THE CHOU DYNASTY ( c. 1028-257 B.C.)
1 Cultural origin of the Chou and end of the Shang dynasty
The Shang culture stil lacked certain things that were to become typical of "Chinese" civilization. The family system was not yet the strong patriarchal system of the later Chinese. The religion, too, in spite of certain other influences, was stil a religion of agrarian fertility. And although Shang society was strongly stratified and showed some tendencies to develop a feudal system, feudalism was stil very primitive. Although the Shang script was the precursor of later Chinese script, it seemed to have contained many words which later disappeared, and we are
not sure whether Shang language was the same as the language of Chou time. With the Chou period, however,
we enter a period in which everything which was later regarded as typicaly "Chinese" began to emerge.
During the time of the Shang dynasty the Chou formed a smal realm in the west, at first in central Shensi, an area which even in much later times was the home of many "non-Chinese" tribes. Before the beginning of the eleventh century B.C. they must have pushed into eastern Shensi, due to pressures of other tribes which may have
belonged to the Turkish ethnic group. However, it is also possible that their movement was connected with
pressures from Indo-European groups. An analysis of their tribal composition at the time of the conquest seems to indicate that the ruling house of the Chou was related to the Turkish group, and that the population consisted mainly of Turks and Tibetans. Their culture was closely related to that of Yang-shao, the previously described www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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painted-pottery culture, with, of course, the progress brought by time. They had bronze weapons and, especialy, the war-chariot. Their eastward migration, however, brought them within the zone of the Shang culture, by which they were strongly influenced, so that the Chou culture lost more and more of its original character and
increasingly resembled the Shang culture. The Chou were also brought into the political sphere of the Shang, as shown by the fact that marriages took place between the ruling houses of Shang and Chou, until the Chou state
became nominaly dependent on the Shang state in the form of a dependency with special prerogatives.
Meanwhile the power of the Chou state steadily grew, while that of the Shang state diminished more and more
through the disloyalty of its feudatories and through wars in the East. Finaly, about 1028 B.C., the Chou ruler, named Wu Wang ("the martial king"), crossed his eastern frontier and pushed into central Honan. His army was formed by an aliance between various tribes, in the same way as happened again and again in the building up of the armies of the rulers of the steppes. Wu Wang forced a passage across the Yelow River and annihilated the
Shang army. He pursued its vestiges as far as the capital, captured the last emperor of the Shang, and kiled him.
Thus was the Chou dynasty founded, and with it we begin the actual history of China. The Chou brought to the
Shang culture strong elements of Turkish and also Tibetan culture, which were needed for the release of such
forces as could create a new empire and maintain it through thousands of years as a cultural and, generaly, also a political unit.
2 Feudalism in the new empire
A natural result of the situation thus produced was the turning of the country into a feudal state. The conquerors were an alien minority, so that they had to march out and spread over the whole country. Moreover, the alied
tribal chieftains expected to be rewarded. The territory to be governed was enormous, but the communications in northern China at that time were similar to those stil existing not long ago in southern China—narrow footpaths from one settlement to another. It is very difficult to build roads in the loess of northern China; and the war-chariots that required roads had only just been introduced. Under such conditions, the simplest way of
administering the empire was to establish garrisons of the invading tribes in the various parts of the country under the command of their chieftains. Thus separate regions of the country were distributed as fiefs. If a former subject of the Shang surrendered betimes with the territory under his rule, or if there was one who could not be
overcome by force, the Chou recognized him as a feudal lord.
We find in the early Chou time the typical signs of true feudalism: fiefs were given in a ceremony in which
symbolicaly a piece of earth was handed over to the new fiefholder, and his instalment, his rights and obligations were inscribed in a "charter". Most of the fiefholders were members of the Chou ruling family or members of the clan to which this family belonged; other fiefs were given to heads of the alied tribes. The fiefholder (feudal lord) regarded the land of his fief, as far as he and his clan actualy used it, as "clan" land; parts of this land he gave to members of his own branch-clan for their use without transferring rights of property, thus creating new sub-fiefs and sub-lords. In much later times the concept of landed property of a family developed, and the whole concept of "clan" disappeared. By 500 B.C., most feudal lords had retained only a dim memory that they originaly belonged to the Chi clan of the Chou or to one of the few other original clans, and their so-caled sub-lords felt themselves as members of independent noble families. Slowly, then, the family names of later China began to
develop, but it took many centuries until, at the time of the Han Dynasty, al citizens (slaves excluded) had
accepted family names. Then, reversely, families grew again into new clans.
