Yale Agrarian Studies Series

JAMES C. SCOTT, Series Editor

The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural people are especially encouraged.

—James C. Scott, Series Editor

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight

Edward Dallam Melillo, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection

Kathryn M. de Luna, Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa

James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

Loka Ashwood, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America

Jonah Steinberg, A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways in India

Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism

Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti

Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam

Dan Allosso, Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History

Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West

Christian Lund, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia

Shaila Seshia Galvin, Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya

Michael Dove, Bitter Shade: The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness

Japhy Wilson, Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Aniket Aga, Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India

Ruth Mostern, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History

Brian Lander, The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire

For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit yalebooks.com/agrarian.

THE KING’S HARVEST

A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire

BRIAN LANDER

Published with assistance from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

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Title-page illustration: The stylized fanged beast is a detail of the decoration on an Erligang-era (c. 1400s BCE) bronze vessel now in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum.

To my parents and to the memory of Elizabeth

They clear away the grass and trees;

Their tilling loosens up the soil.

In a thousand pairs they tear out weeds,

Along the lowlands and the paths.

There are the master and his eldest son,

The other sons and their children,

The strong helpers and servants.

Many food baskets are brought;

Lovely are the ladies,

Hearty are their husbands.

And now with spades so sharp

They set to work on the southern acres.

They sow the many sorts of grain,

Seeds that contain life.

Then the sprouts emerge;

How sleek the young stalks;

Very sleek, the young grain!

And the weeders go out in multitudes.

Then come the reapers in crowds

And pile the harvest in stacks.

Myriads, millions and billions of them.

To make beer and sweet ale,

To offer to our ancestors,

And provide for all the ceremonies.

When the fragrance of our offerings is sweet,

Glory shall come to the dynasty;

When the aroma is strong,

It gives comfort to the elders.

It is not only here;

It is not only now;

From of old it has been thus.

—Sacrificial hymn from the Book of Odes, c. ninth century BCE

Acknowledgments

IT WAS A LONG and meandering route that led me from rural Ontario to the study of ancient Chinese history, and I could not have done it without family, friends, and governments. I had the good fortune to grow up in a wealthy and relatively socialist state where universities charged nominal tuition fees, allowing me to pursue a liberal arts education that has since become inaccessible to many. I was first introduced to environmental issues and East Asian history at Osgoode Township High School and found my calling in Lorne Hammond’s environmental history class at the University of Victoria, where I was also inspired by Greg Blue’s erudition. At Hong Kong University, Chad Hansen convinced me to study Chinese and Ci Jiwei expanded my consciousness. My research methodology owes a lot to my exposure to European scholarship during a semester at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where I learned a lot from Hub Zwart and Pieter Lemmens and from attending the first European Environmental History Conference. Two summers spent working as a Parks Canada interpreter at Kluane National Park gave me a wonderful crash course in natural history.

I began learning Chinese in earnest during a year at East China Normal University and then received a fantastic introduction to the study of early China under the tutelage of Griet Vankeerbergen and Robin Yates at McGill University. After that I spent a year at Lanzhou University, where I learned from Wu Jingshan 吳景山 about China’s long tradition of historical geography and came up with the project that became this book. Thanks to Liu Li 劉莉 and Sun Zhouyong 孫周勇 for helping me join the Shaanxi Bureau of Archaeology’s excavation of a Qin royal tomb and to Ding Yan 丁巖 and the work crew.

It was a privilege to do my doctorate in Columbia University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures under the supervision of Li Feng. With his deep knowledge of early China and his generosity toward his students, he was the ideal doctoral advisor and has remained a supportive mentor. It was particularly nice to learn about archaeology from him on the Guicheng archaeological survey. Robert Hymes and Madeleine Zelin taught me a lot about Chinese history and about how history should be studied. I also learned from my classmates in China studies, including Stephen Boyanton, Kevin Buckelew, Glenda Chao, Chen Kaijun, Anatoli Detwyler, Nina Duthie, Arunabh Ghosh, Weiwei Luo, Wu Minna, Greg Paterson, Ho Han-Peng, Nick Vogt, Chelsea Wang, and Sixiang Wang. I have learned a great deal about the history of Qin from the work of Maxim Korolkov. Bill McAllister and the other fellows at INCITE enriched my final year at Columbia. My dissertation committee (Robert Hymes, Li Feng, Rod Campbell, Guo Jue, and Robin Yates) gave me a lot of useful advice. I would like to particularly thank Robin Yates for his generous encouragement and mentoring over the past fifteen years.

My year at the Center for the Study of Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts at Wuhan University provided me with essential training. Thanks to Chen Wei 陳偉 and everyone else there for hosting me. I learned a lot from conversations with Cao Fangxiang 曹方向, Dou Lei 竇磊, He Youzu 何友祖, Huang Jie 黃傑, Lu Jialiang 魯家亮, Luo Xiaohua 羅小華, Zheng Wei 鄭威, and Tian Chengfang 田成方. Thanks to Edward Shaughnessy for introducing me to Wuhan University during his fantastic summer paleography workshop. I learned about ancient ecology and climate in classes with Gail Chmura, Dorothy Peteet, and Wally Broecker. Thanks also to Tom McGovern for letting me take his course at CUNY and to both him and David Pankenier for serving as field advisors. Gary Crawford kindly let me spend a month at his lab at the University of Toronto, introducing me to the theories and methods of archaeobotany.

