Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  Through the entire Western Zhou period, the bronze inscriptions continued to celebrate the divine origin of the Zhou conquest, and as such the Zhou state born from the conquest was seen as an institution to fulfill the will of Heaven. Since the mandate could be granted only once by Heaven, particularly to King Wen, no subsequent Zhou kings could again claim the status as the recipient of the mandate. Instead, their legitimacy as king rested first of all on their genealogical link to King Wen, and it was also strengthened by their commitment to virtuous conduct following the good example of the founding kings, thus helping host Heaven’s Mandate in Zhou. On the other hand, the theory of history of the transmission of Heaven’s Mandate from Xia to Shang and to Zhou actually called the future of the Zhou regime into question. Thus, Heaven’s Mandate was not only a source of legitimacy, but also a source of great anxiety that one day it might be void if the Zhou kings did not conduct themselves in a responsible way. Therefore, in Zhou literature, particularly from the late part of the dynasty, there is constant fear that this may happen some day.6

  The concept of High God or God (di) and his relationship to Heaven is a point of hot debate with regard to Zhou cosmology and religion. The pre-dynastic Zhou oracle-bone inscriptions from Zhouyuan suggest that the Zhou had apparently adopted the concept of High God from the Shang. As mentioned in Chapter 5, God by origin was probably the celestial pivot (North Pole). No matter what attitude the Zhou had towards God, it seems evident that after the conquest the concept of God went through significant reworking by Zhou elites to suit their own political purposes. On the one hand, God lost his omnipresent power over both human and natural worlds, a power that was taken over by Heaven. On the other hand, the Zhou seemed to have forged their own genealogical relations going back directly to God (as in the poem “The Birth of People” in the Book of Poetry), thus transforming High God into their own guardian. Later Zhou tradition further put the Zhou in a more advantageous position by having Zhou’s female ancestor Jiang Yuan as the primary wife of the legendary Di Ku and the Shang female ancestor as his secondary wife, an arrangement that shows clear influence from the Zhou practice of primogeniture. Thus, in Zhou sources, although Heaven represented the ultimate universal order, following the dynastic decline, it was increasingly described as a source of calamities, death, and destruction; in sharp contrast, God (di) appears as a patron of the Zhou king and protector of the Zhou people, and never appears as a source of misfortune. The coexistence of Heaven and God is an important feature of Zhou religion.

  God was not only the guardian of the Zhou people, but he also hosted the deceased Zhou kings who would rise to the court of God after they physically faded away from the secular world. The former kings, while accompanying God in his court, occasionally descended to their temples during worships honoring them in the secular world ruled by their offspring. Thus, ancestral worship formed the foundation of the Zhou state and it tied the Zhou king and the various regional rulers of royal descent together in a political and religious “commonwealth.” Because sessions taking place in the ancestral temples are frequently but briefly recorded in the bronze inscriptions, scholars have made efforts to recover the system of Zhou temples. Although there are questions that are likely to remain unknown in the near future, careful analysis of the information at hand offers an outline of the organization of the royal temples, composed of essentially two large clusters. The first cluster, called the “Grand Temple” or the “Temple of Zhou” (because it was located in Zhou, or Qiyi), was probably constructed in the pre-dynastic period with the Grand King (or Ancient Duke) occupying the central temple, to which the temples of King Ji, King Wen, King Wu, and King Cheng were subsequently added, forming a group of five temples. After the conquest, this temple cluster was replicated in all major royal cities as well as in the central settlements of the regional states, forming a common ancestral cult among the Zhou elites (Fig. 7.1). The second cluster was called “Kang Temple,” beginning with the temple for King Kang (sixth king from the ancestral Grand King) as the central focus, to which the temples of four later kings including King Zhao, King Mu, King Yi, and King Li were added.7 Although we do not know if the three kings between King Mu and King Yi and the two kings after Li should have constituted a different order, or if they would have been worshipped together after all, the inscriptions clearly mention the five temples headed by Kang Temple as a cluster, and they were invariably located in one place – Zhou (Qiyi). This five-temple group arrangement might have been the original model that gave rise to the “five-generation rule” that was transmitted in the later Confucian texts.

