Chapter Two: Classical China

This chapter is an outline of Chinese history from its earliest periods through the Han dynasty. We will cover some, but not all, of it in class. It is important, however, that you read the entire chapter with care, because this chapter will serve as a solid foundation for the next three chapters on classical Chinese philosophies.

Evidence from bone fragments shows that humans or proto-humans lived in the area of present-day China as far back as 200,000 to 500,000 years ago. Neolithic lifestyles in this region began roughly 10,000 - 12,000 years ago. The presence of ceramics, most commonly vessels for food storage, and settled or semi-settled agriculture are the defining characteristics of Neolithic cultures. In other words, the term "Neolithic" (late stone age) indicates a change from living as nomadic hunter-gatherers to living in fixed, settled communities.

Archaeologists generally agree that the Yellow River region was the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization. There, a Neolithic culture called #Yangshao# 仰韶文化 emerged, reaching the height of its development around 3,000 BCE The main crop among the Yangshao people was millet, a small-grain cereal grass. The Yangshao people domesticated dogs and pigs and used tools fashioned from stone and bone. They had elaborate burial and fertility rituals and, at least according to archaeologists' best guesses, believed in an afterlife. The most famous artifacts of Yangshao culture are its painted pottery.

Later, a new culture, #Longshan# 龍山文化, emerged in the same Yellow River region. It either evolved out of Yangshao culture or displaced it (archaeologists are not in agreement on this point). Longshan culture reached its peak around 2,000 BCE In contrast with the painted pottery of the Yangshao people, Longshan pottery was black and unpainted. The Longshan people cultivated rice and millet. Compared with the Yangshao society, Longshan society featured a high degree of occupational specialization. Similarly, social stratification was more pronounced in Longshan culture. Compared with Yangshao, the religion of the Longshan people placed less emphasis on fertility rites and more emphasis on venerating ancestors. Ancestral veneration remains an important part of Chinese folk religion to this day. One notable religious practice in Longshan society was the use of bones to perform divination. Divination is a method of obtaining knowledge or information not readily apparent to ordinary human senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste) by tapping into the power of the spiritual or superhuman realm to answer questions about human concerns. Divination, as we shall see, was the central feature of religion during the Shang dynasty and became an important feature of Chinese popular and elite culture.⁽¹⁾

Scholars traditionally divide Chinese history into a series of dynasties. A dynasty is a sequence of rulers from the same family. According to traditional historiography, the first dynasty to appear in China was the Xia dynasty (2183-1752 BCE?). The legendary sage king Yu was its founder, at least as the story goes. In fact, many non-Chinese historians doubt the existence of the Xia dynasty, at least as described in classical Chinese accounts. Within China, however, the existence of the Xia dynasty is a matter of national pride (for bragging rights to having a "longer" history than India or Egypt), and so there is strong pressure on scholars there to say "yes" to the dynasty's existence.

Sarah Allen has adumbrated a convincing theory regarding the Xia dynasty. She argues that the Xia was the "mythical inverse" of the Shang dynasty. In other words, Shang dynasty elites imagined themselves and their society to have certain characteristics. Part of their self-identification involved positing the existence of a preceding dynasty with the opposite characteristics. This (alleged) preceding dynasty was the Xia. Later, Zhou dynasty elites placed great emphasis on the story of the Xia dynasty as part of their conception of history and the Zhou dynasty's place in the overall course of events. Allen explains:

The Shang people (or at least the elites of Shang society) naturally regarded their own mythical origins in positive terms. They therefore attributed the opposite qualities to an imagined Xia people. As a result, the elites of the Zhou dynasty regarded the Xia dynasty as an actual political entity, and later generations of Chinese historians took the Zhou chroniclers at their word. The table below illustrates the matter from the Shang point of view. If Allen is correct, it was the imagination of members of the Shang dynasty that created the idea of a Xia dynasty. Such imaginary creations are common in human history.

ALLEGED SHANG ASSOCIATIONS	ALLEGED XIA ASSOCIATIONS
SUN (OR SUNS)	MOON (OR MOONS)
SKY	WATERY UNDERWORLD
BIRDS	DRAGONS
EAST	WEST
LIFE	DEATH
LORD-ON-HIGH	LORD BELOW

The first well-documented dynasty to exist in the Yellow River area was the Shang (sometimes called the Yin dynasty). Our understanding of Shang society contains many gaps, and historians do not even agree on the dynasty's exact terminal dates, but a common estimation is 1766 BCE-1127 BCE Most scholars agree that Shang civilization grew out of the earlier Longshan culture.

Shang society was highly stratified according to occupation and hereditary rank. At the top was a king, served by an aristocratic class. Under the rule of the king and aristocracy were numerous peasants and artisans, who paid a share of their produce as taxes. We can speak of Shang China as an empire comprising much of the Yellow River area (*see map*). This empire contained several large cities, the center of each containing large buildings, sacrificial alters, storehouses, and other structures. Buildings in these cities had pounded-earth foundations into which were set large stones or bronze castings to support wooden pillars. Beyond these cities, the boundaries of the empire were not clearly defined, and the Shang king had to spend much of his time waging war in outlying areas to maintain control of his territory.