Guo Yanli 郭妍利 helped me in many ways during my time at Shaanxi Normal University, and I am grateful to her and to various students from the history department for keeping me sane. I learned a lot from Huang Chun Chang 黃春長 and the students at his lab, including Guo Yongqiang 郭永強 and Liu Tao 劉濤. I would like to thank Zhang Li 張莉 and the Northwest Institute of Historical Environment for inviting me to present my findings. For other research help I would like to thank Liang Yun 梁雲, Wang Zhiyou 王志友, Qin Jianming 秦建明, Hu Songmei 胡松梅, and especially Jiao Nanfeng 焦南峰, who introduced me to several of the above. Thanks also to Jiao Nanfeng, Sun Zhouyong, and the Shaanxi Provincial Bureau of Archaeology for providing me with some of the images in this book and permission to use them. I should also add that I met with many generous and thoughtful people during the five years I lived and traveled in China, and much of my understanding of China comes from casual conversations with people all over China.

Two great years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment provided me with time and resources to expand my research and pushed me to think harder about its relevance to present issues. Thanks especially to Dan Schrag, Jim Clem, the other fellows, and my host, Rowan Flad, who introduced me to my favorite collaborator, Kate Brunson. I have also learned a lot from my forest history collaborators John Lee, Ian M. Miller, and Brad Davis. Here at Brown my colleagues in the history department and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society have made me feel at home, provided me with an ideal space for my research, and been very supportive during some difficult times. Thanks to Cynthia Brokaw, Jonathan Conant, Nancy Jacobs, Rebecca Nedostup, Emily Owens, Lukas Rieppel, Naoko Shibusawa, and Kerry Smith. I would particularly like to thank Robert Self and Timmons Roberts for their generosity and guidance. Robert Self generously organized a manuscript workshop in which he, Tamara Chin, Bathsheba Demuth, Rowan Flad, Graham Oliver, Peter Perdue, and Ling Zhang read and provided extensive comments on my manuscript. It was an extraordinary privilege, and it helped make this a much better work. My students have also pushed me to think about many of the issues addressed in this book.

Researching this book has given me new awareness of how much my education has been supported by states. The Chinese and Canadian governments supported three of my years in China: my years in Lanzhou and Wuhan were both funded by the Canada-China Scholar’s Exchange Program, and my language study in Shanghai was funded by the University of Victoria/East China Normal University Student Exchange. My semester in the Netherlands was part of the Coastal Inquiries Exchange Project funded by Canada and the European Union. And, of course, the private American universities where I have studied and worked all receive substantial government support.

People who have generously read and commented on my manuscript over the years include Graham Chamness, John Cherry, Stewart Cole, Gary Crawford, Madelaine Drohan, Benjamin Hein, Yizchak Jaffe, Sumit Guha, Michael Loewe, David Lord, Robert Marks, Ian M. Miller, Tate Paulette, Parker VanValkenburgh, Lothar von Falkenhausen, and Donald Worster. Apologies to those I’ve forgotten and for the good advice that I ignored. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press, one anonymous reviewer from Yale University Press, and Ruth Mostern for their very helpful suggestions. At Yale University Press, editor Jean Thomson Black has guided me expertly through the publishing process, and I also thank Elizabeth Sylvia, Marilyn Martin, and Mary Pasti. Thanks to Lynn Carlson for making many of the maps.

I am grateful for the support of family, including my in-laws and my sisters. Without the patient support of my parents for my seemingly never-ending studenthood, this book would not have been written. Their love of gardening seeded my interest in agriculture, and their enthusiasm for travel led me to China. I dedicate this book to them and to my sweetheart, Elizabeth. I met her around the time I first came up with the idea for this book, and she helped me with every part of it. Elizabeth died of cancer just as I was finishing the book, and although she will sadly not see it in print, it is a testament to our fifteen years of happiness and love.

General Chronology

Neolithic Cultures of the Guanzhong

Bronze Age

Empires

Chronology of the Zhou Era

All dates are Before the Common Era (BCE). Asterisks (*) indicate the kingdoms that were conquered by Qin and the year of the conquest.

Regional Kingdoms

THE KING’S HARVEST

Introduction

I SPENT MY TWENTY-FIRST SUMMER living in a little green tent beside the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory. A century of gold mining had torn up its river valleys, but the Yukon was still a wild place, bigger than California, with thirty thousand people and twice as many moose. That summer gave me a glimpse of landscapes in which humans were just one among many animals, not the dominant ones. In August, as the brief northern summer waned, I flew to Hong Kong. I can still remember my astonishment at its crowds—the Kowloon area had thirty thousand people per square kilometer. I was fascinated, and though I still love that city, I could not help but see it as a devastated landscape. This impression was only strengthened as I traveled around China that year and realized that humans had wiped out natural ecosystems across much of the subcontinent. Even squirrels have been erased from the landscape, surviving only in the mountains.

I studied early Chinese philosophy that year at Hong Kong University and was struck by the following passage from Mencius: “The trees on Ox Mountain were once beautiful, but because it is near a big city they were all chopped down with axes. Can this be considered beautiful? The vegetation does get respite over the days and nights and is watered by the rain and dew, so it is not that no new shoots grow, but then cattle and sheep come and graze on them. That is why the mountain is so bald. People see its baldness and assume it never had trees on it, but is that the nature of the mountain?” Mencius used this as a parable of human nature, and it is also a profound reflection on the ways we perceive our environments. But I was not thinking so deeply about it then. I was just amazed to learn that people had been transforming China’s environments for so long, since I had thought that environmental problems were a modern phenomenon. I began to wonder what China’s natural ecosystems had looked like before people came to dominate the landscape. I went to the library to look into it and gradually realized that nobody had written the book I wanted.¹