  Fig. 7.1 Configuration of the Zhou ancestral temple system.

  It has to be noted that ancestral worship was not the monopoly of the royal house aimed at the royal ancestors, but was universally practiced by the Zhou elites focusing on the lineage temples located in the numerous lineage centers far away from the royal capitals. In fact, the overwhelming majority of sacrificial bronzes that we have today were cast for use in the context of lineage sacrifice, whereas only a fraction were commissioned by the Zhou king. It has been suggested recently that the lineages (not limited to those that split off from the royal genealogy, but including also their marriage partners, usually non-Ji-surnamed lineages) were connected to the royal house through their “nexus ancestors” who had in time past served either King Wen or King Wu, and whose initial connection to the Zhou royal house determined the social status of their descendant lineages. These initial moments of service or alliance with the royal house needed to be instantiated through ritual ceremonies that motivated the casting of numerous sacrificial vessels dedicated to the lineage ancestors.8 In other words, the reverence and continuing remembrance of the “nexus ancestors” formed the essential logic that underlay both the ancestral worship carried out in the lineage temples and the religious ceremonies that took place in the royal compounds also involving the participation of lineage members. These religious practices played a critical role in creating and maintaining social order in Western Zhou society.

  The Bureaucratization of the Royal Government

  Quite different from the Shang government that was likely to have centered on the role of the royal diviners, the Zhou central government from the beginning of the dynasty was centered on the role of the executive officials such as the Supervisor of Land, Supervisor of Construction, and Supervisor of Horses who were further organized into a general bureau of administration named “Ministry” (qingshiliao). Whether the Shang institution of royal divination already displayed principles of a proto-bureaucracy, as argued by Keightley, is open to question; even if it did, it was not in any substantial way. But there can be no doubt that a bureaucracy that was set up for actual administrative purposes certainly did not exist in Shang. In the Zhou case, the administrative officials were further assisted by a large number of Scribes and Document Makers who produced and kept written records in the government. Only the office of Document Maker can be traced back to the Shang dynasty, while all others are likely Zhou inventions. This suggests that with their historical conquest, the Zhou might have introduced a new approach to the issue of governance through the refinement of civil administration in order to support the military, combined with a colonization operation in a much larger geographical space than that of Shang. This government worked in an oligarchical way through most of the early Western Zhou as the power of policy-making rested in the hands of one or sometimes two dukes who were uncles or brothers of the reigning Zhou king, and who evidently had the Ministry under their control. It was this government guided by strong-willed dukes that managed the state affairs through the period of great early Western Zhou expansion.

  By the mid Western Zhou, the Zhou central government was clearly undergoing a process of bureaucratization. This is seen first in the compartmentalization of the Zhou central government, resulting in three parallel structural divisions (Fig. 7.2). The Ministry was further expanded to embrace multiple officials serving at the position of each
of the Three Supervisors. Mentioned as its counterpart in the inscriptions is the Grand Secretariat, the major secretarial body of the Zhou government headed by the Grand Scribes assisted by many minor scribes. The management of the Royal Household and its local branches had developed into a separate system of administration headed by the Superintendents. A parallel development was the separation of the interior scribe body from the Grand Secretariat; this secretarial body headed by the Chief Interior Scribe was located in the inner court of the Zhou king and assisted him in various matters brought to the king. Another major development lay in the military system; during the mid Western Zhou both the Eight Armies and Six Armies had developed into a huge system of administration employing officials who managed properties and land attached to the military. Above this structure was a group of five to six high officials who, appearing in a fixed order, acted together as decision-makers and as judges in legal matters, suggesting the expansion of impersonal rule.9

  Fig. 7.2 Organization of the Western Zhou central government: mid Western Zhou period.