Thus we have this picture of the early Chou state: the imperial central power established in Shensi, near the
present Sian; over a thousand feudal states, great and smal, often consisting only of a smal garrison, or
sometimes a more considerable one, with the former chieftain as feudal lord over it. Around these garrisons the www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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old population lived on, in the north the Shang population, farther east and south various other peoples and
cultures. The conquerors' garrisons were like islands in a sea. Most of them formed new towns, waled, with a
rectangular plan and central crossroads, similar to the European towns subsequently formed out of Roman
encampments. This town plan has been preserved to the present day.
This upper class in the garrisons formed the nobility; it was sharply divided from the indigenous population
around the towns The conquerors caled the population "the black-haired people", and themselves "the hundred families". The rest of the town populations consisted often of urban Shang people: Shang noble families together with their bondsmen and serfs had been given to Chou fiefholders. Such forced resettlements of whole
populations have remained typical even for much later periods. By this method new cities were provided with
urban, refined people and, most important, with skiled craftsmen and businessmen who assisted in building the
cities and in keeping them alive. Some scholars believe that many resettled Shang urbanites either were or
became businessmen; incidentaly, the same word "Shang" means "merchant", up to the present time. The people of the Shang capital lived on and even attempted a revolt in colaboration with some Chou people. The Chou
rulers suppressed this revolt, and then transferred a large part of this population to Loyang. They were settled there in a separate community, and vestiges of the Shang population were stil to be found there in the fifth
century A.D.: they were entirely impoverished potters, stil making vessels in the old style.
3 Fusion of Chou and Shang
The conquerors brought with them, for their own purposes to begin with, their rigid patriarchate in the family system and their cult of Heaven (t'ien), in which the worship of sun and stars took the principal place; a religion most closely related to that of the Turkish peoples and derived from them. Some of the Shang popular deities,
however, were admitted into the official Heaven-worship. Popular deities became "feudal lords" under the Heaven-god. The Shang conceptions of the soul were also admitted into the Chou religion: the human body
housed two souls, the personality-soul and the life-soul. Death meant the separation of the souls from the body, the life-soul also slowly dying. The personality-soul, however, could move about freely and lived as long as there were people who remembered it and kept it from hunger by means of sacrifices. The Chou systematized this idea
and made it into the ancestor-worship that has endured down to the present time.
The Chou officialy abolished human sacrifices, especialy since, as former pastoralists, they knew of better
means of employing prisoners of war than did the more agrarian Shang. The Chou used Shang and other slaves
as domestic servants for their numerous nobility, and Shang serfs as farm labourers on their estates. They seem to have regarded the land under their control as "state land" and al farmers as "serfs". A slave, here, must be defined as an individual, a piece of property, who was excluded from membership in human society but, in later legal texts, was included under domestic animals and immobile property, while serfs as a class depended upon
another class and had certain rights, at least the right to work on the land. They could change their masters if the land changed its master, but they could not legaly be sold individualy. Thus, the folowing, stil rather
hypothetical, picture of the land system of the early Chou time emerges: around the waled towns of the feudal
lords and sub-lords, always in the plains, was "state land" which produced milet and more and more wheat.
Cultivation was stil largely "shifting", so that the serfs in groups cultivated more or less standardized plots for a year or more and then shifted to other plots. During the growing season they lived in huts on the fields; during the winter in the towns in adobe houses. In this manner the yearly life cycle was divided into two different periods.
The produce of the serfs supplied the lords, their dependants and the farmers themselves. Whenever the lord
found it necessary, the serfs had to perform also other services for the lord. Farther away from the towns were the vilages of the "natives", nominaly also subjects of the lord. In most parts of eastern China, these, too, were www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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agriculturists. They acknowledged their dependence by sending "gifts" to the lord in the town. Later these gifts became institutionalized and turned into a form of tax. The lord's serfs, on the other hand, tended to settle near the fields in vilages of their own because, with growing urban population, the distances from the town to many of the fields became too great. It was also at this time of new settlements that a more intensive cultivation with a falow system began. At latest from the sixth century B.C. on, the distinctions between both land systems became unclear; and the pure serf-cultivation, caled by the old texts the "wel-field system" because eight cultivating families used one common wel, disappeared in practice.