Shang aristocrats were much concerned about ancestors. Funeral rites, therefore were extremely important in Shang society, and its elites were buried in elaborate tombs. In Shang times "accompaniment burials" were common. In other words, when the king or an aristocrat died, he would be buried along with his important earthly possessions for use in the afterlife. Among these "possessions" were human servants. Sometimes these servants were killed and then buried with the aristocratic corpse, but usually they were buried alive with the corpse. This practice continued into the Zhou dynasty, but with one important modification: clay figures replaced actual human beings.

The Shang king had to rely on local rulers to control the outlying areas of his empire. In many cases these local rulers were royal relatives, but there was always the possibility that they would break away from the Shang empire. The king, therefore, had to spend much of his time traveling around the Yellow River region re-cementing the bonds of loyalty between himself and local rulers. Religious rites to venerate common ancestral spirits were one key activity of the king during his travels. Another was hunting game with local rulers. Sometimes the king waged war against rebellious local rulers or against groups of outside invaders from other parts of the Asian continent. The king and other aristocrats traveled by chariot. In later dynasties it would have been unimaginable for the monarch to roam around so much. Typical emperors from the Han dynasty onward spent most of their time within the walls of their palace compounds and knew little or nothing of the outside world.

The religious practices of the Shang king and aristocrats centered on a hierarchy of royal ancestral spirits (that is, the spirits of the previously deceased Shang kings). At the top of this hierarchy was an all powerful deity known as Shangdi 上帝 or Lord-on-High in English. Shangdi was so powerful and awesome that no mere mortal dared communicate with him directly. Instead, humans communicated with Shangdi indirectly via the other royal ancestral spirits. *This diagram* illustrates the general conception of Shangdi in simplified form. Religious practices in Shang times often involved communicating with the ancestral spirits via divination. Another important, related activity was sacrificing (animals, humans, crops) to these spirits to keep them happy and thereby prevent problems. Shang people regarded disease, poor weather, crop failure, and all the many other problems afflicting individuals or society as signs that one or more of the ancestral spirits was angry. At such times, it was the job of aristocratic religious officials to find out which ancestral spirit was angry and why, and then to perform appropriate rituals of appeasement.

These aristocratic religious officials used divination to communicate with the royal ancestral spirits. A common method of divination was scapulimancy, or divination using the shoulder bones (scapulae) of cows, oxen, and other bovine creatures (an alternative was to use *tortoise shells*). Bones used in Shang dynasty scapulimancy are called *oracle bones.* The basic procedure was, first, to write a question on the bone itself. Next, the diviner would heat the bone until cracks appeared on its surface. The usual source of heat was metal rods placed in a fire. It was also common to carve grooves in the bone before application of the heat source to facilitate the cracking process. The cracks were thought to be the spirit(s)' answer, but of course, the meaning of the answer would not be obvious just from a series of cracks (*good example*). It was, therefore, necessary for the diviners or other experts to interpret the cracks in light of the original question. Upon making their decision regarding the meaning of the "answer," the diviners often wrote the response out on the bone near the question. The process just described was more typical of the early part of the Shang dynasty. In the dynasty's later years, it became increasingly common for scapulimancy to serve mainly as a way of reporting human actions to the deities (ancestral spirits), not as a way of questioning the deities.

Shang scapulimancers in the questioning mode usually posed queries phrased in a simple yes or no style. Some examples include:

These questions are our major source of knowledge about Shang society, customs and politics. The writing on the oracle bones is also important for the study of Chinese orthography (writing systems) because the bones contain the earliest known samples of Chinese writing. Specialists in this field have managed to decipher most, but not all, of the oracle bone characters. View *this example* of an oracle bone and its inscription. (Exhibition: #Ancient Writings from the Ruins of Yin#)

In interpreting the "answers" on the bones, one can imagine that it would be to the diviners' benefit to provide vague responses. For example, in response to the question above about the attack on tribe x, a good answer might be something like "Yes, the king should attack, but only if he has made adequate preparations." Such an answer might enable the diviners to divert some or all of the blame from themselves should the attack be unsuccessful.

It is also likely that these diviners became astute observers of human and natural⁽³⁾ phenomena. In this way, they would have provided more accurate interpretations during divination sessions. Through careful observation of correlations between phenomena, ancient diviners gradually took on some functions that today we might associate with science and scientists. The official astronomers/astrologers, mathematicians, and political and military advisors of later dynasties all would have been diviners in Shang times.

The Shang dynasty is also known for the *magnificent bronze vessels* its artisans produced. These *bronze vessels* were generally used for religious rites, sacrifices, and other ritual purposes. The technical quality of the casting is excellent, often better than that of later dynasties. The very existence of such bronze vessels indicates that Shang society produced a substantial surplus of wealth and had mastered sophisticated metallurgical technologies. These bronze vessels often contained inscriptions describing the circumstances of the vessel's creation, use, or another matter. These inscriptions supplement those found on the oracle bones as sources of knowledge about Shang China. (#More Shang and early Zhou bronzes#)

Shang aristocrats used some of these vessels for ordinary purposes such as cooking or food storage. The more elaborate vessels were used for ceremonial occasions. Certain tripods, vessels with three legs, were of particular importance in royal rites and rituals, and in later eras, the *bronze tripod* (ding 鼎) became a symbol of royal or imperial authority itself.

