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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 3
The Origins of Chinese Civilization
Civilization?
Development from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic to the rise of early states, in China, shows a remarkably even progress. Local declines were balanced by local growth elsewhere. Village societies merged into larger-scale ones, and ultimately into the first states, showing a steady rise in complexity of settlement patterns and technology, a rise in the importance of cultivated crops and animals, and a slow, fairly steady spread of cultural developments from the Yellow River-Yangzi River axis to the rest of northern China and then to the south as well (see Liu and Chen 2012; Underhill 2013). Detailed local stories show fluctuation, but the wide view balances these out.
Civilization, as the word suggests, is defined by cities. When a settlement not only reaches a large size, but also has big public buildings—“monumental architecture”—and other evidence of social and political differentiation on a grand scale, we speak of a “city.” In the Old World and North (but not South) America, cities were accompanied by writing. They showed evidence of complex political organization, and the first written documents are usually business and administrative materials, soon followed by law codes.
The first cities were Uruk and its neighbors in Mesopotamia and the early cities of the Nile Valley in Egypt. The first identifiable kings and dynasties appeared. The first written law codes, official temples and government-dictated religion, standing armies, and other attributes of civilization followed soon after. Whether or not there was a Neolithic Revolution, we can certainly speak of a true Urban Revolution. Interestingly, cities were clearly a completely separate invention in the New World, and there they were more or less independently developed in Mexico and in Peru, but everywhere they had the same traits and characteristics, except for the anomalous lack of writing in Peru. So there is clearly something functionally necessary about the unity of traits that characterize these early urban formations.
It seems that cities and organized formal governments go together and that such governments necessarily have armies. The government monopolizes the legitimate use of force. This became Max Weber’s definition of a state (see Weber 1946), and it would serve as a definition for civilization. When ordinary people cannot kill as they wish, but formal elites can call out the troops, a great divide is crossed. One remembers that the Marxist explanation for the rise of states is basically predatory: bands of warriors conquered large territories and had to deal with them—inventing formal administration for the purpose (Engels 1942).
It has been repeatedly pointed out (notably by Carneiro and commentators on him, 2012a, b, and Lieberman 2009) that early states did not effectively monopolize violence and that even later ones often failed. Semi-autonomous lords—from feudal subkings to landlords—could call on violence up to a point, and often even ordinary people had rights of self-defense, feud, and duel. But Weber has a real point, even if we must often “take the intention for the deed.” From quite early, Chinese rulers realized that local autonomy could go only so far before being really threatening to the state. They thus tried to make sure that it did not get out of hand. Once the empire was established, they moved quickly to crush such autonomous power bases. The rulers were never wholly effective, but they did make it clear that they agreed with Weber in principle. Most important, states and cities arose at the central points or key control points of great trade networks. They also had to have large tracts of extremely fertile land around them, since early agriculture could not otherwise support urban-size settlements.
Moreover, cities and states usually (if not always) arose in areas where people could not easily escape, as Robert Carneiro pointed out (Carneiro 1970, 2012b). Very fertile tracts surrounded by hostile desert land (as in the Near East) or mountains (as in China and central Mexico) were ideal. (An interesting exception is the Olmec-Maya civilization of south Mexico.) Carneiro views warfare as critical: the victims had nowhere to run and were incorporated into the winners’ polities. In areas with dispersed resources, states did not develop until forced to do so to deal with aggressive states formed in circumscribed areas. Even these “secondary,” or “reflex,” states tended to develop in relatively bounded areas.
China’s early states, however, were not confined by the absolute boundary of a lifeless desert, as were Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and the Peruvian river valleys, or by the extremely high and rugged mountains that shut in the Mexican centers. In response to a thorough survey by Yi Jianping (2012) of the countless small local chiefdoms that moved toward statehood, Carneiro (2012a) notes that the states arose in the more circumscribed areas (the Wei Valley, the Yellow River where it enters the North China Plain, the Sichuan Basin; he could have added the Lower Yangzi Valley). But Carneiro has to admit that it appears that “resource concentration” was more important in this case than circumscription.
Trade was clearly critical. All the pristine states, and for that matter, all the well-studied secondary ones, arose at trade nodes, and the more important and focused the trade node, the earlier and more important the state. At the Valley of Mexico, Mesopotamia, and the western North China Plain, all the natural trade routes of entire continents or subcontinents come together. Conversely, beautifully circumscribed areas that were peripheral to all trade, such as the Colorado River, the Central Valley of California, and the lower Rhine (including its delta), had no early states—but such areas shot into major prominence when major trade reached them. This phenomenon is visible in China, with the progress of civilization from the Yellow and Yangzi Valleys to the Pearl and Red Rivers; these were peripheral to the early trade routes in the North China Plain and Yangzi lowlands and to the early agricultural sites. Only very much later did urbanization come to the even more isolated Manchurian valleys. The great Amur River has yet to achieve centrality.
The chiefdoms, or local complex societies, in the most favored localities did well in terms of wealth and population and could both get rich through trade and conquer the less favored ones. If circumscription was sufficient to make it impossible for the less favored to escape or to unite in a large oppositional force, the central social unit would become larger, wealthier, and more populous. It would then be forced, at some point, to develop a ruling elite, law code, and other trappings of a state; informal rule and simple kinship would simply not provide enough structure. Military organization and financing the military, in particular, would require central organization and some sort of ruling group.
All this leads to a necessity for the government to show off its wealth and power by having huge buildings, if only as defensive structures—but usually they are much more than that: they show off administrative power. Moreover, the government moves to control religion, ceremony, spectacle, great holidays, and other solidarity-building institutions. As the Marxists point out, a happy harmony prevails among the elite when the rulers, the army, and the priests are all in agreement. Even if there are dissident factions, they can unite around the goal of keeping the people docile and taxpaying. They can also insure that the elites will get most of the rapidly increasing wealth that urban civilization and trade bring to the city gates. One sees why a natural fence is needed to keep the people in.
The only thing that can disarrange this neat picture is a situation in which a marginal area produces better and better-organized fighters—such that the core’s superior numbers are neutralized. China was to learn all about this, to its enormous cost, when the steppes became organized into chiefdoms and then into true states. (The rise of independent city-states dominating trade could also disrupt this situation but this never happened in China, though it was a continual experience in the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.)
On the other hand, such governments do often succeed in delivering relative peace and order, so the people may not always want to escape. Complex, densely populated nonurban societies (“chiefdoms”)—like many societies in Native America and Oceania 500 years ago—are particularly conflict-ridden. States slowly but surely reduced the incidence of violent death (Pinker 2011). And of course there is much to be said for the spectacle, excitement, and variety of urban life. The Chinese speak of the “heat and noise” (renao) of cities as a positive and desirable thing, however much romantic and rural Westerners may view urban heat and noise as mere pollutants. The Germans say, “city air makes people free.” (Early German elites lived in the countryside on their estates, however, whereas Chinese elites generally preferred to live in the biggest cities they could find, making Chinese city air rather less free than the German form.)