This book is the result of my inquiry into those questions, but it is quite different from what I was looking for back then. In those days I considered “the environment” to consist of everything outside of human societies, as exemplified by national parks that had been conveniently depopulated so tourists could see proper nature. Like many North Americans, I imagined human history as a kind of frontier rolling over nature and converting it to towns and farmland, a simple transition from nature to culture. It was only when I returned to Canada and discovered the field of environmental history that I realized how far we have been misled by this focus on wilderness. I decided to apply the methods of environmental history to the study of ancient China. But when I started reading through the classical texts—in translation until my Chinese improved—I found few other passages that explicitly discussed environmental change. Luckily, the fields of archaeology and paleoecology were producing a lot of relevant data. China’s construction boom of the past few decades has been a bonanza for archaeologists, who have unearthed an unending stream of new discoveries, from seeds and bones to roads and cities. Perhaps most amazingly, huge quantities of documents written on bamboo and wood have been discovered, many of them legal statutes and routine administrative “paperwork” from China’s early empires, the Qin and Han. These documents contain so much information on environmental questions that it gradually dawned on me that states are themselves agents of environmental change.²

This book combines the comparative study of political institutions with the methods of environmental history to examine the ecology of state formation in early China. It traces this process in the central Yellow River valley, the heartland of Chinese civilization, from the origins of farming until the fall of China’s first empire. It focuses on the Guanzhong Basin of Shaanxi Province, a region known outside China for the city of Xi’an and the terracotta army that guards the tomb of the First Emperor of China (map 1). In East Asia, the region is famous as the capital of China’s greatest empires under the Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties, which gives it a historical importance akin to that of Rome in Western history. The Guanzhong Basin is the most northwesterly of China’s major agricultural areas, a vast arable plain whose excellent natural defenses made it a great base for conquering rivals. This explains why it repeatedly became an imperial capital. The Yellow River valley is an ideal focus for a study of an early state because it is one of the few places on earth where agriculture and states evolved. As this book will show, building political organizations required reorganizing nature and society so that they could provide resources and labor to the state. Conversely, once these systems were established, they became powerful forces of environmental change. One reason humans have become the dominant species across East Asia is that their political systems have been so successful in expanding and sustaining agriculture.³

It is fitting that the word for “China” in most languages descends from the name of “Qin” (pronounced “cheen”) because Qin founded the imperial system that did so much to build the entity we now call China. Of course Qin’s sophisticated bureaucracy was the culmination of a long history. The origins of the political entity that became China can be traced to walled towns in the central Yellow River valley about four thousand years ago, from which arose the Shang-Zhou-Qin-Han lineage of states. There were equally sophisticated Neolithic societies in other places that are now within China’s borders, but it is anachronistic to call these “Chinese” because they contributed little to the initial formation of the Chinese political and cultural tradition. Those regions became “China” when they were later conquered and colonized. The formation of Chinese culture was always a process of hybridization between conquerors and conquered, but in the long run the imperial center tended to have the upper hand. These empires had a fundamental incentive to expand agriculture and played a key role in the domestication of East Asia’s landscapes.⁴

This book explores the ecology of political power from the origins of agriculture around ten thousand years ago to the fall of the Qin Empire in 207 BCE. I will leave the ecology of political systems to the next chapter. Here we will imagine the lives of ordinary people in four different periods in order to illustrate the changes that occurred over this time. We will see how agricultural systems improved over time, eventually becoming productive enough to create substantial and reliable surpluses. Political institutions gradually arose that used these surpluses to feed people doing nonagricultural labor, such as building infrastructure or fighting. Over time these institutions expanded to control more land and people. By the time this book ends in the third century BCE, states had grown large enough to mobilize the resources of millions of people. They used them to transform ecosystems in ways humans could never have done if we had remained in small, decentralized groups.

Map 1. The Yellow and Yangzi River valleys. The rectangle indicates the study region.

Our first stop is the village of Jiangzhai, near Xi’an, around 4500 BCE, which archaeologists call the Yangshao period. The village is situated in a grassy savanna with scattered patches of shrubs and woodlands. The Qinling Mountains tower to the south. The village is home to a few hundred people who live in wattle and daub houses arranged in a circle around a central courtyard. The only domesticated animals are dogs and pigs, which wander around freely. Human settlements are few and far between, and the landscape is home to dangerous animals like tigers and wild water buffaloes, perhaps one reason the village is surrounded by a deep ditch. Every year people burn patches of land around the settlement to plant millets, creating a patchwork of vegetation that attracts deer, making them easier to hunt. The residents also hunt various other wild animals that provide them with meat and with skins and furs of which they make clothes. They also weave hemp and other plant fibers into cloth. They catch plenty of fish, turtles, and other aquatic animals and gather a wide variety of wild plant resources for food, medicine, and materials. In the summer and fall they often take advantage of all the wild fruit and nut trees, and the seeds they discard around their villages often grow into trees. Later inhabitants of this region would be jealous of the variety of foods in these people’s diets.⁵

The long-term development of North China’s agricultural system is the subject of chapter 2. Over thousands of years people learned to raise more and more kinds of plants and animals. Each new domesticated species increased their ability to modify their environments, and people continued to develop better breeds and new techniques. Farming also allowed the human population to increase, so natural ecosystems were increasingly replaced with grain fields, orchards, and grazing land. Advancements in various sciences provide us with an increasingly good idea of what people ate and how they modified their environments. Soil research helps us understand the changing climate. Fossil pollen gives us an idea of the regional vegetation. Burned seeds and other macrofossils reveal what crops people were cultivating and the weeds growing among them. Animal bones tell us what animals they were rearing or hunting. Stable isotopes in bones give us an idea of what people ate, and the conditions of their skeletons tell us about their health. Ancient DNA analysis allows us to trace the genealogies of human populations and domesticated species. From all of these sources we know that the people of Jiangzhai and other Yangshao-era sites gathered food and materials from a wide variety of species, both wild and cultivated. This made them healthier than many of their descendants, though the wildness of the surrounding ecosystems also made it more likely that they would step on a pit viper or run into a bear.