  Importantly, the procedure of appointing officials had also become bureaucratized, giving rise to a new type of inscriptions – the “appointment inscriptions.” Some 100 inscriptions constantly record official appointments that took place in the various facilities of the Zhou king or in building compounds under the authority of individual officials. In this ritual hosted almost exclusively by the Zhou king, the written command of the king was pronounced by the Interior Scribe to the candidates who were normally led to the courtyard and introduced to the king by an official in a superior position. Then, the appointee received the royal command which he brought home and subsequently transferred onto bronzes. The entire process was highly regularized both in terms of the officials involved and of the way in which each party acted. And the very fact that the numerous inscriptions (the ones we have are probably a fraction of what had been produced during the mid to late Western Zhou) were cast to commemorate royal appointments suggests strongly the high social value the Zhou elites placed on government service (Box 7.1); before the mid Western Zhou many inscriptions were cast to commemorate military exploits or the receipt of royal gifts, and none of them were cast to record the actual procedure of royal appointment.10

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  Box 7.1 Example of an Appointment Inscription: The Song Ding

  This long text of 149 characters was cast on at least three hemispheric ding-cauldrons that formed a part of an original set, stylistically similar to but slightly later than the Duoyou ding (Fig. 7.3). The text offers one of the most detailed descriptions of the appointment ritual that took place in this case in King Zhao’s temple that was a part of the Kang Temple complex. The caster Song is identified as Scribe Song in another shorter inscription that was cast on at least two ding-cauldrons and five gui-tureens.

  It was the third year, fifth month, after the dying brightness, the jiaxu day (#11). The king was in the Zhao Temple of the Kang Temple in Zhou. At dawn, the king entered the grand chamber and assumed his position. Superintendent Hong accompanied Song to his right, entering the gate and standing in the center of the courtyard. The Chief (Interior Scribe) received the document of royal command, and the king called out to Scribe Guosheng to command Song with the written document. The king said: “Song! [I] command you to take office in charge of the storage of twenty households in Chengzhou, and to inspect and supervise the newly constructed storage house, using palace attendants. [I] award you a black jacket with brocaded hem, red knee pads, a scarlet semi-circlet, a jingle-bell pennant, and a bridle with bit and cheek-pieces with which to serve!” Song bowed with his head touching the ground, received the bamboo document of royal command, hung it [on his body], and came out [of the courtyard]. He then returned and brought in a jade tablet. Song dares in response to extol the Son of Heaven’s illustriously fine beneficence, herewith making [for] my august deceased father Gongshu and august mother Gong Si [this] treasured sacrificial ding-vessel, which will be used to pursue filial piety, to pray for peaceful harmony, pure blessings, pervading wealth, and eternal mandate. May Song for ten thousand years enjoy abundant longevity, and serve the Son of Heaven, with no end. [May Song’s] sons’ sons and grandsons’ grandsons treasure and use [it]!

  Fig. 7.3 The Douyou ding-cauldron and its inscription which records Zhou combat with the Xianyun at four locations along the Jing River to the north of the Zhou capital.

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  Bureaucratic features are manifest also in the process of selection of officials for government service. While traditional textual records tend to describe the Western Zhou as a period of hereditary offices, the bronze inscriptions instead describe a much more complex situation where although hereditary appointments were made by the Zhou king, he had considerable freedom to manipulate the system by appointing officials with no documented family history of government service or by assigning them to offices different from what had been held by their fathers or grandfathers. This tendency corresponded well with another practice in the Zhou government – promotion. Further analysis of the inscriptions suggests that younger elites were usually appointed assistants to senior officials, and then after some years of service were promoted to offices of full capacity. The current evidence shows that although family background was important, personal qualification might have also been an important consideration for government appointment, and the system was set up, at latest by the mid Western Zhou period, with the expectation that good performance of officials was a credential that would lead them up to the higher levels on the bureaucratic ladder.11

  While the bureaucratic tendency continued to develop in the late Western Zhou, the whole process of bureaucratization of the Zhou government seems not to have been a response to the military expansion that took place mainly during the early Western Zhou, but was a natural process of internal reorganization that took place after the end of the great expansion and was intensified even more following the dynastic decline. This pattern of development of bureaucracy had many parallels in the ancient world. It should also be noted, however, that the sway of bureaucratization did not seem to have affected the regional governments which, even during the early Spring and Autumn period, remained largely personal and unbureaucratic.