Most of the Shang bronze vessels have intricate designs on them. Close examination of these designs reveals that they generally resemble the face of some sort of creature. This *face-like design* is known as the taotie 饕餮 pattern. There are many theories about the meaning and significance of the #taotie pattern,# and scholars are not in agreement on the matter. A common theory is that the taotie design depicted a mask worn by shamans in the course of religious rites. This theory would account for the lack of a lower jaw in many taotie depictions. There are other theories, including one that categorizes some taotie designs as phallic symbols. There is so much variation in the taotie design, however, and it changed so frequently during Shang times, that it is probably impossible to say that the design was any single, specific thing.⁽⁴⁾There is at least one case of a Shang bronze vessel featuring a more or less ordinary #human face.#

Shang culture spread throughout the Yellow River area. Toward the end of the dynasty, the state of Zhou, located to the west of the Shang cultural area, became increasingly powerful. For some time, the Zhou was a vassal state of the Shang empire. Eventually, however, Zhou's power became so great that it replaced the Shang dynasty altogether.

Like many people of the Shang empire, the Zhou were Chinese-speaking descendants of the neolithic Longshan people. Compared with the Shang, however, Zhou society was much less advanced in terms of technology. To Shang elites, the leaders of the emerging Zhou state must have seemed like rusticated country cousins. The Zhou people, in other words, were semi-barbarians in the eyes of Shang aristocrats and rulers. Myth and legend provide several explanations of the origin of the Zhou state and its people, but verifiable information about the early Zhou is sparse.

At some point, a Zhou leader married a Shang noblewoman, and they produced a son who later became King Wen 文王. King Wen definitely existed and was a successful leader of the Zhou people. When later writers of Chinese history looked back on the early Zhou period, they tended to elevate King Wen to such dizzying heights of greatness that he appears almost superhuman. In the eyes of later historians, King Wen became a symbol of moral excellence, and some accounts credited him with creating important cultural artifacts. Beyond the fact of his existence, however, we know very little about King Wen. His major accomplishment was in the realm of military and diplomatic relations, where he forged alliances with neighboring tribes to build up Zhou strength at the expense of the Shang empire.

King Wen's name literally means "the cultured king."⁽⁵⁾ His son and successor was King Wu 武王 whose name literally means "the martial king." King Wu came to the throne around 1133 BCE, and continued his father's efforts at consolidating Zhou power. He moved the Zhou capital farther east (nearer to the Shang) and launched an attack on the Shang empire in 1120 BCE This attack was not successful, but two years later he tried again. The second attack was successful, and the armies of King Wu invaded and sacked Yin, the Shang capital. King Wu does not seem to have been more ambitious than simply looting the Shang capital, and he made no attempt to incorporate Shang territories into any sort of political entity under his own rule. It was King Wu's brother, the Duke of Zhou 周公, who actually created the Zhou dynasty by following up on King Wu's initial conquests (#image# of King Wu, left, and Duke of Zhou, right).

Like King Wen, King Wu also became a hero to later historians, who wrote glorified accounts of his activities. According to such accounts, the Shang forces vastly outnumbered King Wu's army. The Shang ruler, King Zhou 紂 (no connection to the Zhou 周 dynasty--notice that the characters are different), however, was an oppressive tyrant who imposed heavy taxes on the empire's subjects to support his luxurious, depraved lifestyle. So evil was this last Shang king, in fact, that he created a #lake of wine# and a #forest of meat# (jiuchi roulin 酒池肉林) where he held wild parties and orgies. (#Click here# for some linguistic trivia connected with this term.) Mark Edward Lewis describes the alleged evil of the last Shang king, who:

Remember, we are not talking here about what this last Shang king was really like. Instead we are talking about how Chinese history books of later dynasties depicted him. As the story goes, the people of the Shang welcomed King Wu as their liberator, and the mighty Shang army melted away as its soldiers deserted to the Zhou side. This traditional account is a classic example of history as written by the victors. It also reflects the influence of Confucian historiography and the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, which we study below and in later chapters.

In sharp contrast to the last Shang king, the mainstream of Chinese history depicted King Wu as a great hero and paragon of virtue. The Han dynasty text, Huainanzi, for example, gives the following account:

King Wu sought only "to attack the evil and strike down the unrighteous" in this and other mainstream histories. But there were other versions of the story that never made it into the mainstream of later historical writing. As Lewis points out, several late Zhou and early Han texts tell how the last Shang king and his wives committed suicide when the armies of King Wu entered Yin. Then:

Ancient China was an extremely violent place, but later histories tended to cover up this violence. If this alternate version of events is correct, King Wu was no virtuous Confucian sage intent on helping the oppressed Shang people. Instead, he was a vicious warrior intent on conquest and revenge.