The actual structure of early Chou administration is difficult to ascertain. The "Duke of Chou", brother of the first ruler, Wu Wang, later regent during the minority of Wu Wang's son, and certainly one of the most influential
persons of this time, was the aleged creator of the book Chou-li which contains a detailed table of the bureaucracy of the country. However, we know now from inscriptions that the bureaucracy at the beginning of
the Chou period was not much more developed than in late Shang time. The Chou-li gave an ideal picture of a bureaucratic state, probably abstracted from actual conditions in feudal states several centuries later.
The Chou capital, at Sian, was a twin city. In one part lived the master-race of the Chou with the imperial court, in the other the subjugated population. At the same time, as previously mentioned, the Chou built a second
capital, Loyang, in the present province of Honan. Loyang was just in the middle of the new state, and for the purposes of Heaven-worship it was regarded as the centre of the universe, where it was essential that the
emperor should reside. Loyang was another twin city: in one part were the rulers' administrative buildings, in the other the transferred population of the Shang capital, probably artisans for the most part. The valuable artisans seem al to have been taken over from the Shang, for the bronze vessels of the early Chou age are virtualy
identical with those of the Shang age. The shapes of the houses also remained unaltered, and probably also the clothing, though the Chou brought with them the novelties of felt and woolen fabrics, old possessions of their earlier period. The only fundamental material change was in the form of the graves: in the Shang age house-like tombs were built underground; now great tumuli were constructed in the fashion preferred by al steppe peoples.
One professional class was severely hit by the changed circumstances—the Shang priesthood. The Chou had no
priests. As with al the races of the steppes, the head of the family himself performed the religious rites. Beyond this there were only shamans for certain purposes of magic. And very soon Heaven-worship was combined with
the family system, the ruler being declared to be the Son of Heaven; the mutual relations within the family were thus extended to the religious relations with the deity. If, however, the god of Heaven is the father of the ruler, the ruler as his son himself offers sacrifice, and so the priest becomes superfluous. Thus the priests became
"unemployed". Some of them changed their profession. They were the only people who could read and write, and as an administrative system was necessary they obtained employment as scribes. Others withdrew to their
vilages and became vilage priests. They organized the religious festivals in the vilage, carried out the ceremonies connected with family events, and even conducted the exorcism of evil spirits with shamanistic dances; they took charge, in short, of everything connected with customary observances and morality. The Chou lords were great
respecters of propriety. The Shang culture had, indeed, been a high one with an ancient and highly developed
moral system, and the Chou as rough conquerors must have been impressed by the ancient forms and tried to
imitate them. In addition, they had in their religion of Heaven a conception of the existence of mutual relations between Heaven and Earth: al that went on in the skies had an influence on earth, and vice versa. Thus, if any ceremony was "wrongly" performed, it had an evil effect on Heaven—there would be no rain, or the cold weather would arrive too soon, or some such misfortune would come. It was therefore of great importance that
everything should be done "correctly". Hence the Chou rulers were glad to cal in the old priests as performers of ceremonies and teachers of morality similar to the ancient Indian rulers who needed the Brahmans for the correct www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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performance of al rites. There thus came into existence in the early Chou empire a new social group, later caled
"scholars", men who were not regarded as belonging to the lower class represented by the subjugated population but were not included in the nobility; men who were not productively employed but belonged to a sort of
independent profession. They became of very great importance in later centuries.
In the first centuries of the Chou dynasty the ruling house steadily lost power. Some of the emperors proved
weak, or were kiled at war; above al, the empire was too big and its administration too slow-moving. The
feudal lords and nobles were occupied with their own problems in securing the submission of the surrounding
vilages to their garrisons and in governing them; they soon paid little attention to the distant central authority. In addition to this, the situation at the centre of the empire was more difficult than that of its feudal states farther east. The settlements around the garrisons in the east were inhabited by agrarian tribes, but the subjugated
population around the centre at Sian was made up of nomadic tribes of Turks and Mongols together with semi-
nomadic Tibetans. Sian lies in the valey of the river Wei; the riverside country certainly belonged, though
perhaps only insecurely, to the Shang empire and was specialy wel adapted to agriculture; but its periphery—
mountains in the south, steppes in the north—was inhabited (until a late period, to some extent to the present day) by nomads, who had also been subjugated by the Chou. The Chou themselves were by no means strong,
as they had been only a smal tribe and their strength had depended on auxiliary tribes, which had now spread
over the country as the new nobility and lived far from the Chou. The Chou emperors had thus to hold in check
the subjugated but warlike tribes of Turks and Mongols who lived quite close to their capital. In the first centuries of the dynasty they were more or less successful, for the feudal lords stil sent auxiliary forces. In time, however, these became fewer and fewer, because the feudal lords pursued their own policy; and the Chou were
compeled to fight their own battles against tribes that continualy rose against them, raiding and pilaging their towns. Campaigns abroad also fel mainly on the shoulders of the Chou, as their capital lay near the frontier.