Let us jump 2500 years into the future, to 2000 BCE, the end of the Longshan period. Many things look the same as in earlier periods. Most people still live in small villages, dogs and pigs are still running around, and people are still wearing skins and woven hemp. But much has changed. The agricultural system has improved. People have bred more varied and productive types of millet. People still hunt deer, but there are fewer wild animals than there were in earlier periods. Where they previously ate only wild fruit, they now plant apricots and peaches. Domesticated cattle and sheep have arrived from Central Asia. They can subsist on dry grassy lands that were previously of little use to humans, but this requires people to travel far from their families with their herds. Where families in the Yangshao period rarely accumulated much more wealth than their neighbors, some are now much wealthier than others, owning livestock and riches like jades. People tend to have less diverse diets than their ancestors, and poorer people sometimes depend so heavily on millets that their health suffers. Malnutrition will continue to plague poorer farmers for the next four millennia. Walled towns, home to a few thousand people, have appeared. One of the larger ones, Taosi, has wealthy elites who live in a large walled compound, and own many luxury goods. Common farmers living around these towns must work the fields of their leaders and fight in wars against other walled settlements.

Whereas people in the Yangshao period had lived in relatively egalitarian communities, a few millennia later they had to pay taxes and do labor service to the state. How did institutions form in these towns to collect resources from their hinterlands? How did some families become hereditary elites while many others provided them with goods or labor? We do not know the details, but it did happen. Chapter 3 will explore how states formed in East Asia and how they gradually improved their capacity to extract surplus resources from larger territories and populations. It started in the Longshan period, when walled towns first formed and clear signs of class divisions emerged. The city of Erligang, modern Zhengzhou, was the first indisputable state in East Asian history. It flourished between 1500 and 1300 BCE, and its influence extended across an enormous area. It was succeeded by the Shang dynasty at Anyang (c. 1250–1046 BCE), which is famous as the first site with writing, horses, and chariots. In 1046 armies led by the king of Zhou (pronounced “Joe”) conquered much of the Yellow River valley and established a hierarchical alliance of polities across the region. Because its capital lay to the west near modern Xi’an, the first Zhou dynasty was known as the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE). In 771 the Zhou royal house collapsed and established a new capital to the east in Luoyang. This is known as the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 BCE), a time of conflict between and within the Zhou polities.

Let us now have a look at life 1500 years after the Longshan period. In 500 BCE the state of Qin has taken over the Western Zhou capital region in the Guanzhong and Confucius is teaching in obscurity in Shandong. Agriculture has improved over the past 1500 years. Cattle and sheep are much more common than they were in the Longshan period. Chickens have arrived from the south and are now running around villages along with dogs and pigs. There is a wider variety of vegetables in people’s gardens, and they grow various fruits and nuts in their settlements. It may be around this time that people begin to use oxen to plow fields.

Society is divided into rulers and ruled. Rulers have horses and sharp metal weapons that give them an advantage over common people that Longshan elites would have envied. Horses require grazing land, keepers, and people to maintain chariots, which makes it more expensive to be a member of the elite and differentiates those with wealth and power from those without. States in this period are quite decentralized, composed of various aristocratic lineages, or clans, each of which has full control over its own land and estates. Commoners have their own plots of land, but are also required to work on their lord’s fields and do other work for him, such as building and maintaining infrastructure. Men also have to serve in their lord’s armies during military campaigns, which are held regularly in the winter after the harvest. If there are no wars, they go on large-scale hunts and kill as many beasts as they can catch. Apart from those big hunts, common people hunt smaller furry animals that provide them with furs for winter clothes, as their ancestors have done for millennia.

Chapter 4 traces the six-hundred-year history of the state of Qin as it rose from irrelevance to hegemony. Qin’s history is the history of the Eastern Zhou period, a time of inter-state competition. Over the centuries, wars became longer and more expensive, forcing governments to find new sources of revenue. Their decentralized structure made them relatively weak, so these states worked to appropriate the tax income and corvée laborers of rival aristocratic lineages. As they did so, they grew in size and population and had to develop bureaucracies to administer their territories and subjects. Qin arose as a minor polity breeding horses for the Zhou, but after the Zhou kings fled the fertile Guanzhong Basin, Qin moved in and gradually built its power. Qin’s rise to pre-eminence began with state-strengthening reforms initiated in the fourth century BCE by its ambitious kings and its famous chancellor Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE). They established a system of ranks that commoners could obtain through military service: the higher the rank, the more land and privileges they were given. This radical reorganization of both society and the agricultural landscape made Qin the superpower of East Asia, and in 221 BCE it conquered the last of its rivals and founded the Qin Empire.

Let us now imagine life in the Guanzhong of 210 BCE, at the height of the Qin Empire. Only three centuries have passed since the time of Confucius, but the world has been transformed. The people of the Guanzhong now live in the capital region of a huge empire, and the state is a major factor in their lives. The grassland mosaic we saw in the Yangshao period has mostly been replaced with farmland. Even the saline lands of the northeast Guanzhong are being colonized after Qin built a massive canal system to drain and irrigate them. Wild ecosystems have disappeared from the lowlands of North China, though there is still plenty of wildlife in the mountains. Even in the wilder mountains and wetlands, people increasingly forage and hunt to supply urban markets. Millets remain the key grain, but people also grow soybeans, wheat, rice, and a wide variety of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Iron tools are becoming more widely available, but most farm tools are made of wood and stone. Most farmers have pigs and chickens, but cattle are too expensive for many since they require grazing land. Goats and donkeys are becoming more common, and people from the deserts of the far northwest sometimes arrive in the capital with camels. Men must serve in the military, and it is not uncommon for them to be sent very far away, perhaps never to return. But some are enthusiastic about joining the army because those who fight well can expect substantial rewards, including larger farms. Once young men reach adulthood, the state encourages them to marry and form their own separate families, a practice that has eliminated most of the larger clans that were common a few centuries earlier.