Civilization, like agriculture in the Old World, appears first in the Near East and then about a thousand years later in China. With agriculture, we can safely assume independent invention, but this is not true of cities. It seems eminently possible that the idea of cities and civilization diffused across Central Asia to China (see Mair 2005—though this source deals mainly with later centuries). We know that bronze technology, horses and chariots, and funeral rites spread from west to east in early civilized times. This being the case, it seems likely that the whole idea of urbanization spread similarly. By 2000 BCE, when the first signs of civilization appear in China, cities and urban life were well established all the way from the entire Nile Valley to northern and central India and the western edges of Central Asia. Large, sophisticated towns flourished throughout much of Central Asia, though they were to vanish in the dark ages that afflicted much of the Western world in the few centuries just before and after 1000. (Climate was one reason—it turned colder and drier—but there were other poorly known factors.)
On the other hand, it seems fairly clear that the Chinese independently invented writing (on early Chinese writing, see Li Feng and Branner 2011). The Chinese would not have invented such a difficult and problematic system if they had had access to the cuneiform or alphabetic options that arose in the Near East. (I realize that this claim could earn me a charge of bias, but I cannot see how it could have been otherwise. The value of the Chinese writing system today is that it distinguishes the countless homonyms of Mandarin. Reconstructions show that the ancient Chinese did not have anything like the current problem in that regard.) Nor would their writing have shown such clear evidence of slow and organic development in place.
Chinese civilization arose in a core area in the western parts of the North China Plain and the adjacent Wei Valley. Until recently, it seemed to be a civilization that began in one area and spread in discrete rings outward, like the ripples from a stone cast in a pond. This neat scenario was early questioned by Wolfram Eberhard (one of my teachers). Today, we know Eberhard was right.
The people of the Yangzi Valley were as advanced as those on the North China Plain, if not more so, from earliest times onward. By 2000 BCE they had large towns and sophisticated art, similar to and culturally related to the proto-civilization of the North China Plain (Underhill and Habu 2006. Sichuan is also providing dramatic new finds that show a related but distinctive early civilization there (Bagley 2001). Urban-size sites extended from the far north to the Yangzi and inland to Chengdu by 2500–2000 BCE. Many had huge walls and large public buildings. Differentiated occupations, complex religion, and other features of civilization are attested all over north and central China. Shao Wangping (2002) believes that neither the view of a West Asian origin for Chinese civilization nor the view of Chinese culture as spreading from a point source on the Yellow River can be sustained any longer. However, Western inspiration for urbanization is not ruled out. The spread of writing (at least) from the central Yellow River area is clear.
Moreover, stunning recent finds in north and northeast China reveal utterly unexpected cultures there. The mysterious and controversial Hongshan culture (4500–3000 BCE) had intensive agriculture, as well as pig burials (Nelson 1994, 1995). It produced many large towns long before China had dynasties. “A huge ritual complex, about 8 by 10 km2, was discovered at the late Hongshan period (ca. 3500–3000 BCE) site of Niuheliang in western Liaoning province…. It contains stone platforms interpreted as altars, stone foundations that could have been temples,” sculptures, images, jewels, shamanic figures, “pig-dragons,” and much more (Underhill and Habu 2006: 131). Perhaps more striking is a statuette of a woman with inset eyes of pale blue jade (Morris 2010: 126). She was presumably blue-eyed. (This does not necessarily mean the people of the town were blue-eyed. In Chinese folk belief, spirit beings were often white-eyed or blue-eyed.) She has been regarded as a “goddess,” and the whole complex called a goddess temple. Hongshan declined (Liu and Chen 2012) and the great sites were no more, but the Liao valleys continued to be important cultural foci.
Although their monumental architecture is huge, the communities were small, perhaps a thousand people. The subsequent Xiajiadian culture created huge stone walls, evidently for defense (Shelach et al. 2011). Magnificent photographs of these finds are now available and show a site a great deal like a city (Zhang Zhongpei 2002: 79–80). If writing were present, no one would hesitate to call it one. However, no writing or anything comparable is associated with these sites. The Hongshan culture remains totally mysterious. Its people may have spoken ancestral Chinese, ancestral Korean, or some lost language. Could they be among the Rong? We will probably never know.
Similar monumental settlements are now being found in northwest China and Inner Mongolia. These finds appear to be greeted with enthusiasm by local people. In one recent case, a road was being built between the Inner Mongolian towns of Chifeng and Chaoyang. Construction turned up a large town 4,000 years old, with a huge wall and several major structures. The choice was made, all the way up from the local archaeologist to Beijing, to delay the road and save the buildings. The mayor of Chifeng gave his opinion in a line that should be circulated to all archaeology projects: “We, people of Chifeng, would rather travel to Chaoyang by donkey than destroy this site.” The site was saved by building an underpass below it (Carver 2011: 714).
Moving back to the focal area on the central Yellow River: Taosi in Shanxi reached 3 square km—the size of a middling Classic Mayan city or small early Near Eastern one—by 2300 BCE or so. It was nearly abandoned by 1900, possibly because of a severe drying trend in this very dry part of China (Li Min 2012; Shao 2002). Taosi had perhaps 10,000 people and major architectural relics. Burials indicate stratification: “one in ten was bigger, but about one in a hundred (always male) was enormous. Some of the giant graves held two hundred offerings … [some including] clay or wood drums with crocodile [actually alligator] skins, large stone chimes, and an odd-looking copper bell…. About two thousand years later the Rites of Zhou, a Confucian handbook on ceremonies, would still list all the instrument types … as appropriate for elite rituals” (Morris 2010: 204).
Other cities were comparably large. So far, scholars have been very cautious about calling them civilizations. This is partly because they all lack writing, which first appeared with the Shang Dynasty in the Yellow River plain area by around 1300–1500 BCE. Signs on vessels before 2000 (see, e.g., photographs in Shao 2002: 106 and K.-c. Chang 2002b: 133) are suggestive, but most of them clearly are tally marks rather than real characters (see, again, Li Feng and Branner 2011). Earlier writing will, however, probably turn up. The earliest Shang writing has a well-developed look, implying some prior history. Fast-wheel pottery, a technically sophisticated craft, was locally known by this time (Shao 2002). Spectacular jade work was common; many through the centuries have held that Chinese civilization never equaled the quality of its precivilization jades (see Shao 2002 for spectacular photographs that might convince many more). Southeast Asia has produced nothing so large so early, but advanced cultures by 1500 BCE show that this area too was advancing almost in step with China.
In short, Chinese civilization was a diverse set of traditions from earliest times. Different language groups are certainly represented and surely include Thai as well as Sinitic; most scholars suspect that Miao (Hmong), Yao (Mien), Altaic, and other groups were also involved.