It must not be simply assumed, as is often done by the Chinese and some of the European historians, that the
Turkish and Mongolian tribes were so savage or so pugnacious that they continualy waged war just for the love
of it. The problem is much deeper, and to fail to recognize this is to fail to understand Chinese history down to the Middle Ages. The conquering Chou established their garrisons everywhere, and these garrisons were
surrounded by the quarters of artisans and by the vilages of peasants, a process that ate into the pasturage of the Turkish and Mongolian nomads. These nomads, as already mentioned, pursued agriculture themselves on a smal
scale, but it occurred to them that they could get farm produce much more easily by barter or by raiding.
Accordingly they gradualy gave up cultivation and became pure nomads, procuring the needed farm produce
from their neighbours. This abandonment of agriculture brought them into a precarious situation: if for any reason the Chinese stopped supplying or demanded excessive barter payment, the nomads had to go hungry. They were
then virtualy driven to get what they needed by raiding. Thus there developed a mutual reaction that lasted for centuries. Some of the nomadic tribes living between garrisons withdrew, to escape from the growing pressure,
mainly into the province of Shansi, where the influence of the Chou was weak and they were not numerous;
some of the nomad chiefs lost their lives in battle, and some learned from the Chou lords and turned themselves into petty rulers. A number of "marginal" states began to develop; some of them even built their own cities. This process of transformation of agro-nomadic tribes into "warrior-nomadic" tribes continued over many centuries and came to an end in the third or second century B.C.
The result of the three centuries that had passed was a symbiosis between the urban aristocrats and the country-people. The rulers of the towns took over from the general population almost the whole vocabulary of the
language which from now on we may cal "Chinese". They naturaly took over elements of the material
civilization. The subjugated population had, meanwhile, to adjust itself to its lords. In the organism that thus www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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developed, with its unified economic system, the conquerors became an aristocratic ruling class, and the
subjugated population became a lower class, with varied elements but mainly a peasantry. From now on we may
cal this society "Chinese"; it has endured to the middle of the twentieth century. Most later essential societal changes are the result of internal development and not of aggression from without.
4 Limitation of the imperial power
In 771 B.C. an aliance of northern feudal states had attacked the ruler in his western capital; in a battle close to the city they had overcome and kiled him. This campaign appears to have set in motion considerable groups
from various tribes, so that almost the whole province of Shensi was lost. With the aid of some feudal lords who had remained loyal, a Chou prince was rescued and conducted eastward to the second capital, Loyang, which
until then had never been the ruler's actual place of residence. In this rescue a lesser feudal prince, ruler of the feudal state of Ch'in, specialy distinguished himself. Soon afterwards this prince, whose domain had lain close to that of the ruler, reconquered a great part of the lost territory, and thereafter regarded it as his own fief. The Ch'in family resided in the same capital in which the Chou had lived in the past, and five hundred years later we shal meet with them again as the dynasty that succeeded the Chou.
The new ruler, resident now in Loyang, was foredoomed to impotence. He was now in the centre of the country,
and less exposed to large-scale enemy attacks; but his actual rule extended little beyond the town itself and its immediate environment. Moreover, attacks did not entirely cease; several times parts of the indigenous
population living between the Chou towns rose against the towns, even in the centre of the country.
Now that the emperor had no territory that could be the basis of a strong rule and, moreover, because he owed
his position to the feudal lords and was thus under an obligation to them, he ruled no longer as the chief of the feudal lords but as a sort of sanctified overlord; and this was the position of al his successors. A situation was formed at first that may be compared with that of Japan down to the middle of the nineteenth century. The ruler was a symbol rather than an exerciser of power. There had to be a supreme ruler because, in the worship of
Heaven which was recognized by al the feudal lords, the supreme sacrifices could only be offered by the Son of Heaven in person. There could not be a number of sons of heaven because there were not a number of heavens.
