China

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 non-feudatory 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-to-be-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 clear: ‘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’.

Zhongguo is in another category. The word in Chinese consists of two characters, the zhong character clearly depicting ‘central’, ‘middle’ or ‘inner’, and the guo character meaning ‘state’ or ‘kingdom’. It is in fact the name by which the Chinese still know their country today, ‘China’ itself being as much an alien expression to the people who live there as, until the nineteenth century, ‘India’ was to the people who live there. As the geographical name of the modern republic, zhongguo (‘the Central State’ or ‘Central Country’) appears on politically correct maps, and its twin characters feature among the six officially used to express the phrase that is translated as ‘The People’s Republic of China’. The same two characters, however, were once no less correctly rendered as ‘the Middle Kingdom’; and before that they were used to indicate the ‘central states’ of the later Zhou (for guo, like all Chinese nouns, can be either singular or plural).

In other words, depending on its historical context, zhongguo can designate a small nucleus of antagonistic states in northern China or its antithesis – a vast east-Asian agglomeration of territories under a single centralised government. The term is almost as misleading as ‘the Great Wall’. But promoters of a long and continuous tradition of Chinese civilisation rightly stress that only a shared sense of identity could have generated the concept in the first place. ‘The central states’ of the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods shared a common culture; they already evinced what has been called ‘a superiority complex’ in relation to their less literate neighbours; and in their nominal allegiance to the Zhou and Heaven’s Mandate they preserved amid the harsh realities of competitive coexistence the ideal of a more harmonious political hierarchy under a single and more effective dispensation.

THE CONFUCIAN CONVEYANCE

Through this shared world and culture of the later Zhou’s ‘central states’ there roamed not only exiled adventurers like Chonger of Jin but merchants and craftsmen, teachers, magicians, moralists, philosophers and charlatans. It was Asia’s age of itinerancy. Beyond the Himalayas the Gangetic plain also swarmed with vagrants – renunciates, metaphysicians, miracle-workers and holy men; among them were Mahavira, the founding jina of Jainism, and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (‘Enlightened One’) whose teachings would enjoy a longer currency in China than in India. In both countries the multiplicity of hard-pressed states and rival courts offered avid listeners and potential patronage. Troubled times inspired a spirit of enquiry and a predisposition towards novel solutions. So too did social upheaval and the emergence of a market economy.

In northern China, social integration was already under way. In the later Zhou period the fortified cities of the Zhou’s feudatory states extended their writ beyond their immediate hinterlands to incorporate less assertive communities. These were often comprised of non-Xia peoples, whom the literate Xia knew as Di and Rong (in the west and north) or Man and Yi (in the south and east). Subdued by conquest or seduced by alliance (typically including marriages like that of Chonger’s mother), the non-Xia chiefs embraced the ‘feudal’ system of exploitation and exacted the usual tithes from whatever resources of land and labour they commanded. Under the early (Western) Zhou, agricultural exactions had taken the form of service, with the peasant labouring on a portion of his holding for his ‘feudal’ superior under a division of agrarian activity known as the ‘well-field’ system. But by the late ‘Spring and Autumn’ period a tax on individual holdings was steadily replacing it.

The tax was paid in kind, although at about the same time, in the sixth century BC, metallic coinage made its appearance. Foundries, once reserved for the production of ritual bronzes, had already begun turning out weapons and farm implements such as spades and ploughshares. The latter, increasingly of iron, plus the wider use of draught animals, made feasible the reclamation of heavy marginal lands, the terracing and irrigation of steeper loess slopes and the introduction of a winter sowing of wheat. The importance of the new tools may be inferred from the value attached to miniature bronze replicas of them, for it was these same pocket-rending playthings which served as the first coins. ‘Knife-money’, complete with blade and handle, was favoured in Qi; and more than a thousand stumpy ‘spadecoins’ have been found in a single hoard in Jin. They were evidently used as both a medium of exchange and a means of wealth accumulation. Trade was no longer restricted to tributary exactions and official gift presentations. By road and river commodities were being moved in bulk, while from far beyond the ‘central states’ came exotica like jades from Xinjiang, ivories and feathers from the south. The Zuozhuan mentions merchants and customs posts; the marketplace was an important feature of contemporary city-planning.