The Earliest Dynasties
According to historical tradition, China’s first dynasty was the Xia, which ruled the very center of the Chinese world: the great bend area of the Yellow River as it turns from the mountains to cross the North China Plain. It was founded by the legendary Great Yu, who tamed the Yellow River floods and prepared the land for planting. He was so busy that, according to folklore, he passed his family door several times over many years without once going in. This later gave him a reputation for a lack of filial feeling, causing debates about how much serious business must take precedence over family ritual. The Xia supposedly ruled from 2205 to 1766 BCE, when they were conquered by the Shang, probably from farther east.
The last emperor of Xia became the prototype of the “bad last emperor,” who lost the Mandate of Heaven—the legitimacy of his rule in the eyes of the people and the gods—by sinning. He supposedly had a meat forest—trees hung with drying meat—and a lake of ale (or “wine”—jiu, i.e., fermented grain drink). Supposedly he went swimming in it, and the courtiers drank from it like beasts. This exaggeration was cut down to size by Wang Chong (1907: 486–89) in the Later Han dynasty. Wang, a chronic skeptic, debunked this and other fantastic tales of heroic drunkards (including Confucius). But the lure of a sinful wish-fulfillment fantasy was too much for the Chinese historians, and the lake of wine remained—often, though, with a skeptical disclaimer. Stories of bad last emperors proliferated thereafter, providing excuses for their removal by subsequent conquering dynasts.
The existence of a Xia Dynasty continues to be debated, but there certainly was a major chiefdom or early civilization at that time and place. The main city site known so far is Erlitou, often identified as the capital of the Xia Dynasty. It was large and complex, with stunning art and monumental architecture including many large buildings and walls. It peaked at around 24,000 inhabitants (Liu and Chen 2012:270), and more in large suburbs. During Xia times (perhaps a bit earlier), bronze technology was introduced from the Near East (see, e.g., Sherratt 2006). The evidence for Near Eastern origin of Chinese bronzemaking is now overwhelming (Golas 1999), but the Chinese were quick learners. A huge bronze industry flourished at Erlitou, with copper being mined as much as a hundred miles away.
The site seems to have had all the trappings of civilization—except one: true writing. We have tallies, symbols, and possible ancestors of characters, but no real characters. Erlitou’s art style spread all over the core area of what would later be China (Allan 2007). A dragon made of turquoise stones, arranged carefully, was found in a grave at Erlitou (Lawler 2009).
A fascinating speculation on Xia religion and behavior exists in the Li Ji, a Han Dynasty text. The Han writers (or Warring States writers they were copying) assumed: “At the first use of ceremonies, they began with meat and drink. They roasted millet and pieces of pork; they excavated the ground in the form of a jar, and scooped the water from it with their two hands … when one died, … they filled the mouth … with uncooked rice, and (set forth as offerings to him) packets of raw flesh” (Legge 2008: 216). The Li Ji goes on to reconstruct a whole prehistory, including ideas that the very earliest people knew no fire, ate their food raw, and lived in nests; later they invented fire, liquor, and other foods and took to extensive use of the liquor in ceremonies. These ancient times were considered a sort of golden age, rough and hard but natural and free from guile. Because of this, there were no crop failures or disasters, and heaven and earth produced dews and sweet wine (227). Acquaintance with neighboring peoples gave early writers a sense of what simpler, less civilized cultures might do or have done.
Other large and impressive towns existed in many parts of north China at the same time. Current thinking suggests a mosaic of chiefdoms throughout the region (see, e.g., Hui 2005; Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999). There may have been 10,000 (give or take many thousand!) small independent local societies, with the number shrinking to a couple of thousand states or near-states during Shang times and perhaps still 1,200 at the end of Western Zhou (K.-c. Chang 2002b: 126). They rapidly declined to the well-known couple of dozen Warring States after 500 BCE. K.-c. Chang (2002a, b) points out that the growth of polity size enlarged the work forces available to the rulers of the states that managed to grow. He maintains that productivity per worker did not increase much during this period (a debatable claim). Of course the elites in the loser states became part of that work force!
Shamanism flourished, and shamans obviously had great power, but exactly how much is hotly debated. Chang (2002a) also notes that Chinese civilization resembled Native American civilizations, and differed from West Asian (and later European) ones, in seeing continuity with nature and revering nature spirits and nature-related deities who were close to humans. They seem to have been psychologically as close as ancestors. As noted above, Chang felt that the East Asian–American universe was one of “continuity” between humans and the rest of the cosmos, divine or worldly. The West, to Chang, displays “rupture” between people and nature and between people and their remote heavenly gods (K.-c. Chang 2002: 193). This is supported by texts from Mesopotamia from the same time period: works like the Epic of Gilgamesh display a strong contrast between the civilized and the wild, with the latter being disliked and feared. This attitude runs through Western literature and philosophy from that time on and is indeed in dramatic contrast with China’s cosmology.
The Shang Dynasty, in contrast to Xia, is now quite well known (K.-c. Chang 1980, 1983; Keightley 2000; Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999). It began around 1500 to 1600 BCE, not 1766 (as traditional histories recorded). It ruled the central Yellow River region, and its power seems to have extended well up and down stream, as well as west into the Wei Valley and north into the North China Plain. Shang was a brilliant but local civilization, centered on the great central plain of north China, depending on intensive agriculture and pig-raising. It seems to have begun its glory days by conquering the Erlitou polity; it was probably a semiperipheral marcher state conquering the local core, thus beginning a pattern that was frequently repeated in northern China. The Shang people built a capital nearby at Yanshi but soon afterward moved the seat of government downriver to Zhengzhou, which grew to at least 25 square km (Lu Liancheng and Yan 2002: 152) with a population of around 104,000 (Liu and Chen 2012: 282), a huge size for an early city. The capital then moved again, finally settling at Anyang, where another huge city grew up.
The Shang world was a world of small city-states, and Shang may have been little more than a league of them (Keightley 2000; Lewis 2006, see esp. 137). However, in later times it was clearly a true state. It was probably a typical early Asian state: centered on the capital with the boundaries vague (Keightley 2000: 56–57)—what anthropologists call a galactic polity.
Anyang was twenty-four square kilometers in extent, making it forty-five times as large as any other settlement remotely close, so we are clearly dealing with a real capital of a real state (Li Feng 2008: 25). About 500 place names appear in the oracle bones. This happens to be about the number of place names known to the average person, worldwide; there seems to be something about the human brain that makes 500 places perhaps the highest easily learned number (Hunn 1990).