The Qin Empire reached the zenith of its power during the reign of its First Emperor, who reigned from 246 to 210 BCE, and it collapsed soon afterward. Chapter 5 analyzes the ecology of Qin’s political system at this time. Its power was based on the taxes paid in grain by farming families. This grain was stored in granaries throughout the empire and used to feed the people, horses, and cattle who labored on the empire’s various projects. Qin not only required most men to do corvée and military service; it also exploited the labor of convicts on a large scale. Much of this labor was used on infrastructure like roads and water systems that sometimes also benefitted local people. Qin also built megaprojects like the first Great Wall and the First Emperor’s tomb complex, which is now famous for its terracotta army. Qin’s huge armies conquered wide swaths of the subcontinent. The empire extended over such a large area that it could take months to travel from the capital to its most distant conquests. Officials kept control of this system with a bureaucracy that administered local society by sending enough information to the capital to allow central officials to make decisions about how the resources and labor were to be used. This gave them enormous power to shape the ecosystems of the subcontinent. They exploited forests while also issuing laws aimed at conserving them. As they had done since the time of Shang Yang, Qin officials put agriculture at the center of their system: the more farmers there were on the state registers, the more grain taxes they could collect and the more men they could mobilize for the army. Qin’s extractions did not make it particularly popular, and it was overthrown in a popular uprising.

Qin’s bureaucratic government and agricultural emphasis were inherited by the Han Empire, which endured for four centuries and was around the same size as the contemporaneous Roman Empire.⁶ The Han was the first to establish lasting peace across most of the fertile river valleys of East Asia, from the Korean Peninsula to Vietnam. Like the Roman Empire, the Han established a political model that subsequent leaders sought to emulate. But European rulers never managed to re-create the Roman Empire, while China’s centralized bureaucratic empire has been rebuilt over and over. The People’s Republic of China is its most recent version. Even northern pastoralist groups who conquered China quickly learned that their new subjects already had a well-established system for extracting surpluses from the laboring masses and adopted much of it. Regardless of who was in charge, the power of Chinese states was based on farming, so they had a fundamental motivation for expanding cultivation and increasing populations. The power of these states was quite limited by modern standards, but they maintained some level of peace across large areas for centuries at a time, making it easier for the human population to grow and to convert virtually all of the subcontinent’s lowland ecosystems into farmland.

This is the first English-language monograph on the environmental history of early China, but it builds on a long history of scholarship. In the 1920s, Karl Wittfogel combined the ideas of Marx and Weber to develop influential theories on environmental aspects of political power. I first encountered these ideas in Joseph Needham’s brilliant history of water control in China. Mark Elvin’s pioneering The Retreat of the Elephants argues that warfare was an important driver of environmental change in early China, an idea elaborated at length in this book. Despite these influences, states and wars were actually far from my mind when I began this project. I was initially inspired by the American field of environmental history and by Chinese historical geographers, especially Shi Nianhai, who wrote histories of land use and soil erosion on the Loess Plateau. But when I set out to study early China’s environmental history, I found few relevant written sources on early environments, and plenty on political organizations. It was the sources that prompted me to think harder about the nature of political power in early China. James Scott’s work on the logic of state power was very helpful in thinking through these questions. His work and Donald Worster’s critique of an earlier draft of this one—pushed me to recognize the limits of the time-honored American mistrust of government and acknowledge the many ways in which states have created stability and prosperity in human lives. Though rarely addressing the ecology of political systems, scholarship on the environmental history of the ancient Mediterranean has served as a model and an inspiration.⁷

This book synthesizes a lot of data excavated and published by archaeologists in China. Archaeologists have excavated an enormous volume of materials, and the quality of this data has improved dramatically over the past two decades as the government has poured funds into the sciences, including environmental archaeology and paleoecology. This has allowed me to write a book that it would not have been possible to write a few decades ago. However, archaeological research on the Neolithic period has been considerably more innovative than research on historical periods, and the different research priorities of prehistoric and historical archaeologists in China have shaped this book’s organization. Archaeologists in China working on the period before texts (roughly before 1300 BCE) have always paid careful attention to subsistence and environment, and recently they have embraced scientific methods and begun to publish in international journals. In contrast, archaeologists of the historic period tend to base their research on historical texts, many of which have a strong elite bias because they were written by—or at least for—the rich and powerful. Historical archaeology has vastly improved our understanding of China’s early history, not least by proving that early texts contain a lot of accurate information. But the focus of these archaeologists on cities and tombs has provided little insight into the lives of the rural farmers who were the vast majority of the population. We know much more about the Neolithic village of Jiangzhai than we do about any village from the 800-year Zhou period. This is why the discussion of Neolithic agriculture in chapter 2 is so detailed, while the subsequent chapters that focus on the Zhou period are mainly concerned with politics and administration. Luckily, excavated administrative documents do provide us with a wealth of details on mundane affairs.⁸