In Chinese accounts of these matters from the Han dynasty onward, there was an interesting gendered dimension as well. Read this brief supplement: *"Kings Jie & Zhou and Female Power."*

King Wu died roughly two years after conquering the Shang capital. His son became king, but this son, King Cheng 成王, was too young to rule effectively. Several of King Wu's brothers tried to oust King Cheng, rebellions broke out, and surviving relatives of the Shang royal family tried to reinstate their own rule. At this critical juncture, one of King Wu's brothers stepped in and took charge of the Zhou state in the name of King Cheng. This brother, the Duke of Zhou, waged military campaigns to incorporate all of the former Shang territory into a unified empire under Zhou rule. In the process, he wiped out the Shang royal family and killed all of his brothers. In other words, he eliminated all potential rivals for power. The Duke of Zhou then turned the reins of power back over to King Cheng. Of all the Zhou dynasty political and military leaders, the Duke of Zhou became most revered by later generations of learned Chinese. He was, for example, Confucius' favorite historical figure, and later histories attributed a variety of cultural accomplishments to the Duke of Zhou. As in the cases of Kings Wen and Wu, however, we should be wary of taking the traditional account at face value. The Duke of Zhou was undoubtedly a major historical figure, but it is probably more realistic to regard him as the victor in a bloody power struggle, not the great, virtuous sage later historians made him out to be. (There is a pretty good article about China's bronze age in the #July, 2003 issue of National Geographic.#)

The royal Zhou court was unable to control the vast eastern plains of China directly. It therefore sent relatives of the royal family and other trusted allies to rule particular territories in the name of the Zhou king. Sometimes, the Zhou court permitted existing local rulers to continue in power provided they swore an oath of loyalty. These local rulers who governed in the king's name passed on their positions to their sons, who in turn passed on rulership to their sons. As time went on, the original connection with the Zhou court grew increasingly remote, and the outlying districts became more and more like separate states. Because of its relatively decentralized arrangement of political authority, many historians characterize China's early Zhou period as "feudal," and refer to these local rulers as "feudal lords." The term "feudal," of course, comes from European history, and, if loosely defined, it applies reasonably well to early Zhou China as well.

As these local rulers began to identify themselves more with their own territories than with the Zhou court, the court found it increasingly difficult to wield sufficient military strength. Non-Chinese tribes from the west sometimes attacked the Zhou capital, and as the centuries went by, the various states that made up the Zhou confederation became increasingly reluctant to supply soldiers for the Zhou court's defense. King Xuan 宣王 (r. 827 BCE - 781 BCE) spent most of his reign fighting defensive wars. In 771 BCE, invaders sacked the capital city of Hao. The next year, the Zhou court moved the capital east to Luoyang.

This move marks a key turning point in the history of the Zhou dynasty, *dividing the dynasty into two halves.* The time before the move to Luoyang in 772 BCE is known as Western Zhou, and the period after the move is known as Eastern Zhou. After the move to Luoyang, the Eastern Zhou court rapidly lost all military power. It continued to exist for two reasons. First, the court was of symbolic importance since the rulers of the various Chinese states retained pride in their Zhou ancestry. Second, there was no single state or ruler powerful enough to conquer and rule the whole of north China. Therefore, the Zhou royal court continued to exist by default.

We saw that elite members of Shang society believed in an all-powerful deity called Shangdi. The early Zhou aristocrats also spoke and wrote of Shangdi, but by the middle of the Zhou period, the word tian had replaced Shangdi. The usual English translation of tian 天 is *"Heaven."* This translation is fine but requires an important caution: "Heaven" here does not mean a place to which one's soul goes, or a state of being one's soul attains, after death--or anything like it (cf. #conceptions of heaven#). "Heaven" had *several specific meanings* in Chinese usage:

Which of the above meanings of "Heaven" prevailed during the Zhou dynasty? The answer is all three. There was a general tendency for Zhou-era intellectuals to emphasize meaning #2 over meaning #1, but we can find many instances of meaning #1 in texts at any time during the Zhou period. Even the same individual might not be consistent, sometimes speaking of "Heaven" in the sense of meaning #1 and sometimes in the sense of meaning #2. These three meanings of "Heaven" remained a part of Chinese intellectual discourse throughout later dynasties as well.

Let us examine a typical use of the term "Heaven" in its meaning of the cosmos as a whole (#2). The following passage is from the writings of Xunzi 荀子 (312 BCE-?), a Confucian scholar who lived during the last century of the Zhou dynasty:

Notice the emphasis on personal power and responsibility. "Heaven" for Xunzi is the impersonal force of nature as a whole. By acting in accord with nature's principles humans prosper; by acting contrary to these principles humans suffer. The key to human success, therefore, is a thorough investigation of nature's laws (to understand them) coupled with the resolve to act in accordance with those laws. By "nature's laws" here, we also mean rules governing social conventions and human morality, for ancient Chinese did not make a harp distinction between "nature" and "human society" as we commonly do today.