Excavation of Zhengzhou is handicapped by the fact that it is still a flourishing metropolis. Many cultural traits have lasted the entire 3,500 years since it was a capital. These begin with the intensive agriculture and pig raising but also include some startling details. When I visited Zhengzhou in 1978, I became fascinated with the ash-glazed high-fired brownware in the town market. Notable was a pottery kettle with three short, stubby legs, which was sold by the hundred. There were also cups and bowls. In the city’s excellent Shang Dynasty museum, I found the same kettles, cups, and bowls—not merely similar, but almost identical. The oldest of these are the earliest known ash-glazed high-fired pottery in the world. The technique is simple; I have seen it done at traditional kilns. The potter, or his assistant, simply mixes ash, water, and some of the pottery clay. Then the potter gives the pot (already made and dried, but not fired) a quick whirl in this mix and then fires it. The ash fluxes the feldspar in the clay into a good glaze. The style and technique produced pots so cheap and serviceable that no one could improve on them over the centuries. Today’s “sand pots” (made of sand-tempered clay) carry on the tradition and are essential for making good Chinese stews, because they distribute the heat smoothly and evenly, “sweat” a bit in cooking, and do not create the ruinous hot-spots and cold-spots of aluminum ware.
The Shang world depended on agriculture, which was already quite intensive and involved millets, wheat, barley, rice, vegetables, fruits, and domestic animals. Far from being a largely ceremonial or political site, the capital city was a major manufacturing and commercial hub; at least this was true of the final capital, Anyang (R. Campbell et al. 2011). Vast workshops made artifacts from bone (from cattle, deer, pig, and so on); these were evidently traded widely. Impressive bronze foundries produced thousands of tons of beautiful bronze work, including huge vessels. One wonders how people in such an early civilization could work with several tons of molten metal at a time. The industrial accident rate must have been horrific, and deforestation must have been extensive to produce the needed fuels. Very possibly, tracts of forest were reserved and selectively cut, as was done for later metalworking activities (Wagner 2008).
The Shang bureaucracy was complicated and lavish enough to include Many Dogs Officers, who took care of the hunting hounds. There were also Many Horses Officers (Keightley 1999: 280; 2000: 111–12). These officials are frequently mentioned in oracle bone inscriptions. There were cooks, supposedly including the legendary Yi Yin, cook to King Tang. (The latter, at least, was apparently real.) Yi Yin came as part of the entourage of the bride in a royal marriage and appeared carrying a bronze ding, a big three-legged meat-cooking dish (So 1992: 11). Thousands of dings survive (maybe one of them is Yi Yin’s), and residue analysis confirms that they were for cooking meat. Yi’s teachings on cooking appear in the records of Lü Buwei in the third century CE; alas for ancient lore, it is fairly clear from the third-century writing style that they are apocryphal (see the discussion of Warring States foodways below in “Later Zhou and the Warring States”). The ordinary people, meanwhile, ate mallows and onions—for which, Wang Chong reminds us, no gourmet cook is needed (1907: 69). (Mallows, the Malva parviflora complex, are humble herbs that were an extremely common food among the poor and ordinary folk in old China; they became a symbol of poverty and thus were shunned by later generations [E. Anderson 1988]. They are, however, quite good and are also among the most nutritious foods known to science. Wang refers to the fruits, a children’s snack still popular in my youth in California, where they were known as “cheeses”—they look and taste like tiny green cheeses.)
Weather and pests were an endless problem. Wind was a constant and major concern; David Keightley, who did archaeological work in the area, says from experience that the Shang kings did not exaggerate: the wind is ferocious. Situated in a fertile and lush but climatically challenged part of China, Shang could lurch from lavish abundance to desperate want and back to prosperity in quite short time ranges.
Time was critical: seasons and dates had to be coordinated for planting. The Chinese obsession with almanacs and calendars had begun, driven by the need to manage planting and harvest. I should correct here the common scholars’ belief that the rulers had to prepare calendars for the stupid peasants. Evidently these scholars have never farmed. Farmers know perfectly well when to plant and harvest and have many ways of determining this. The calendars were, instead, for timing elite rituals. However, the farmers later got some imagined benefits: the calendars included predictions about the coming year’s weather. Dawn and dusk were important, but night was a scary time to stay indoors; lamps do not exist in the archaeological record (Keightley 2000: 25), and burning straw or wood for light could go only so far.
Shang had quite powerful rulers, who had extensive authority. They constructed vast earthworks: walls, altars, building complexes. They were buried in enormous tombs, along with vast numbers of human and animal sacrifices. (Ian Morris, 2010: 213, has rather morbidly estimated that “a quarter of a million people” were sacrificed during the dynasty’s long run. However, this number seems a bit high.) Kings became deified ancestors, requiring a hundred or so individuals to accompany them into the other world. Even larger sacrifices of both humans and horses were sometimes made. One king went out with 79 humans, 28 horses, a deer, and, most oddly, three monkeys (Lu Liancheng and Yan 2002: 161). One wonders why the simians. Guard dogs were also sacrificed in some cases, presumably to guard the dead in the afterlife.
As elsewhere, however (Bellah 2011: 213), human sacrifice ended after a few centuries. During Zhou, some human sacrificing continued, and animal sacrifices including dogs were frequent (Falkenhausen 2006: 181–82), but sacrifice rapidly diminished and finally died out. I think the old Marxian explanation is the best: kings simply could not afford the loss of labor power, whether human or animal.
Human sacrifice declined early enough that Confucius was unaware of it (though burials show it was still being done locally in his time). He was horrified that people sacrificed straw figures of people and animals, since it seemed too much like the real thing; he did not know that the real thing had indeed been the rule and was not altogether extinct in remote states even in his own time. Straw itself then gave way to pottery by Qin and Han times. This delights archaeologists, since we have wonderful pottery models—accurate and often artistically beautiful—of virtually everything a dead person could wish. Alas for archaeology, pottery gave way a few centuries later to paper models, which are still the rule in Chinese memorial rites. They are burned ritually, thus “sent to the sky,” where they become the real thing in the world of the deceased.
In Shang, the king could order farmers to work collectively in the fields. Officers supervised (Keightley 1999: 279). In one storage pit, “444 stone sickles showing wear were discovered with gold leaves, stone sculpture, bronze ritual vessels, and jade artifacts. Such precious items would be found neither in the storage pit of an ordinary farmer nor in a stone workshop. The implements must have been stored there by a master” (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 28). He was evidently a noble—either an administrator or an owner of an estate. The Shang used stone implements to conduct slash-and-burn agriculture in forests, as well as upland agriculture on grass and brush steppes. (Bronze is impractical for farming, though it was used for lack of anything better; it is expensive and brittle and does not hold an edge well.) The bottomlands especially were valued as fertile farmland. Ash, vegetable debris, and presumably dung restored soil fertility (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 29).
Worship was directed especially at the high god Di (“heavenly king” or “thearch”) or Shang Di. (This shang means “above” and has nothing to do with the dynastic name, which means “merchant.” Legends related that it got this meaning because the Shang elite became merchants when the dynasty fell. There is no proof of this, but it is an intriguing idea.) The high god was known in Zhou as Tian, “Heaven.”