Given that this book focuses on the period when the classical texts of the East Asian intellectual tradition were written, I should explain why ideas play such a small part in this story. Most English-language scholarship on the Zhou period focuses on texts and ideas. The materialist focus of this book is intended partly as an antidote to this overemphasis on what elite men thought and wrote about. More importantly, though, I do not think that the abstract ideas people hold about nature ever made much difference to the ways their societies actually treated their environments. All early Chinese thinkers shared the belief that the expansion of agriculture and the human population was a good thing. Calls for the more sustainable exploitation of natural resources were not recognitions of the inherent value of nature, but simply rational analyses of how best to manage ecosystems for human benefit. Scholars interested in the ecological implications of early Chinese thought tend to be attracted to proto-Daoists like Zhuangzi, but I believe that the thinkers whose ideas made the most difference in the real world were political theorists like Shang Yang.⁹

I am very conscious in writing this book that some may perceive it as yet another work laying blame on China for the world’s environmental problems. However, as chapter 1 demonstrates, premodern China’s political systems were not fundamentally different from those elsewhere. They were relatively effective and enduring, but were still quite weak by modern standards. Moreover, the more I have learned about the ecology of China’s empires, the clearer it has become that my own middle-class Canadian life was made possible by the Anglo-American empire’s coercive transformation of the world’s ecosystems. I have had the luxury of traveling and learning about the world because Europeans conquered so much of it, displacing people to provide land for settlers like my family and reorganizing economies to channel resources to us. European empires built a global system of industrial capitalism so effective at enriching themselves that colonized peoples have no choice but to adopt their profligate ways if they are to escape subordination. Westerners often criticize the People’s Republic of China for its resource-intensive growth model as if we had not invented it ourselves and put China in a position in which it had little choice but to adopt it. As this book will show, rivalry between armed states has been a key driver of environmental destruction for millennia.¹⁰

I doubt my twenty-one-year-old self would have found this book very “environmental.” It is too focused on human societies. But the two subsequent decades have taught me that the story of our environments is the story of our societies themselves. Since economic productivity is the basis of political power, states have a fundamental incentive to promote economic growth, which means using more resources. Even though fossil fuels have given us much more energy to work with, plants remain our main sources of food and resources, and growing those plants requires land. If we are to reduce the destruction of the earth’s biosphere by human societies, we will have to design political systems that can prioritize long-term sustainability over economic growth. This means we will need a better understanding of what our political institutions really are. That is the topic of the next chapter.

CHAPTER ONE

The Nature of Political Power

Those who have land and herd people must heed the four seasons and watch over the granaries. If the state is wealthy, people will come from afar. If the land has been cleared for cultivation, they will settle down.

—“On Herding the People,” fourth century BCE

OVER THE PAST FEW millennia, a mere instant in the long history of life on earth, humans have come to dominate the earth’s surface. We and our livestock now constitute over 95 percent of the mammals on earth by weight and are causing one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of our planet. Why has this happened? The simple answer is that we are exploiting more and more of the earth to provide for ourselves, leaving less for other species.¹

If we want to understand how humans have been so successful (so far), we must look back not decades or centuries but a few millennia, to the origins of farming. Domesticating plants and animals enabled us to build ecosystems for ourselves and allowed our species to expand across the globe. By replacing most of the species in a given area with a few that produced for the human species, human populations could grow far larger than they could have from foraging. Farming also allowed people to produce surplus food and resources that could feed people who did things other than produce food. Over time political institutions formed that were funded by the surplus food and labor of the farming masses. As these organizations grew larger and more effective, their leaders became capable of mobilizing the resources of their populations to transform ecosystems far more profoundly than we could have done if we had remained in small, decentralized groups. Political organizations have played a central role in converting the world’s landscapes into human ecosystems and in creating the environmental crisis that we now find ourselves in. They must also be central to our attempts to solve these problems.

Walter Benjamin wrote that the cultural treasures of humanity “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Like Benjamin, I use the word “civilization” to refer to societies in which elites exploit the labor of the population to accumulate wealth and use it to fund advancements in the arts and sciences that can then be taken by members of those societies as evidence of their superiority over others. History books often describe artistic masterpieces such as sculptures and cathedrals as symbols of their times, but the only way societies could support professional artists was by mobilizing resources produced by the work of slaves, wage-laborers, and taxpaying peasants, often with considerable brutality. In the Anthropocene we must extend this argument one step further to recognize that all the achievements of human civilization have been based on destroying natural ecosystems and replacing them with anthropogenic ones like farmland or pasture. Only once extensive forests, grasslands, and wetlands had been transformed into farms could human societies produce enough surplus to support people who specialized in the arts, scholarship, governance, and war.²

Each human needs between one and three thousand calories of food per day to survive, in addition to clothing, shelter, and fuel to burn for heating and cooking. So a certain amount of the earth’s surface must be used to produce the resources that support each person, land that would otherwise be available to other species. For this reason, population is a good proxy for environmental impact in pre-industrial societies, unlike now, when wealthier people often consume more than dozens of poor people. Two thousand years ago there were over forty million people in lowland North China. If we multiply that number by the size of official farm plots at that time, it suggests that roughly 360,000 square kilometers were in use—an area around the size of Germany—and that most of the natural ecosystems of the lowlands had already been replaced with farmland.³