  The Mid Western Zhou Transition

  Historians, art historians, and archaeologists have each taken a different approach to the changes that occurred during the mid Western Zhou period. Earlier, archaeologists observed a major change in burial bronzes in Western Zhou elite tombs where the assemblage of wine vessels popular during the early Western Zhou gradually gave way to a new set of bronze vessels composed almost exclusively of food vessels during the mid Western Zhou. Working mainly on bronze objects, art historians further hypothesized that the changes that occurred during the mid Western Zhou might have been the result of some kind of “Ritual Reform” or “Ritual Revolution.”12 These changes are quite obvious and important in reshaping a bronze art tradition that had its roots in Shang. By the closing of the mid Western Zhou period, Zhou bronze art had acquired a totally new image (see Chapter 6). However, the critical missing piece of information is whether these changes in bronze art were related to systematic changes implemented by an agent (or agents) in Zhou’s political ritual system, or they were simply a change of “fashion” that gradually took hold among the Zhou craftsmen and was accepted by Zhou elites. Until what actually happened in the Zhou ritual system can be demonstrated, the “Reform” theory has to remain hypothetical.

  A recent systematic study of the ritual tradition and ritual practice in the Western Zhou offers the first step towards recovering this missing ground which might have conditioned at least in part the changes in bronze art. According to this analysis, the mid Western Zhou saw a move from the practice that combined many ritual techniques inherited from the Shang, rituals that centered on the Zhou king and enrolled members of the various lineages, to a ritual system that was intended to create and implement internal differentiation among
the Zhou elites. This new trend enabled the Zhou king to continue to distribute prestige to the elites in a time after the early Western Zhou expansion when war had ceased to be a sufficient source for the elite to win honor and prestige. Thus in effect the new system served to strengthen the power of the Zhou king and to maintain the solidarity of the Zhou elites. The time of this important change in Zhou ritual tradition has been pinned down to the end of the reign of King Mu which actually saw the peak of diversity of ritual techniques, many of which disappeared quickly thereafter.13 The new standards and patterns observed on mid and late Western Zhou bronzes, relating more closely to the personal ranking and status of the elites, were reflections of the same trend.

  In all, the closing of the great early Western Zhou expansion seems to have set the Western Zhou state and society on a different trend that was to develop in the next 100 years. The changes in government system and ritual practice are two aspects of a widely ranged sociopolitical transformation that took place during the mid Western Zhou period. In the history of the royal house, five Zhou kings came to rule for a total length of time that was shorter than three generations of an aristocratic family.14 Possibly contributing to the short reigns was an incident of abnormal succession that happened for the first time since the beginning of the dynasty – King Xiao succeeded his nephew King Yih to become the eighth Zhou king. In foreign relations, the mid Western Zhou saw the first deep foreign invasion since the beginning of the dynasty – the invasion by groups of aboriginals from the Huai River region which posed a major threat to the security of Zhou’s eastern capital in present-day Luoyang. Along with the weakening of royal power, the relationship between the Zhou central court and the regional states was also challenged by the ambition of some regional rulers such as that of Qi who was targeted by a royal campaign in the reign of King Yi. These are signs that the Zhou court was no longer able to keep its enemies beyond the border and regional rulers in line with royal interests. On a societal level, the most important impact of the closing of the great expansion was the removal of opportunities to transfer population out of the Wei River valley to form new regional polities in an expanding territory. The bronze inscriptions suggest that the Zhou king was no longer able to grant the lineages large parcels of land, but had to hand out fields in a piecemeal fashion often located at a distance from one another. On the other hand, the lineages also traded land in such small pieces that they in turn accelerated the process of lineage fragmentation discussed above. This shift was itself an indication of intense competition for land resources when large areas of marginal land had been exhausted. Reports on disputes over land ownership or even incidences of robbery of land products were frequently filed at the Zhou court and recorded on bronzes by those who won the respective legal cases. The inscriptions offer us a vivid picture of tense competition over economic resources and social conflicts in the royal domain during the mid Western Zhou period. In short, the current evidence shows that the mid Western Zhou was an important period of sociopolitical transition.