ethnic groups in the Zhou commonwealth.1 If this is true, the invention of clan names might well have been related to the nature of the pre-dynastic Zhou polity as a congregation of numerous ethnic groups in the Wei River valley and the adjacent regions that jointly helped the Zhou achieve their conquest of Shang (see Chapter 6). The Zhou royal clan, for instance, was named Ji, and through the entire Western Zhou period, more than half of the twelve Zhou kings took as their primary wives ladies from the Jiang clan which seems to have had an origin in the farther west, possibly related to the ancient Qiang people. Certainly, Ji clan members founded the largest number of lineages in the royal domains and the overwhelming majority of regional states in the east. Besides Ji and Jiang, there were about ten other intermarrying clans frequently mentioned in the bronze inscriptions, and the actual number of clans in the Western Zhou period must have been very large.

  However, clans were not social solidarities; lineages were. As essential social units, the history of some of the prestigious lineages of the Zhou elites goes back to the pre-dynastic time when they first split off the royal lineage that was continued by the succession of the Zhou kings. Lineages were basic social units that held land estates and people, and competed with each other for political power and economic interests in Zhou society. The bronze inscriptions suggest that land was held in the form of settlements (called yi in the inscriptions) – natural villages that have a residential core surrounded by fields; most lineages had multiple small settlements under their control where their farmers lived and activities of subsistence were carried out. Under the practice of primogeniture, only the eldest son in each generation had the chance to become the head of the lineage, while other sons formed their individual families and worshipped in the common ancestral temple of the lineage. The inscriptions also suggest that while the lineage centers and the greater part of their estates were located in the rural areas across the fertile Wei River plain, most prominent lineages also held residences in the Zhou royal centers where bronzes cast by the lineage members have frequently been excavated (Chapter 6). As time passed, such lineage branches could develop into new lineages. Another factor that might have contributed to lineage segmentation was the frequent sale or exchange of land between the aristocratic lineages which had inevitably led to the fragmentation of lineage properties; settlements located far from the lineage center tended to be transferred into bases of new lineage segments.2

  Later Confucian texts describe the process of lineage segmentation in the way that in every five generations, minor sons of a lineage would be required to move away and found a new lineage, so the lineage’s growing population could be kept at a manageable level.3 Naturally, there is a distinction between the primary lineage and derivative ones, and the minor lineages by their position on the genealogical tree were required to obey the primary lineage. The bronze inscriptions do not confirm the practice of a strict “five-generation” rule, but they offer sufficient evidence that the distinction between the primary and minor lineages indeed existed in the Western Zhou. There is also evidence that the primary lineage represented its minor lineages in cases of legal disputes that were brought for settlement at the Zhou court. Thus, genealogical relationships underlay the basic logic of social relationships during the Western Zhou.

  This genealogical rule, conceived of not so much as a basis for relationships between the individuals as for lineages, was also applicable to the royal lineage. In a way, the “Fengjian” institution by which many regional states were established during the early Western Zhou can be seen as the process of segmentation of the royal lineage. Throughout the Western Zhou, minor sons of the Zhou king continued to receive estates in the royal domain in Shaanxi, thus founding new lineages, or, in a few cases, to be established as rulers of the new regional states. Because of their positions on the royal genealogical tree, they were required to obey the royal lineage in the Zhou capital as the primary lineage.

  Ideology and Religion

  For a long time, the Shang–Zhou transition has been taken by historians as one of the “revolutions” in Chinese history. With respect to the ideological foundation of this revolution, the Zhou were credited with the invention of the concept of “Heaven’s Mandate,” as opposed to the concept of the “High God” of the Shang people. This theory of an ideological opposition between Shang and Zhou has been modified by recent studies with regard to the nature of “Heaven” (tian) in the Shang dynasty.4 Due to the lack of extensive records of royal divination as in the Shang case, we do not understand Zhou religion in the way we do that of Shang. Nevertheless, “Heaven” as an anthropomorphic deity, the ultimate power of the universe, seems surely to have been a Zhou discovery. Modern scholars have further provided an astronomical base for the rise of this concept – the conjunction of the five major planets in the solar system in 1059 BC which was clearly v
isible from the Zhou capital and that was evidently taken by the Zhou people as a sign of Heaven’s Mandate and left a deep psychological impact on the Zhou people (see Chapter 6).5 This event prompted the declaration of kingship by King Wen, the sole recipient of Heaven’s Mandate acknowledged in the bronze inscriptions during the early Western Zhou period.

  Thus, the Zhou conquest was not merely a military campaign, but also an ideological or even psychological war. We read in chapters of the Book of Documents that the last Shang king was denounced as a tyrant who was vicious and paranoid; his officials were indulgent and alcoholic and deserved a total destruction, and the Zhou had the inevitable responsibility to exercise Heaven’s punishment. The Zhou state, although an old polity, had a new mission, as so stated the Book of Poetry. This new mission was not only to overthrow an evil Shang regime, but to create a “New People,” and those who dared to oppose this great enterprise would meet their due penalty. From this concept of Heaven’s Mandate, it was further theorized, probably by the Duke of Zhou, that the Shang once themselves hosted Heaven’s Mandate when their sage kings ruled the kingdom, as did the Xia Dynasty before it was conquered by the Shang. Thus the subjugated Shang should have no blame for the Zhou because their own kings and ministers caused the removal of Heaven’s Mandate from them.