People who lived from foraging, fishing, and hunting could consume only a tiny percentage of the biological productivity of a given area. Domesticating plants and animals allowed people to clear away plants that they did not find useful and build ecosystems whose whole purpose was to produce for humans. This greatly increased how many people could be supported in a given area and allowed human populations to grow enormously. In North China this began with the domestication of millets and pigs in the early Neolithic and was followed in subsequent millennia by the indigenous domestication of dozens of different plants. Beginning in the third millennium BCE, domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and horses arrived from Central Asia and opened up grasslands and other marginal environments to human exploitation. Over time farming settlements became their own ecosystems, homes not only to humans and our domesticates but also to weeds, rats, bats, sparrows, and a host of insects. Dense population of humans and livestock also provided ideal conditions for many diseases. Diseases made life less pleasant for individuals but paradoxically gave agrarian populations a significant biological advantage over foragers who lacked antibodies to them. As agrarian societies developed political organizations able to organize large numbers of people to achieve specific goals, their comparative advantage over nonagricultural peoples increased even further.⁴

We humans are unusual animals, able to create a wide variety of different cultures and socioeconomic structures. We nonetheless eat, breathe, and breed like other animals, and our societies can be understood in the same ways that ecologists study other species. But human societies have their own logics, so we must combine the social and the natural sciences to understand ourselves, and this is how I propose to study political organization in early China. If ecology is the “study of the distribution and abundance of organisms and the interactions that determine distribution and abundance,” political ecology can be defined as the study of how the form and organization of states affect the distribution and abundance of organisms. In general, states encourage people to replace ecosystems that do not create taxable surpluses with organisms that do, especially grains and other domesticates.⁵

Until the use of fossil fuels vastly increased the energy available to us, virtually all energy in human societies came from photosynthesis in plants. Political leaders could not tend crops or herd livestock themselves. They could only exploit the farmers and herders who did so, which means that political power was all about controlling people. There were only a few ways that leaders could gain more power. They could find more people and land from which to extract labor and resources. They could improve agricultural productivity to increase the amount of taxable surplus each farmer produced. And they could find better ways to extract surpluses from the economy, for example, by casting coins that made it easier to convert different types of wealth into one another, thereby allowing the state to take a cut of a wider variety of economic activities. Agrarian states thus had strong incentives to occupy and populate new territory, encourage agricultural intensification, and promote economic and demographic growth. This is the ecological logic of agrarian states, and it was clearly understood by Shang Yang, the early Chinese political thinker who wrote, “If there are too many people for the land, strive to expand farmland; if there is more land than people, work to attract new colonists.”⁶

The evolution of stratified societies, in which a minority of the people lived off the labor of the majority, bears some comparison to the domestication of plants and animals. Just as it took millennia for people to fully domesticate plants and animals, the evolution of complex social structures like states was a multimillennial process in which humans became accustomed to being ruled and to giving their surplus production and labor to support the interests of a small group of rulers. The similarity of herding animals and ruling people was obvious to people across the Old World. The essay “On Herding the People,” whose opening passage serves as this chapter’s epigraph, was one of the most famous works of political theory in early China. On the other end of Eurasia, people wrote hymns with lyrics like “The lord is my shepherd,” which helped legitimize the power of the earthly lord while also glorifying the celestial one. The herding metaphor recognizes that political power entails having authority over large numbers of people and responsibility for their safety. It rarely acknowledges that the relationship between shepherds and sheep ends in slaughter.⁷

As the shepherd metaphor makes clear, people have been searching for ways to describe political power for as long as it has existed. I will define a state as an organization that extracts enough resources from society to support its administrative personnel, promulgate ideologies that encourage acceptance of its authority, and fund armed groups that use violence to defend or expand their territory and maintain control of the subject population. This definition may seem pessimistic to those of us who have the good fortune to live in a modern welfare state, but many premodern states were parasitic or predatory, giving their subjects little in return for their taxes. An empire is essentially just a very large state, but the increase in scale requires different strategies of rule. The larger the territory, the more its rulers have to deal with controlling areas that they cannot visit in person and ruling over people with different languages and cultures than their own. Regardless of scale, all competent rulers have been concerned with revenue and therefore with the economic productivity of their domains. And the more power they had, the more human labor they could mobilize to increase economic production, reshape water systems, conquer and colonize territory, and expand agriculture.⁸

This description emphasizes the perspective of those on the top of the system, but it is important to consider political organizations from the perspective of working people. Commoners have always been aware of who is collecting their taxes and rents and have always had some collective power to demand something in return. One of the most important functions of states has been to mitigate risks and disasters. Agrarian societies were beset by droughts, floods, earthquakes, and storms. They were also invaded by various kinds of pests. Dealing with these problems was a way for political leaders to legitimate their wealth and power. If they successfully mobilized workers to build infrastructure that helped people—such as walls to defend them from invaders and dikes to defend them from floods—people might value their leadership. Since taxes were often collected in the form of grain, leaders could ostentatiously redistribute grain when crops failed, which bolstered their legitimacy and ensured that their subjects survived to pay more taxes. Leaders also demonstrated the value of having someone in charge when they mobilized people to deal with short-term threats like floods or human attacks, which incidentally makes clear how the militarism of political organizations is never separate from their other capacities. States also mobilized people’s labor to build large-scale infrastructure such as aqueducts, roads, and bridges that no decentralized group could have done. States were appreciated not only for their ability to change environments for human benefit but also for their ability to prevent undesirable changes. As agrarian populations grew and devoted more land to growing a few key crops, societies tended to become more complex just as they simplified the ecosystems on which they depended. Political structures played essential roles in maintaining the resilience of these systems.⁹

Having argued that states have played an important role in environmental history, I should also emphasize that they are just one element of the fabric of the human societies that have conquered the earth. Most premodern states had little influence at the local level; their main interaction with commoners occurred when they collected taxes or organized corvée laborers, and even these were often done through local elites or tax farmers. The main agents of environmental change in premodern China, as elsewhere, were everyday people looking to improve their circumstances, from poor peasants colonizing frontiers to wealthy families draining wetlands. Empires could install networks of officials across huge areas but were usually too weak to prevent officials from embezzling funds or to support them when they came up against the interests of powerful local elites. People in China often colonized land without any aid from the state, or even illegally. Although it is poorly documented for the period covered in this book, commerce was also an important factor in transforming environments, turning plants and animals into commodities, and increasing general productivity and consumption.¹⁰