The concept of Heaven was also an important component of Zhou-era political theory. Zhou historians developed the idea of tianming 天命, or *Mandate of Heaven* to explain and rationalize the Zhou conquest of the Shang. The idea of the Mandate of Heaven takes what we have seen thus far about Zhou conceptions of Heaven and applies them to the political and military realm. Consider the following Zhou-era poem:

The basic idea behind the Mandate of Heaven is that if a ruler acts contrary to Heaven, the result will be problems such as crop failure, famine, strange weather, violent storms, earthquakes, outbreaks of disease, and so forth. These problems are a "warning" from Heaven that the ruler must improve his personal virtue--and soon. Notice that this way of thinking makes no distinction between social norms and the laws of nature--they are all interconnected. If the ruler continues to ignore Heaven's warnings and fails to rectify himself, Heaven would eventually withdraw its mandate for that dynasty to rule, replacing it with a new, virtuous ruler. In the poem above, it was King Wen who was virtuous compared with the evil last Shang king (not explicitly mentioned in the poem but still very much present). As a result, King Wen's family received Heaven's mandate to rule ("the blessings"). The poem exhorts future generations of the Zhou royal line to "hold fast" to these blessings, that is, to continue to be virtuous and thus retain the mandate to rule. A ruler who is secure in his possession of Heaven's Mandate allows his *virtue to radiate outward,* harmonizing the human world with the larger cosmos. Notice that the idea of the Mandate of Heaven works equally well whether one thinks of "Heaven" as an all-powerful entity that actively intervenes in human affairs (meaning #1 above) or as the cosmos as a whole (meaning #2 above).

Because Zhou historians placed such strong emphasis on this concept as a way to legitimize their overthrow of the Shang, it is not surprising that they would spare no effort in portraying the last Shang king as evil and depraved. The last Shang king lost the mandate to rule that "Heaven" once bestowed on his royal line. But it was not only the Shang that once held the mandate and then lost it. Zhou historians pointed out that the Xia dynasty before the Shang had gone through the same process. Thus in Zhou writings there is a sense of concern that the Zhou not repeat the errors of the previous two dynasties and lose Heaven's Mandate. The following poem expresses these themes well:

The poem stands as a warning to the leaders of the Zhou state not to become complacent lest the mandate slip from their hands just as it slipped from the hands of the once-great Shang dynasty.

The idea of the Mandate of Heaven is significant not only for the Zhou dynasty, but for later dynasties as well. By the end of the Han dynasty, the Mandate of Heaven had become the primary means of explaining dynastic change in history and political theory. Educated Chinese took the idea seriously, and emperors often worried about any sign that their mandate might be ending. As *dynasties rose and fell,* learned Chinese began to speak of *dynastic cycles.* They regarded the Mandate of Heaven as the governing force behind these cycles. As time went on, the idea that dynasties start out vigorously, then go into a period of decline, and then lose Heaven's mandate became well entrenched in the political thinking of most Chinese. The personal virtue of rulers was the main force behind the dynastic cycles. In this way of thinking, the first ruler of a dynasty was always virtuous by definition; the last ruler was always depraved.

The Zhou period was a time of major social and political change.⁽¹²⁾ In the early part of the Zhou period there was a well-established aristocracy. Members of the aristocracy were highly conscious of their status and quick to defend their honor. This aristocracy defined itself by means of two types of activities:

The early Zhou aristocrats followed a strict code of honor and were quick to take offense at any perceived insult or slight. This situation resulted in constant violence of one kind or another as the Zhou aristocrats maintained their honor. Hunting substituted for warfare during times of calm, and the aristocrats commonly spoke of hunting and warfare in the same terms. Successful hunts and military campaigns always ended the same way: a sacrifice. The consumption of ritual meat, sometimes human, consummated these sacrifices.

During the early Zhou period, kings and local rulers did not rule as dictators. The consciousness on the part of the aristocrats that they were royal relatives, and thus nearly on the same level as the king, limited the monarch's power. Aristocratic culture placed high value on a life devoted to winning prestige for oneself and one's lineage through heroism and military prowess. Vendettas and blood feuds were common in this pursuit. As time went on, the entire Zhou aristocracy entered a deepening spiral of conflict, blood vengeance, and civil war. Much of the aristocracy destroyed itself in this way, setting the stage for new social and political arrangements in the latter part of the Zhou dynasty.

In the early Zhou period, aristocrats waged war against other aristocrats. The common people had little connection with military activities, hunting, and vendettas. During the Spring and Autumn Period of the Zhou dynasty, the situation that had prevailed in previous centuries began to change. The old aristocratic values remained, but new realities of political power arrangements began to weaken those values and make them increasingly less viable. Individual rulers began to seek ways to strengthen their personal authority and the general power of their states. They began to experiment with new concepts such as training armies of common people. Such rulers started to seek the advice of non-aristocrats who had knowledge or skills that could benefit their states. Rulers began to realize that the key to their success was not their own personal bravery and prowess in battle, nor was it adherence to the old aristocratic code. Instead, the key to maintaining and enhancing authority was the manipulation and control of sanctioned violence. Confucius lived during this transitional period, and much of his anxiety about preserving old cultural forms probably stemmed from a vague sense that his world was undergoing profound structural changes.