Dead kings—along with earlier, otherwise forgotten ancestors—routinely caused trouble when their wants and needs were not met. One of the main jobs of shamans and diviners was to find out which ancestor had been offended when things went wrong. Anything from the living king’s sickness to a drought or plague of locusts could be caused by shortchanging an ancestor when sacrifices were made. Therefore, many sacrifices were intended to keep the ancestors from punishing the living or to make up for previous slights that caused the ancestors to punish the living. This custom survives today, as among the Akha minority of the far south: “a man who had a stroke made the connection that his stroke was caused by not offering the correctly colored chicken at his ancestral offerings” (Tooker 2012: 38). In Shang, this practice not only provided excuses for state-building rituals but also trapped Shang in a round of destruction. Humans and wealth goods were sacrificed at an appalling rate.
The vast majority of written records of Shang are questions to the gods and ancestors, carved on scapular bones and turtle shells. The bones and shells were cracked by heat, the cracks being read as answers to the questions. Often the answers were then carved on the bones.
These oracle bones can provide a whole ethnography of Shang (Flad 2008; Keightley 2000, 2006). They show, most obviously, consumption of sheep, pigs, turtles, deer, and so on. The inscriptions are somewhat less clear. There is continuing controversy as to what they are “really” about. If all that mattered was the forecast, it would have been easier to write it down with a brush, as indeed the scribes sometimes did (Keightley 2006); why go to incredible effort and expense to carve it? Evidently something about state power and authority is involved. Showing off expensive evidences of ritual divination may have been the goal. Presumably there was a validating religious idea that only carved oracles were truly effective. The Shang gods, like so many gods worldwide, probably demanded that the worshipers show seriousness by diligent hard work.
Writing seems to have been invented—or just possibly diffused as a concept from the Near East—around the beginning of Shang. By the end of Shang, writing was highly developed, with ancestral forms of modern characters well standardized and widely used. Early characters were largely pictographic, but eventually someone got the bright idea of using a pictograph to write various nonpicturable words that sound the same. The linguist David Prager Branner (2011: 107f–117) has described what followed. A picture of a person swimming in a stream was used to write “to swim” (now pronounced yong) and then was also used to write “eternally” (also yong—evidently they were already homonyms in Zhou times). Very soon, such duplications became terribly confusing, and people began to write small classifying particles, now called radicals, next to the phonetic symbol. These radicals indicated broad classes of meaning. Thus the word “to swim” added some dots that look like drips—the radical for “water”—while the original “swim” character, without a radical, became the word for “eternally.” This sort of marking reversal—with the original pictograph acquiring a radical while a derived word did not—was very common. It seemed logical; it is easier to mark “swimming” with “water” than to mark “eternally” with anything. Thus, similarly, the word for “ancestor,” a picture of an ancestral tablet (not—in spite of a rampantly viral folktale—a phallus), came to mean a particle indicating “good” (among other things). Both are pronounced zu, but “good” remains a simple picture of a tablet, whereas the word for “ancestor” has acquired a radical used to mark terms referring to gods and the supernatural. Then the word “butcher’s block,” which is pronounced the same way, was written with the same tablet plus a little picture of two bamboo plants, the radical for “bamboo” objects (Branner 2011). The original picture of a tablet has become a “phonetic”—a graphic device that merely marks the sound. Through such extension by meaning and sound, any word can be written, and foreign words can be transliterated.
The vast majority of modern Chinese characters consist of a radical and a phonetic. Usually the phonetic supplies nothing but the pronunciation and has nothing to do with the meaning. The cute stories that Chinese love to tell about the appropriateness of the phonetic are mostly fiction—delightful, but fiction. However, there are some important exceptions: cases in which characters are genuine ideographs. The commonest is the character for “good” (hao), which shows a woman (nu) with a son (zi—no sound correspondence there). Another important case is the extension of ren “human person” to mean “humaneness.” Originally they were the same word and character. Scribes added the character for “two” to the character for “person” when it meant “humaneness,” because it was the way two people should act toward each other. “Person” is both the “phonetic” and the “radical” in this case, “two” being inserted purely to differentiate meaning. A still different type of evolution concerns the familiar yin and yang. These terms originally referred to the shady and sunny sides of a hill (the north and south slopes). Both use the “hill” radical. Yin combines it with the word for “shadow”—used as phonetic but clearly with an eye to the meaning. Yang similarly uses an old character for “sun” as a meaningful phonetic.
Possibly the most interesting of all the Shang graphs is a cross, each arm tipped with a bar. This is the original form of the character wu, meaning a shaman or spirit medium. In Shang times it meant the divine powers associated with the directions (Keightley 2000: 73ff.). Divinization of the directions is a concept shared with Native Americans and many other cultures. There may also be some graphic relationship with the turtle, whose shell and four limbs may have been a world symbol (Keightley 2000: 93); the cosmic turtle is another concept known from India to South America. Wu, anciently pronounced something like *mag, may be cognate with “magus”—deriving from an ancient Indo-Iranian word for a magician, and, indeed, is the root of our English word (see Mallory and Mair 2000). However, its presence in Shang documents makes the link tentative, since there is not much evidence of contact at the time and since the root meaning was quite different.
Shang religion involved concern for weather and geographic features. The Li Ji, that thoughtful Han Dynasty political work masquerading as an ancient ceremonial text, expressed concisely some 3,000 years of Chinese reverence for nature: “Mountains, forests, streams, valleys, hillocks, mounds, can emit clouds and produce wind and rain, and [make one] see strange things, and are all called divine beings” (see Keightley 2000: 124, but I have retranslated). By Han, the old beliefs were subject to agnostic speculation, and seeing gods in the mists was not the literal Revelation it apparently was in Shang.
Keightley thinks the elite “may have been nature worshippers—or, more precisely, worshippers of certain Powers in nature—but they were unlikely to have been nature lovers” (2000: 116). I doubt this. Fear and awe of nature not only can accompany love for it; they can also even be the reason for love. Nature’s powers are truly awesome, in the old sense of the word, and demand respect and reverence. Humans have their own powers and can mutually love and respect other beings, a common experience in cultures everywhere that are dependent on direct interaction with nonhuman forces. Even the emperors of Shang were tiny and helpless in the face of the overpowering natural forces around them, and they knew it. They probably loved the smiling faces of heavenly and chthonic forces as much as they feared their wrath. China’s famous love for the natural environment was surely well initiated by this time.
One bit of evidence is the Shang kings’ love of hunting, abundantly attested in the oracle-bone records. Hunting and love of nature go together (paradoxical as this may sound) and certainly goes along with the love of animals. Those Many Dogs Officers prove that it was clearly as true of Shang as it was of Tudor England: “There is a saying among hunters that he cannot be a gentleman which loveth not hawking and hunting, which I have heard old woodmen well allow as an approved sentence among them. The like saying is that he cannot be a gentleman which loveth not a dog” (The Institucion of a Gentleman, Humfrey Braham, 1568, quoted in Almond 2003: 33).