The imperial sacrifices secured that al should be in order in the country, and that the necessary equilibrium
between Heaven and Earth should be maintained. For in the religion of Heaven there was a close paralelism
between Heaven and Earth, and every omission of a sacrifice, or failure to offer it in due form, brought down a reaction from Heaven. For these religious reasons a central ruler was a necessity for the feudal lords. They
needed him also for practical reasons. In the course of centuries the personal relationship between the various feudal lords had ceased. Their original kinship and united struggles had long been forgotten. When the various feudal lords proceeded to subjugate the territories at a distance from their towns, in order to turn their city states into genuine territorial states, they came into conflict with each other. In the course of these struggles for power many of the smal fiefs were simply destroyed. It may fairly be said that not until the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. did the old garrison towns became real states. In these circumstances the struggles between the feudal
states caled urgently for an arbiter, to settle simple cases, and in more difficult cases either to try to induce other feudal lords to intervene or to give sanction to the new situation. These were the only governing functions of the ruler from the time of the transfer to the second capital.
5 Changes in the relative strength of the feudal states
In these disturbed times China also made changes in her outer frontiers. When we speak of frontiers in this
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in China until her conflict with the European powers. In the dogma of the Chinese religion of Heaven, al the
countries of the world were subject to the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven. Thus there could be no such
thing as other independent states. In practice the dependence of various regions on the ruler naturaly varied: near the centre, that is to say near the ruler's place of residence, it was most pronounced; then it gradualy diminished in the direction of the periphery. The feudal lords of the inner territories were already rather less subordinated than at the centre, and those at a greater distance scarcely at al; at a stil greater distance were territories whose chieftains regarded themselves as independent, subject only in certain respects to Chinese overlordship. In such a system it is difficult to speak of frontiers. In practice there was, of course, a sort of frontier, where the influence of the outer feudal lords ceased to exist. The development of the original feudal towns into feudal states with actual dominion over their territories proceeded, of course, not only in the interior of China but also on its borders, where the feudal territories had the advantage of more unrestricted opportunities of expansion; thus they became more and more powerful. In the south (that is to say, in the south of the Chou empire, in the present
central China) the garrisons that founded feudal states were relatively smal and widely separated; consequently their cultural system was largely absorbed into that of the aboriginal population, so that they developed into feudal states with a character of their own. Three of these attained special importance—(1) Ch'u, in the
neighbourhood of the present Chungking and Hankow; (2) Wu, near the present Nanking; and (3) Yüeh, near
the present Hangchow. In 704 B.C. the feudal prince of Wu proclaimed himself "Wang". "Wang", however was the title of the ruler of the Chou dynasty. This meant that Wu broke away from the old Chou religion of Heaven, according to which there could be only one ruler ( wang) in the world.
At the beginning of the seventh century it became customary for the ruler to unite with the feudal lord who was most powerful at the time. This feudal lord became a dictator, and had the military power in his hands, like the shoguns in nineteenth-century Japan. If there was a disturbance of the peace, he settled the matter by military means. The first of these dictators was the feudal lord of the state of Ch'i, in the present province of Shantung.
This feudal state had grown considerably through the conquest of the outer end of the peninsula of Shantung,
which until then had been independent. Moreover, and this was of the utmost importance, the state of Ch'i was a trade centre. Much of the bronze, and later al the iron, for use in northern China came from the south by road and in ships that went up the rivers to Ch'i, where it was distributed among the various regions of the north, north-east, and north-west. In addition to this, through its command of portions of the coast, Ch'i had the means of producing salt, with which it met the needs of great areas of eastern China. It was also in Ch'i that money was first used. Thus Ch'i soon became a place of great luxury, far surpassing the court of the Chou, and Ch'i also became the centre of the most developed civilization.
[Ilustration: Map 2: The principal feudal States in the feudal epoch. ( roughly 722-481 B.C. )]
After the feudal lord of Ch'i, supported by the wealth and power of his feudal state, became dictator, he had to struggle not only against other feudal lords, but also many times against risings among the most various parts of the population, and especialy against the nomad tribes in the southern part of the present province of Shansi. In the seventh century not only Ch'i but the other feudal states had expanded. The regions in which the nomad tribes were able to move had grown steadily smaler, and the feudal lords now set to work to bring the nomad