By the Warring States Period of the late Zhou dynasty, warfare between the different states had become serious, and each had to adapt or perish. The old aristocratic values had no place in this new order within which the government of each state attempted to mobilize its material and human resources in the most effective way possible. Sanctioned violence, once the prerogative of the aristocracy, was now something in which everyone might participate. In other words, now, the entire population participated in each state's wars, if not directly through military service then indirectly through taxes and mandatory labor service. A summary of the major developments of the Warring States Period is as follows:

These changes resulted in two major new social tensions. It is important to bear in mind that no society ever works as its members ideally conceive it should. There are always tensions and contradictions as ideals clash or prove impractical. New values may emerge and become strong, but it is rare that the new values replace old ones completely. In Warring States Period China:

These two tensions, and several others we examine in a later chapter, remained a part of Chinese society into modern times.

We can best summarize these social changes by examining the ideal early Zhou military commander and contrast him with the ideal commander of the Warring States Period. The earlier commander would ideally be someone with great physical strength and courage. He would set an example for his soldiers by his own personal bravery in battle. The *later type of commander* was quite different. The key to battlefield success in the Warring States Period was effective organization. The new style ideal commander was well read in strategy and had penetrating intelligence that allowed him to see patterns or regularities where others saw chaos and randomness. This new commander was an expert at organizing others, but his own physical strength was irrelevant. In fact, stories of great generals and strategists dating from the end of the Zhou period often featured commanders with severe physical disabilities as protagonists, as if to emphasize the importance of brains over brawn.

In short, what we see emerging in China at this time is an early form of the centralized bureaucratic state. Such a state would emphasize routine, regularity, and law over spontaneous personal action on the part of rulers and officials. It would value the intellect over physical strength. A centralized bureaucratic state would try to mobilize all of its human and material resources for maximum strength. During the Qin and Han dynasties, China was becoming such a state. By the Song dynasty the transformation to a centralized bureaucracy was complete.

As the Warring States period of the Zhou dynasty drew to a close, a small number of powerful states emerged to vie for control of all of China. The victor in this final round of warfare was the semi-Chinese state of Qin from the western periphery of the Chinese world. In 221 BCE, the king of Qin renamed himself the #"First Emperor"# (Qin shihuang 秦始皇) of a Qin empire that encompassed much of the eastern half of present-day China (*see map*). He declared that his sons would succeed him as rulers of this vast territory for ten thousand generations. In fact, the Qin state collapsed in 206 BCE, shortly after the second emperor came to the throne. The dynasty lasted a mere fifteen years, but its short life does not mean that the Qin dynasty was unimportant. During his brief, harsh rule, the first emperor laid the basic groundwork for imperial rule that would carry over into all later dynasties.

The first emperor embraced a social and political philosophy now called Legalism (fajia 法家), which we examine in a later chapter (for a preview, #click here#). Outside the context of China, "legalism" is a general term indicating strict adherence to laws or other formal rules. In the Chinese context, the term refers to a specific view of human nature and society and the ways in which that view was implemented through political institutions.

Chinese Legalism starts with the premise that human nature is selfish and anti-social. Another tenet of Legalism is that people exist to serve the state, not vice versa. Because humans act only out of selfish motives, that is, to avoid what is harmful and to seek what is beneficial, a ruler should control his subjects by a system of generous rewards and severe punishments. Detailed law codes, rigidly enforced, should specify these rewards and punishments. This way, a person would know that she or he would profit from behaving in a manner the state specifies as ideal and incur punishment by deviating from this ideal. The Qin was a thoroughly Legalist state. (#More on Chinese Legalism#)

The founder of Legalism was #Gongsun Yang,# better known as Lord Shang (or Shang Yang), from the neighboring state of Wei (before Qin had conquered all of China). Though an immigrant to Qin, Lord Shang served as Prime Minister of Qin until his death in 338 BCE. In this capacity, he carried out thorough reform of the state. He instituted centralized bureaucratic administration, made all serfs into tax paying, land owning farmers, and grouped all households into mutual surveillance units. Under Lord Shang, the laws were harsh, and the punishments were severe. A key feature of his Legalist society was generously rewarding informants. One never knew who one could trust. Lord Shang organized the whole of society for the purpose of strengthening the state.

A later Qin Prime Minister, Li Si 李斯, was also an immigrant. Upon becoming advisor to the Qin court in 237 BCE, he began to make plans for the imposition of Legalism on all of China, correctly anticipating Qin's eventual victory in the wars. The great Legalist theorist and writer Han Feizi 韓非子 also immigrated to Qin. Li Si saw Han Feizi as a potential rival for power and thus had him killed in 233 BCE.

After 221 BCE, the new emperor imposed the strict Qin laws on all of China. Other Qin administrative reforms contributed to the shaping of Chinese society in ways so basic that some remain even today. For example, the Qin divided China into forty-two administrative districts, further subdivided into counties. Although the names of these divisions have changed, their boundaries are generally the same, and they remain the basic administrative divisions of today's China. The Qin rulers sought to standardize all the diverse cultural and administrative practices that had developed during the centuries of late Zhou disunity. Among the items made standard throughout the empire were weights and measures, coinage, the writing system, and even the axle widths of carts. All these standards carried over to later dynasties.