Very few animal species are shown in Shang art; about half of them are mythical, mostly various types of dragons. Of real animals, sheep and water buffaloes are notably important. Many birds are shown; most are highly stylized and unidentifiable (Keightley 2000: 109–11). The pig, by far the most common animal in archaeological finds, was apparently too plebeian to show. Pigs are shown in both Neolithic and (rarely!) Zhou Dynasty art but not in Shang. An interesting sidelight, however, is the character jia (household), a picture of a pig under a roof. David Keightley (2000: 111) believes that, far from showing typical living conditions, this probably started as a sacrificial pig under a temple roof. This is another case of a true ideograph rather than a simple radical-phonetic combination.
Shang’s neighbor states were almost or as brilliant. These included the Zhou to the west, and later successors to the mysterious Hongshan and its heirs to the northeast, as well as splendid local cultures in the Yangzi Valley. We can no longer think of Shang as the ancient civilization of China, though Shang remains the major locus for writing.
Shang was conquered by Zhou, a major state in the Wei Valley. The traditional date was 1122 BCE, the actual one around 1050. Claims that the Zhou people were “barbarians”—that is, non-Chinese in culture—are not sustained by archaeology; they seem to have been thoroughly integrated into early Chinese civilization. On the other hand, the early textual material cannot be simply dismissed. It records many features that, to at least one modern scholar, Sanping Chen (2012), thoroughly confirm the old “barbarian” identification. In any case, Zhou was a semiperipheral marcher state geopolitically in relation to Shang’s centrality in the Chinese world-system of the time. This then stands as an early example of a phenomenon that happened over and over in Chinese history: a semiperipheral (often originally peripheral) state rising in power, challenging the center, and often winning.
The Zhou had a capital in the twin cities of Feng and Hao, near modern Xi’an.
The early Zhou world was still one of city-states, in spite of the empire; it could not abolish, or even well control, the city-states (Lewis 2006). Only later did the Warring States succeed in truly centralizing government in their smaller realms.
The early Zhou Dynasty, like Shang, subsisted especially on millets. The mythical founder of the dynasty was Lord Millet (Hou Ji; ji was some kind of millet, probably panic, possibly foxtail). He was further mythologized as the minister of agriculture under the court of the God of Agriculture, Shen Nong (Liu An 2010: 402). It is typical of China that a god of agriculture would need a bureaucracy under him! Wheat and rice were also important, but wheat is rarely mentioned in Shang and early Zhou texts and oracle readings, whereas hundreds of mentions of millet occur (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 346; this is also true of the later Book of Songs). Archaeology confirms the great importance of millets. Beans and hemp seeds added to the pot. The hemp was grown for fiber for cloth, but no one was going to waste the edible seeds. The value of the resin for drug uses—anesthetic, religious, and recreational—was no doubt known, as it certainly was later, but was rarely (if ever) regarded in China as anything very special.
Ceramic and bronze vessels of enormous size, beauty, and technical complexity abounded. The Shang Dynasty already had a spectacular material culture, including what many consider the most beautiful bronze vessels of all time. Zhou produced ones even larger, if not more beautiful. Residue analysis confirms that these held meat, alcoholic beverages, and grains. This analysis confirms at least some of the traditional Chinese claims about which type of vessel held which food. Vessels were used in banqueting (Falkenhausen 1999), and some at least saw long use before being buried with their lordly user; residues attest this. So they were not purely ritual (Li Feng 2008). One small bronze piece, now in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, was cast at the orders of one Ran in honor of a victory by the Duke of Zhou, brother of the Zhou founder and regent for the founder’s son and successor in the latter’s youth (personal observation, helped by Berger 1994: 86 and pers. comm. of November 17, 2012). Ran paid a hundred strings of cowries for the work, showing that bronze vessels were rather routine and cheap items at the time. The duke later became enshrined as Confucius’s ideal ruler, held to be perfect at moral administration. Having an actual item from his time that commemorates a battle described in early histories is truly a miracle.
A huge bone workshop turned up near the old capital, Feng-Hao: “tens of thousands of kilograms” of bone were found, “including bones of horses, pigs, dogs, deer, elephants, and tigers” and “more than 4,000 cow skeletons” (Lu Liancheng and Yan 2002: 186). Most of these would have been recycled from food waste, though probably not the tigers.
Li Feng’s brilliant study Landscape and Power in Early China (2006) notes the advantages of the Wei River valley: closed and hard to enter, difficult to supply, and poorly connected to the rest of China. It is, however, surprisingly vulnerable to conquest from the north, because its major tributaries provide routes—challenging but not impassable for early armies—from the fairly fertile and easily held plateau country there. Central Asian regimes thus naturally tried to conquer and hold these plateaus and use them as a platform from which to strike at the heart of China. The Xiongnu were to master this strategy. Already, Western Zhou were having to fight off attackers from that direction and later found the task insupportable. The Western Zhou capital was ideal site for farming and communication, but the conquest routes from the north point like arrows at its heart. After a final epochal conquest, Zhou moved the capital east, becoming (naturally) Eastern Zhou.
This vast and open corridor to Central Asia has been greatly misunderstood and its importance underestimated. States like the Xiongnu are routinely called nomadic without any awareness that they controlled vast areas of rich and fertile (if often very dry) agricultural land just north of the Wei valley and that they could and did use this area as a platform for both the logistics and the actual routing of invasions.
Zhou had many contacts with the West. A review of art objects that are either Western-influenced or downright steppe-nomadic in inspiration and manufacture is found in Lothar von Falkenhausen’s study of Zhou archaeology, China in the Age of Confucius (2006; see esp. 204ff.). A range of objects from iron knives to belt buckles show Central Asian provenance or influence. Particularly interesting are belt plaques that are very close in style to items from Scythian and related cultures of the central and western steppe worlds (Falkenausen 2006: 231). It is possible that the Qin people, whose descendants occupied Chang’an and later founded the Qin Dynasty, were immigrants from the steppe zone. How far their origins were from Chang’an we cannot say. At least some of the Scythian-type belt plaques were cast in Qin workshops. That source may indicate a steppe origin for Qin, but the evidence suggests, instead, an exoticist fondness for the art. The romance of the steppe nomad, not unknown in our own time, was certainly present in old China, and the Qin seem to have been somewhat barbarian-influenced Chinese who romanticized their neighbors’ art.
In 771 BCE, Hao was conquered and Western Zhou humbled by the Quanrong people (cooperating with a rebellious Zhou tributary). Quanrong is rather insultingly translated “dog barbarians,” but could equally well be translated “northern non-Chinese of the noble hound.” Recall that quan is a literary word for a dog. (The insulting indigenous word gou is long famous in the compound zou gou, “walking dog” or “running dog,” for a collaborator or sellout.)
