The Zhou Dynasty

The Zhou were a people of the Wei River valley, in what is now Shaanxi province, who for generations lived on the western edge of the Shang world. Under King Wen they built up alliances with neighbouring peoples, and his son King Wu led the combined army that defeated the last Shang king at the Battle of Muye. The date most widely used today is 1046 BC, although older books give other years, among them 1122 and 1027 BC.

To justify the overthrow of an ancient royal house, Zhou writers set out the idea of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming). Heaven, they argued, grants the right to rule to a virtuous house and withdraws it when rulers become cruel or corrupt. The last Shang king was portrayed as a drunkard and a tyrant who had lost it. Every later dynasty drew on the same idea, both to claim power and to explain the fall of the house before it.

Much continued from the Shang. The Zhou used the Shang script, kept the cult of the royal ancestors and at first carried on divination with inscribed bones, although that practice faded over the following centuries.

King Wu died only a few years after the conquest, leaving a young son, King Cheng. Wu's brother, the Duke of Zhou, governed as regent. Three other brothers, joined by a son of the last Shang king and several eastern peoples, rose against him in what became known as the Rebellion of the Three Guards. The Duke crushed the revolt, extended Zhou control eastwards and founded a second capital at Luoyi, near modern Luoyang, to watch over the former Shang lands. Later tradition remembered him as the model minister, and Confucius revered him.

The Zhou held their territory by granting land to royal kinsmen and trusted allies, who governed it as hereditary lords. Among the states created this way were Lu, Qi, Jin, Yan and Wei. The system rested on family ties and ritual: the lords owed the king military service and took part in the sacrifices to the royal ancestors.

Its weakness was that loyalty thinned with each generation. King Li was driven from the capital by its own people, and the regency that followed began in 841 BC, the first year in Chinese history that can be dated with certainty. In 771 BC the Quanrong, allied with discontented Zhou nobles, sacked the western capital at Hao and killed King You. His son, King Ping, re-established the court at Luoyi, and the period after the move is known as the Eastern Zhou.

Once in the east, the Zhou kings kept their ritual standing but lost real power. Historians divide the Eastern Zhou into two eras, both named after old texts: the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC), after the Spring and Autumn Annals, a chronicle of the state of Lu, and the Warring States period (475–221 BC), after a Han compilation, the Strategies of the Warring States.

In the Spring and Autumn period the larger states competed for the position of hegemon (ba), a leading lord who kept order among the others in the king's name. More than a hundred small states were absorbed by their neighbours. By the fifth century BC the contest had become one of outright conquest among a handful of powers: Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei. Their rulers took the title of king, which had once belonged to the Zhou alone.

War changed in scale. Chariot battles between aristocrats gave way to large infantry armies raised by conscription, and states reformed their government to pay for them. The best known reforms were those of Li Kui in Wei, Wu Qi in Chu and, above all, Shang Yang in Qin, whose laws rewarded farming and military merit rather than birth. Our page on the Warring States period covers this era in more detail.

The disorder of the Eastern Zhou produced the most creative period in Chinese thought, remembered as the Hundred Schools. Confucius (551–479 BC) taught that good order depended on ritual propriety, duty to one's family and rulers of moral character, and he looked back to the early Zhou as a golden age. Mencius and Xunzi developed his teaching in opposite directions, the first holding that human nature is good, the second that it must be shaped by education and ritual.

Other schools answered him. Mozi preached impartial care for all and opposed offensive war and costly ritual. The Daoist texts attributed to Laozi and Zhuangzi urged withdrawal from ambition and harmony with the natural way. The Legalists, whose ideas Han Feizi drew together, argued that only clear laws and firm punishments could hold a state together, and Qin put their ideas into practice.

Several of the classics that shaped Chinese education for two thousand years took shape in this period, among them the Book of Songs, the Book of Documents and the Book of Changes. The training of a Zhou nobleman was later summed up as the six arts: ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing and mathematics.

Economic change was as important as political change. Iron came into use in the Spring and Autumn period, and by the Warring States period cast iron was produced on a large scale for ploughshares, hoes and other tools. Better tools, ox-drawn ploughs and irrigation works raised harvests and supported a growing population.

Trade grew with them. The states issued bronze money in shapes that followed tools and other objects: spade-shaped coins in the central states, knife-shaped coins in Qi and Yan, small cowrie-like coins in Chu, and later round coins with a hole in the centre. Walled cities grew into centres of commerce and craft.

Society loosened as well. Officials, merchants and professional soldiers could rise on merit, and the old line between the hereditary nobility and everyone else began to blur.

For collectors the Zhou is above all the age of ritual bronzes. Sets of food and wine vessels, among them the ding cauldron, the gui food bowl and the hu wine jar, were cast in piece moulds for offerings to the ancestors and buried with their owners. Early Western Zhou bronzes follow Shang models, with bold animal masks. Around the ninth century BC the repertoire changed: many wine vessels fell out of use, graded sets of matching ding and gui marked rank, and decoration moved towards wave bands, scales and stylised birds.

Inscriptions cast inside the vessels, some running to several hundred characters, are one of the main sources for Zhou history. In the Eastern Zhou, decoration became dense and intricate, with interlaced dragons and scrolls, and the finest pieces were inlaid with gold, silver, copper or turquoise. Bronze mirrors, belt hooks and weapons were also made in quantity.

Jade was worked for ritual and for personal ornament: bi discs, huang arcs, dragon pendants and sets of plaques worn from the belt. Warring States jades are often carved with small raised spirals known as grain pattern. In the south-east, potters continued to make high-fired stoneware with a thin olive-green glaze, often called proto-porcelain.

Zhou bronzes and jades are dated by comparison with excavated groups, by their inscriptions and by style. They have been copied since the Song dynasty, when scholars began to collect and catalogue them, and many later archaistic pieces and modern fakes carry artificial patina. A piece should be judged in the hand, together with its history, before its age is accepted.

By the third century BC the Zhou king ruled little more than a small territory around Luoyang. In 256 BC Qin annexed the royal domain, and King Nan, the last Zhou king, died the same year. The end of the dynasty attracted little notice amid the wars between the great states. Over the next thirty-five years Qin conquered its six rivals one by one, and in 221 BC its king proclaimed himself the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty.

The Zhou left more to later China than any dynasty before the Han. The Mandate of Heaven, the Confucian classics, the ideal of government by educated officials and much of the ritual language of the imperial court all have their roots in this period. The bronzes of the Shang and Zhou also became the reference point for Chinese antiquarian taste, and their shapes and patterns were copied in bronze, jade and porcelain for centuries afterwards.