The Qin ruler prohibited philosophical discourse. In 213 BCE, the dynasty began attempts to burn all books other than the official Qin chronicles and utilitarian books such as those describing agricultural techniques. The Qin rulers apparently knew that ideas could be a powerful political force, and they wanted to eliminate all rival ideas. Here is part of Prime Minister Li Si's proposal to the emperor:

The emperor approved this plan. According to traditional accounts, the dynasty rounded up over four hundred dissident scholars and buried them alive.

The first Qin emperor began large-scale construction projects to aggrandize himself and his capital. Peasant, convict, and conscript laborers worked on these projects. Forced labor was a common punishment in Qin times. Other punishments included being branded, having the nose or feet cut off, boiling in a cauldron, and being torn apart by chariots. Nobody could ever accuse the Qin rulers of being soft on crime!

The Qin Legalists put great faith in the power of harsh laws to regulate society and strengthen the state. Ironically, it was the very harshness of Qin law that led to the dynasty's undoing. A commoner named Chen She was the leader of a group of peasants drafted for labor service. Heavy rains made his group late in reporting for duty. Knowing they would be killed for this offense, the group members decided they had nothing to lose and became an outlaw band. Soon their ranks swelled with thousands of malcontents, making the band of outlaws a sizeable force. Similar uprisings took place simultaneously in other parts of the empire, and the Qin dynasty collapsed.

Because it lasted less than two decades and collapsed during the reign of the its second emperor, would it be accurate to say that the Qin dynasty possessed the Mandate of Heaven? One might argue that it did, albeit very briefly, because the first emperor was a powerful ruler. Most premodern Chinese historians, however, tended to interpret the Qin dynasty as an aberration. They often argued that a dynasty must survive at least three generations for it to truly have possessed heaven's mandate to rule. With this point in mind, study this *Han-era image.*

When the dust had cleared from the rebellion Chen She started, a commoner named Liu Bang 劉邦 emerged victorious to receive the Mandate of Heaven and found a new dynasty. He called this dynasty Han, and took for himself the title Han Gaozu 漢高祖, the name by which he was generally known to later generations.

The first Han emperor spent his reign consolidating his grip on power. He did not pursue extensive domestic reforms or attempt to expand China's territory (*see map*). He moderated the severity of Qin laws and lowered tax rates but otherwise retained the Qin state apparatus and general methods of governing. The Han and all subsequent dynasties owed much to the Qin approach to government. Aspects of Legalism became a permanent part of Chinese political culture and still are today.

The rise of the Han dynasty gave society a chance to recover from the oppression of the Qin years. The population increased rapidly, and all kinds of economic enterprises flourished. The first four Han emperors pursued a laissez-faire policy with regard to the economy and society. In 140 BCE Emperor Wu 漢武帝 took the throne. Emperor Wu (156-087 BCE) was an activist monarch, and during his reign there was considerable debate between government officials and scholars about the proper role of government in the broader society. Several problems had become acute by Emperor Wu's time, the worst of which was the decline of free peasants. The problem was that large estates had developed in most areas. Tenant farmers and/or slaves worked these estates and often became so powerful that local government officials could not control them. The economic power of these estates made it hard for small, independent farmers to compete. As a result, small farmers often lost their land to these large estates, becoming tenants or indentured servants. A famous memorial to the emperor from the second century BCE describes the plight of the small farmer in some detail:

Peasants in distress would often sell their land to a large estate just to pay off debts. Having no means of support, they often continued to work the same land--but now as tenants renting what had once been their own. The estate owners profited, and the state lost out. In other words, the tenant farmer's rent payments to the estate owner had previously gone to the government as taxes.

Many of these estate owners were merchants, and Emperor Wu taxed wealthy merchants heavily. He also forbade merchants from owning farm land. Some estate owners were government officials, and Emperor Wu took other measures to rein in their power. The idea behind these measures was to stem the tide of decline among free peasants. Another step that Emperor Wu took was establishing an ever-normal granary system. Under this system, the state attempted to keep the supply and price of grain stable. It did so by purchasing surplus grain in years of good harvests when the price was low, storing it, and putting it back on the market in years of poor harvests. The influx of government grain would bring supplies up and therefore drive the price down--at least in theory. The other major economic policy of Emperor Wu was to make the production and wholesale distribution of iron, salt, and liquor into state monopolies.

In the realm of foreign policy, Emperor Wu pursued aggressive military and diplomatic campaigns to increase the territory under Han control and to enhance the empire's security. Attacks on Chinese territory from hostile northern tribes was a problem at this time and would remain a problem in all subsequent dynasties. Under Emperor Wu, Han China came to control large portions of Korea and Vietnam and fought long, costly wars against several central Asian tribes. Han forces eventually got the upper hand in these campaigns, and the territory under Chinese control extended nearly as far as the Middle East. The Han empire was then able to control the caravan trade along the so-called "Silk Road," which *passed through central Asia* (know roughly where it went) and linked China with Europe via Arab traders. The results of Emperor Wu's military campaigns were not all positive. Manpower needs of the large armies took people out of domestic agricultural production, and the costs of the wars required increased taxes. These burdens hit the peasantry hard and nearly neutralized those of Emperor Wu's domestic policies intended to revive small farmers.