The dynasty moved its capital east to Chengzhou, later renamed Luoyi and much later Luoyang, the Yangzi Valley. This cost them the security of the easily protected Wei valley but saved them from the worst of the steppe incursions and gave them better access to the Yellow River and the North China Plain. Many later dynasties were to go through the same evolution. Han followed Zhou in moving the capital from Hao (near Xi’an) to Luoyang. Unfortunately, this move had its costs. Luoyang has no natural defenses worthy of the name. It occupies a vulnerable open valley on a tributary of the Yellow River. Thus it was easily, and frequently, attacked.
Li Feng, in his great study of Zhou and later strategic geography, comments: “It is true that some of man’s great achievements were attained by overcoming natural limits, but it is also the tendency of man to use geography in the most favorable way” (2006: 159). Indeed, but as Zhou well knew, nothing is harder to find in this world than perfectly defensible sites that are also open to easy communication and trade. Venice came closest; Bahrain and Sicily had their merits; but China had nothing remotely comparable and had to suffer. Through history, this meant an unstable, three-way tug-of-war between three regions. Xi’an was central and defensible but cut off. The central Yangzi from Luoyang to Hangzhou was perfect for communication but impossible to defend against a determined army. Beijing, already a local capital in Zhou times, was more defensible than Luoyang, more connected than Xi’an, but suboptimal on all counts. It is now—not for the first time—suffering from lack of water. The other two regions are on major rivers; Beijing has only a small stream.
A striking change took place around 850 BCE (Falkenhausen 2006: 43ff.). Arrays of vessels changed suddenly and dramatically. Also, not too much later, the animal and mythic-animal faces of Shang gave way to beautifully done bird representations and, soon after, to more geometric forms (Li Feng 2008: 37). This may have been because lineages tend to grow over time, and eventually there are simply too many people to remember separately or worship with the same amount of display.
At this point, in modern times, lineages would split and families would consolidate their worship around their own remembered kin. Something similar seems to have happened in Zhou. Younger and distant kin get less attention, with rites being redefined and reorganized to take this into account. However, the most striking change around 850 is a quite different one: the overwhelming importance of alcoholic liquor comes to a sudden and dead stop. Vessels identified by both textual and residue evidence as vessels for jiu (alcoholic drinks—beer or ale at this time) disappear almost completely. After 850, the vessels are almost strictly for meat and grain dishes. Lothar von Falkenhausen quotes a number of later—but still quite early—texts deploring drunkenness at solemn rites and suggests that reform may have come about because people succumbed too enthusiastically to very human temptations at rites that were supposed to be properly serious.
Early Zhou was still kin based and patrimonial, not a feudal society (Bellah 2011: 400) and not a true bureaucratic empire like later China. Zhou gradually developed a true bureaucratic organization, with the emperor managing it. He had to deal with local lords who had their own courts and small bureaucracies and who were rather conditionally loyal (Li Feng 2008 gives a long and detailed explanation of this system).
A neat insight into the transition is given in the Guanzi material (Rickett 1965) and the Zuojuan annals. These show the machinations of the Zhou court and the local lords as the former tried to bring the latter into a routine and subservient relationship. The latter, naturally, tried to maintain their independence. Power shifted constantly. Much later, the brutal Qin and autocratic Han Dynasties broke the power of the local lords.
The term “feudal” is not well applied to China; the old Chinese term fengjian, usually translated thus, really means something quite different (Falkenhausen 2006: 246; Li Feng 2008). Nor were China’s hierarchy of local elites much like the dukes, earls, and marshals of the West. China went from a patrimonial system (based on the king’s royal family and relatives) to a bureaucratic one with specified titles under court control; there were local semi-autonomous lords with tributary relationships with the states, but such lords were on the frontiers or in remote areas. The Zhou lords were not independent estate holders trading service for patronage. There were local lords with serfs or serf-like dependents, but they progressively lost their independence from about 600 BCE onward. By Han times, large estates owned by elites still existed but were under state control; by Tang, even these had been cut down, though not totally eliminated.
A fascinating insight into the thinking of the time is the word gong, translated as “duke,” because it does indeed indicate a high and quasi-autonomous lord; it literally means “common,” as in “the common people.” Apparently the gong was the governmental head of the common lands or the direct governor of the common people or both. (Recall that our word “duke” simply means “leader” etymologically.)
Bronze inscriptions give more insight into this (Falkenhausen 2006; Li Feng 2008; see Allan 2002for many pictures of early Chinese objects). There were three key functionaries: the supervisors of land, of construction, and of horses (Li Feng 2008: 71ff.). The last was so important that it became a surname, Sima—quite literally, “overseer of the horse.” (Chinese surnames, like English ones such as Smith and Fisher, are often derived from the occupation of an ancestor.) The supervisor of land was in charge of many environmental issues, from levees along the rivers to regulating and promoting farming. He oversaw supplying forage grass and forest and other products to the court and its appanages, as well as managing the hunting grounds. There were hierarchies of such supervisors; we read of them at the national level, but apparently military units and presumably local officials had their own supervisors. These or other officials took charge of marshes, orchards, pastures, and other natural and domestic biota (Li Feng 2008: 125ff.). There was sometimes a separate supervisor of marshes (313; the word here translated “marshes” actually means “bottom lands”—it includes drier river-bottom forests, swamps, and other riparian environments as well as marshes). There was still, as in Shang, a supervisor of dogs—mostly of hunting dogs but also those used for sacrifice.
A fascinating and important environmental note is buried in an obscure inscription from around 800 BCE. Lord Qiu cast a bronze vessel with a long inscription concerning a summary transcript of the king’s proclamation rewarding Qiu for meritorious service. The king said: “I order you to assist Rong Dui in comprehensively managing the Inspectors of the Forest of the four directions so that the temple-palaces be supplied” (Falkenhausen 2011: 243; his translation). It is extremely striking to find that forestry management was already considered so important that an entire bureaucracy for it was designated by the king himself. More important still is that it was clearly about management for sustainable production: continuing supplies for the temple-palaces. The Japanese still manage sustainable supplies of large timbers for temple construction.
Another revealing note on a ritual bronze tells us that the king rewarded one Pengsheng (who had provided some horses) with fields that extended from a birch-pear grove on one side to “the mulberry trees in the Yu stream” on the other (Li Feng 2008: 17). This use of trees to mark boundaries is interesting; it must have caused nightmares to the surveyors when those groves disappeared over time.
In both Confucianism and Legalism, farmers were held to be nobler and more virtuous than merchants; farmers produce food and fiber, merchants merely transport things around—and make a vulgar profit to boot. Throughout Chinese history, this differential valuation remained in place. In fact, it surfaced anew in deadly fashion under Mao Zedong. Still, few principles in human history have been more thoroughly ignored in practice. Many literati and others did indeed try hard to remain virtuous, devoting their lives and families to farming or the service of the state, but China never lacked for merchants. Merchants often tried to rise socially by getting their children educated and—if possible—into government service, but this did not usually mean giving up the family business. In fact, government servants got involved deeply in trade, as readers of Chinese histories and novels know.