But perhaps the most crucial development is one that is less easy to isolate, for demographic change, like climate change, may be almost as imperceptible as it is decisive. The most compelling evidence comes from a recent statistical study of the Zuozhuan.19 This revealed that, whereas at the beginning of the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period all the most active participants mentioned in the text were the sons of rulers, during the middle of the period they were mostly ministers or members of the ministerial nobility, and by the end of the period they were overwhelmingly shi, a term that originally meant something like ‘knight’ but was now applied to all educated Xia ‘gentlemen’ without much regard to descent or profession. Thanks to natural fertility and higher agricultural yields the population had expanded and with it the whole demographic base of Xia society.

The shi, later burdened in English translation with functional descriptions such as ‘the literati’, ‘the governing class’, ‘the guardians of Chinese tradition’ and ‘the backbone of the bureaucracy’, were still seeking a role in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period. Birth conferred on them more in the way of expectation than privilege. The younger sons of younger sons, collaterals or commoners who had acquired an education, they coveted employment and to that end cultivated professional expertise. As policy advisers, literary authorities, moral guardians, diplomatic go-betweens, bureaucratic reformers and interpreters of omens, they represent a distinct phenomenon of the age and would become a feature of later imperial government. Though once ‘knights’, only a few shi now saw active military service; fewer still engaged in agriculture or trade. Their worth lay in words, their skills in debate, and their value in a potent mix of high-mindedness and ingenuity.

Not all shi embraced the competitive job market. China too had its renunciates; their teachings in favour of personal detachment, emotional vacuity, various physical disciplines and a back-to-nature primitivism would be compounded into such works as the famously demanding Daodejing (‘The Way and Integrity Classic’, Tao-te ching). Though compiled in the third century BC, it is attributed to one Laozi (‘Old Master’, Lao-tzu), who, if he existed, may have lived 200 years earlier. The more rewarding Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) of perhaps the fourth century BC is another such compilation named for its supposed author but containing many interpolations. Both works as finally put together would be in part a reaction against the teachings of Confucius, a man with ‘brambles for brains’, according to the Zhuangzi. Much later, both works would become central to the canon of Daoism (Taoism) when it emerged as a not exactly coherent school of thought in the first century AD.

Other shi, while welcoming the opportunity of employment, were not very successful in obtaining it. From the little state of Lu in Shandong, a bastion of conservatism once ruled by the now sidelined descendants of the Duke of Zhou, one such son of a ‘gentleman’ set off to make his name around 500 BC. Like his father, a military man of legendary strength who was supposed to have held a portcullis aloft, this Kong Qiu seems to have had a sturdy presence and is further credited with a physical peculiarity – always an indication of future distinction – consisting of a lump on the head; perhaps it was just a very high forehead. He was not, though, interested in warfare like his father, and despite his distinctive appearance found recognition elusive. He was gone for thirteen years, travelling through many of ‘the central states’, by one of which he was briefly employed. But in a stressful age, finding a patron who met his lofty standards proved difficult, and finding one who would attend to his idealistic injunctions nigh impossible. Kong Qiu returned to Lu an admirable, if slightly ridiculous, failure.

‘Great indeed is Kong Qiu! He has wide learning but he has not made a name for himself in any field’ [scoffed a village wag].

The Master, on hearing this, said to his disciples, ‘What then should I make my speciality? Chariot-driving perhaps? Or archery? I think I should prefer driving.’20

Occasionally sarcastic but never resentful, the man known outside China as Confucius (a Latinisation of ‘Kong Fuzi’, ‘Master Kong’) would serve out the rest of his days as a poorly paid minor official in the irrelevant state of his birth. The Buddha found a large following in his lifetime; kings revered him and when (conventionally about 483 BC but probably later) he achieved nirvana, his relics were carefully preserved and piously distributed. But ‘the Master’, when he died in 479 BC, was mourned only by his small circle of disciples – and maybe Mrs Confucius, a lady so inconspicuous that nothing beyond her once having given birth is known. Nor was there any Confucian cult until several centuries later, by when the facts of his life had been decently obscured by legend, and a whole corpus of texts awarded to him, most of them erroneously. Seldom has posterity been so generous; seldom has such a dismal career ultimately been rewarded with such universal esteem.