Scholarship, art and literature also expanded during the Han dynasty, both in private and under imperial sponsorship. Emperor Wu gave lip service to a modified (twisted, many would say), authoritarian version of Confucianism, which we study in a later chapter. From the time of Emperor Wu onward, Confucianism gradually emerged as the dominant ideology of the state, a position it occupied in China until the early twentieth century. It is important to emphasize, however, that Legalism heavily influenced this form of state-sponsored Confucianism. The Chinese state often dressed its essentially Legalist systems of government in the pleasant-looking garb of Confucianism, but serious Confucian scholars rarely felt at home in Chinese officialdom. Outside state sponsorship, Confucianism continued to develop in new directions thanks to the influence of other schools of thought and bodies of knowledge. Whether as private scholarship or as state ideology, the Confucianism of Han times evolved far beyond the original teachings of Confucius himself.

Emperor Wu established a national university and a small-scale civil service examination system to select government officials based on their knowledge. But the number of officials selected this way in the Han period was but a small percentage of the total. In the early Han dynasty, a clearly defined hereditary aristocracy had a near monopoly on important government offices. As time went on, however, the lower ranks of officialdom came to be filled through a system of recommending virtuous common people for office (xuanju 選舉). This system was the beginning of the idea that government officials should be selected based on their merit. In Han times, "merit" tended to mean moral virtue, especially filial piety (more on this virtue in a later chapter). Later, as embodied in the Song dynasty civil service examinations, "merit" tended to mean scholarly accomplishment. Because of the connection between moral virtue and government office in Han times, non-aristocratic well-to-do Chinese became greatly concerned with their "reputations" (ming 名). In practice, the best way to acquire a reputation for filial piety, and thus possibly obtain work as a government official, was to conduct an elaborate funeral for parents and to establish for them a large, but not overly ostentatious, memorial shine. Not surprisingly, most of the Han-era art still extant is funerary and shrine art.

Emperor Wu's successors were mediocre at best, and several were incompetent. The imperial family rapidly lost its prestige, and in 9 A.D. an idealistic minister, Wang Mang 王莽 (r. 9-23), usurped the throne. Wang Mang was an antiquarian who wanted to return China to what he regarded as the ideal institutions of the early Zhou period. Though fancying himself as another Duke of Zhou, Wang was not successful. His policies were a total failure and managed to antagonize virtually every segment of society. Eventually a relative of the former Han ruling house, Guang Wu 光武, restored the Han dynasty.

The first three emperors after the Wang Mang interregnum were moderately capable. Under their reigns the dynasty's fortunes partially rebounded, but the throne had become beholden to entrenched special interest groups during the post-Wang segment of the Han dynasty. It was incapable, therefore, of dealing effectively with social and economic problems. The last hundred years of the Han dynasty was a time of increasing social and political disintegration. Peasant uprisings and rebellions inspired by messianic religious cults arose throughout the empire. Many regions of China sunk into anarchy and chaos. It was during this time of unrest that Buddhism first came to China. Its teaching of a world in constant flux and turmoil and its basic message that life is suffering found receptive minds during these troubled times.

The Han dynasty refined the institutions of the Qin dynasty and established the basic structure of imperial government. We need not concern ourselves with the details of government structure at this point. Instead, we examine some of these details later, in the context of discussing the Song dynasty.

As the Han dynasty disintegrated, China broke up into several different states, somewhat like the situation during the Warring States Period of the Zhou dynasty. The ideal of all of China united under a single emperor remained strong in the minds of the rulers of these states, and it was just a matter of time before a powerful military figure would realize that ideal. The honors fell to Yang Jian, who founded the Sui dynasty in 581.

We take up the political narrative several chapters later. Now, let us turn to a close examination of patterns of thought during China's classical period.

1. The best study of Chinese divination in English is Richard J. Smith, Fortune-Tellers and Philosophers: Divination in Traditional Chinese Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991).

2. Sarah Allen, The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 73.

3. Actually, it is unlikely that these diviners would have made a sharp distinction between humans and nature, a way of thinking characteristic of the modern world.

4. For an excellent discussion of the varieties of taotie designs along with extensive illustrations, see Allen, The Shape of the Turtle, pp. 131-157.

5. The word wen in Chinese has a basic meaning of "pattern." From this basic meaning comes a number of derivative meanings such as "written symbol," "writing," "culture," "refinement," and "civilization." A common antonym of wen was wu ("weapons" "military," etc.), the name of King Wen's successor.

6. Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 208. Cannibalism, in which a victor in battle would eat his vanquished enemy (usually in the form a meat sauce), was common in Shang and Zhou times.

7. Quoted in Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson, comps., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 186.

9. Adapted from Burton Watson, trans., Basic Writings of Mo Tzu Hsün Tzu and Han Fei Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963, 1964), pp. 79-80.

10. Quoted in Wing-tsit Chan, trans., comp., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 6.

12. The material in the following paragraphs is based on Lewis, Sanctioned Violence.

13. Quoted in John E. Wills, Jr., Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 48.

14. Adapted from Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), p. 28.