The people who were less urbanized—the famous “barbarians” of Western-language books on China—were a diverse lot. There is no one Chinese word for them. In the Zhou Dynasty, the Rong on the north, the Yi and Di on the west, the Wu in the east, the Yue to the southeast, and other culturally different peoples each had their own names. (Many other terms came into use later, including the familiar fan of modern times. The latter is found not only in the well-known Cantonese slur faan kuai lou, “foreign ghost person”—mistranslated as “foreign devil”—but also in many food terms.) Translating all those Zhou ethnic words as “barbarian,” as is traditional in western-language sources, captures something of the superior attitude of the Zhou, but it both overtranslates the concept and undertranslates the reality. The Chinese had reason to use all those different terms; they were labeling regional cultural groupings.
The Zhou were surrounded by non-Chinese peoples. Some may have spoken other Tibeto-Burman languages, some probably spoke Altaic or Korean languages. On the south, Thai was certainly very commonly spoken—there are countless mutual loanwords. Other languages of Miao, Yao/Mien, and Austronesian stock were presumably not unknown, but in these cases we lack identifiable loanwords in Chinese.
Later Zhou and the Warring States
In later Zhou, China became more populous, grain became more basic to life, and game gradually moved out of the reach of ordinary people. By the rise of Han, only the elite and the remote mountain dwellers had much chance at anything bigger than a rabbit. Farming was basically in the hands of yeoman farmers, as it remained throughout most of Chinese history—as a result of government policy established in Warring States times. Huge estates worked by serfs and/or slaves were, however, well known. The Warring States period was a time of political and social complexity, and the continuum from slave and serf to freeman was apparently as complex as it was in feudal Europe a few centuries later—though by this time China was firmly bureaucratic, not feudal. The complexities usually had more to do with relations with the state than with local landlords. Merchants were numerous, wealthy, and far ranging.
Populations grew as bronze and later cast iron farming tools became common. Cast iron entered the picture in Zhou and became common in Han. This development has long been known (E. Anderson 1988; Bray 1984) but deserves mention, because it made such a difference. Iron quickly became cheaper and more serviceable, making it easy for ordinary people to do state-of-the-art farming with tough, serviceable, cheap hoes, plowshares, brush knives, and the like. Bronze makes good tools and weapons, but they are more expensive and less hard-wearing than iron.
States had a few million people. Qi, the most powerful state around 300 BCE, had quite a few million; the capital, Linzi, was the largest city in China at that time in population, although some cities had larger walled areas (Lewis 2006: 151). The populations of these states are uncertain but were well into hundreds of thousands, or even millions. The Qin Dynasty, after consolidating control over all China in 221, may have reached 40 million (Falkenhausen 2006: 405).
The pious, fearful treatment of the ancestors, a characteristic of Shang and early Zhou, was progressively replaced by a rather cursory treatment of them and a great deal more attention to the living. Texts, both contemporary inscriptions on bronze and later records of later Zhou ideology, indicate that religion was considered to represent society and keep the living together and teach them social rules, not so much to worship remote and obscure beings. This view anticipated the theory of Émile Durkheim (1995) by two millennia.
Tombs included tableaus that represented ordinary life, with the food, furniture, and even the (fewer) sacrificial victims arranged as if to show how life should be when carried on in an ordinary way in the other world (Falkenhausen 2006). We seem to be dealing not with frightening ancestors in a vague sky but rather with an afterlife almost like ordinary life here. This view is, mutatis mutandis, the approach and ideology of Chinese folk religion today, and we see its formative stages in Eastern Zhou tombs. The reforms of Shang Yang, the authoritarian consolidator of the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE, established the new view for all time. Funeral offerings were more concerned with making the dead comfortable in the next life than with pacifying lineages of ancestors (Falkenhausen 2006: 321–23). The tomb became “a microcosmic representation of the world of the living” (382). Moreover, it seems clear from Shang Yang’s writings that he knew perfectly well that the real purpose of these rites was to bring the living together and show the living social order, whatever the dead may have thought.
Also evident in sacrifices from Eastern Zhou through the Warring States period is a shift in the class system. Western Zhou had a small and only somewhat differentiated elite. Eastern Zhou, and above all the Warring States period, had a definite class society in which a high-ranking elite ruled over a vast middle range consisting of noble-born but not very wealthy individuals (Falkenhausen 2006). This should not be confused with a middle class—it was a lower-ranking elite—but it certainly had many of the characteristics one associates with a middle class, including an earnest desire to rise through education, sophistication, and proper behavior. This was the class from which most of the philosophers came. It is no accident that the Chinese word for “gentleman,” junzi, means “son of the non-royal nobility.” (Comparisons have often been made to Spanish hidalgo, “son of somebody.”) It evolved the way “gentleman” did in English: from a class marker to a compliment on one’s civil behavior. In any case, the high elite got fancier and fancier tomb goods, the lower elite got rather little. At worst, the lower elites would sink into commoner status.
One important development in Zhou and Warring States was the linguistic form we call Classical Chinese. This was an extremely terse, even telegraphic, language. Grammar was shown by rigid word-ordering rules rather than by function words; few such words existed, and they were highly regular and formulaic in placement and use. Redundancy and bisyllabic words were even less evident. Nobody could actually speak such a language. We need redundancy, grammatical function words, and “fillers” (including “filled pauses”) to give our hearers time to process what we are saying. Classical Chinese was a form of speedwriting, evidently developed for taking down court records and orders, in an age when everything had to be laboriously written on bamboo strips or carved into tortoise shells.
One proof of this is that actual verbatim speech, recorded (though still somewhat summarized) for example in the Records of the Warring States, has fairly normal human redundancy and grammar. But for 2500 years all scholars in China had to learn to read, think, and above all write in Classical Chinese. They learned to exploit its distinctive traits. In particular, the telegraphic form makes for ambiguity, and later poets learned to cultivate deliberate ambiguity and multiple implication.
In 690 BCE, Chu, in modern Hunan, developed a bureaucratic system with governors and high officials reporting to the ruler. In 594 the state of Lu remitted the labor that farmers owed to local feudal lords, thus effectively turning partial serfs into yeoman farmers. They had to pay taxes and could be liable for military service (Morris 2010: 251). This was one of the beginnings of China’s evolution from quasi-feudal and slave labor systems to the overwhelming importance of free yeoman farmers.
China’s cultivators have long been called peasants in the West, but in the strict sense, they were rarely peasants—at least not after the Warring States period (though the situation in Han is somewhat unclear). They may have been small-scale farmers, producing for their own subsistence a good deal of the time, but they were not usually in a separate, servile class, as European serfs and peasants were. “Peasant” is a term correctly used for farmers with fewer rights and privileges than full citizens. Chinese farmers were usually full citizens (though sometimes slaves; slavery persisted, diminishing in frequency, to the end of Imperial China). Serfdom apparently diminished after Han. The vast majority of Chinese farmers, and a greater and greater majority over time, were free yeoman farmers, not peasants.