States were not the main driving force behind environmental change. They might be better described as institutions that weakly incentivized agriculture over large areas for many centuries. Simply by maintaining basic infrastructure and keeping the subcontinent more or less at peace for centuries at a time, they helped expand farmland, increase the population, and commodify nature. Only intermittently did they have the power to actively colonize new areas or build new infrastructure, but these actions often had long-lasting effects. Chinese states may have been even more dependent on agriculture than those elsewhere, or at least had less incentive to protect wild ecosystems. Rulers in South Asia had an incentive to protect the natural forests that provided them with essential war elephants, but Chinese rulers had every reason to encourage their replacement with agriculture, silviculture, and aquaculture. The longevity of these political structures is one reason that almost no trace remains of the wild fauna of lowland East Asia.¹¹

Rulers and Ruled

Six thousand years ago the people of the Yellow River valley lived in relatively egalitarian communities. A few millennia later they took it as given that they had to pay taxes to the emperor’s officials, even if they did not like it very much. How did societies become divided into rulers and ruled? In particular, how did the majority of the population come to accept the dominance of a small group of people? Unfortunately, this process is not well documented in any of the places it occurred.

We can search for the origins of political power by looking for archaeological evidence that some people convinced others to work for them or give them resources. When we see that some tombs and dwellings in a settlement became much larger and wealthier than the others, we know that some groups had found a way to extract surpluses from the rest of the community. When people began to build palaces and fortresses, we have a good reason to think that some people had gained the ability to command the labor of many others. When some towns grew far larger than others, we can guess that they were collecting resources from their hinterlands. Of course, any of these processes could also move in reverse. Perhaps a competent and aggressive ruler succeeded in gaining control over surrounding settlements only to be overthrown in a rebellion or have his domain fall apart after it was inherited by an incompetent son. Early polities were anything but stable.¹²

Archaeological evidence of increasing socioeconomic stratification in late Neolithic China makes clear that people must have begun to provide labor or goods to leaders at a time when the largest settlements had no more than a few thousand people. It is very unlikely that a group of people simply ganged up and forced everyone else to pay them taxes. Instead, the earliest such relationships were probably voluntary and negotiated. The most likely scenario is that local organizations were formed to carry out tasks that many people considered worthwhile, such as mediating disputes, organizing irrigation, fighting, or praying for rain. Communities might have agreed to provide some of their members with goods or labor while they performed these services. Once village-level institutions existed to mobilize the surplus labor or food of the population, they provided perfect vehicles for ambitious people to accumulate wealth and power. And once many communities had such institutions in place, it would not have taken long for one of these groups to try to dominate neighboring ones by employing both coercion and rewards, thereby leading to the formation of regional political entities. We can be sure that the sacrifice and feasting rituals that are so important for building political allegiances and alliances in early Chinese texts were used for these purposes long before writing was invented.¹³

One of the best-documented histories of the long-term formation of political systems comes from ancient Mesopotamia, which also provides an interesting history of changing extraction methods. Both temples and grain storage facilities existed in relatively egalitarian Neolithic towns and were presumably communal property concerned with managing community resources, including agriculture. Because they had some of the largest stores of grain and other resources in the communities, the people who controlled them gained considerable power and authority. Although the details of this process are unknown, by the late third millennium BCE most people in the region were subjects of large institutional households, including temples controlled by priestly families. Eventually some of them grew powerful enough to conquer neighboring regions and form the world’s first states. These kinds of states grew and collapsed repeatedly. By the late third millennium BCE an elite household known as the Third dynasty of Ur had managed to establish its dominance over many others. At this time, each wealthy household’s income came from the labor of farmers who had some control over their own land while providing surpluses to their rulers. In later periods elites managed to take over much of the best farmland, which left many people without the means to provide for themselves, so they were forced to exchange their labor and surplus grain for access to land by renting land or sharecropping.¹⁴ The gradual transition from landowning farmers funding communal institutions to people selling their labor to stay alive was one of the most momentous social changes in human history. As long as the relationship of extraction was understood as farmers providing grain or labor in exchange for services, the recipients were obliged to explain why they deserved this support. There was a distinct advantage to the ruling classes if they could take direct control of the land, in which case the relationship would seem to be reversed: farmers would be renting the land from its owners rather than providing unpaid service. This transition, which Karl Marx called “divorcing the worker from the means of production” and mistakenly considered a unique characteristic of capitalism, is a more sophisticated form of exploitation. It obscures the relationship of exploitation by forcing the laborer to ask for work rather than being asked to work.¹⁵

The separation of farmers from ownership of the land they work has occurred many times in human history, but it was not a characteristic of the earliest states. Early states often required their subjects to perform agricultural labor and also do labor service. This allowed states to collect surplus grain from the workers at harvest time and then feed it back to them during the off-season while they toiled for the state. For example, Inka and Aztec farmers kept the harvest from their own land but also farmed separate plots of land whose entire harvest went to elites or to the state. They also provided military and corvée labor to the state. As we will discuss in chapter 3, the situation was very similar in Zhou China. Agricultural labor service was easily converted to a tax payment, which could then be combined with a nonagricultural labor service requirement. In societies without established commercial systems for converting grain and labor into other commodities, labor and grain taxes were among the only forms in which states could extract surpluses. As markets grew, creating systems of exchanging goods and labor for one another, they made it easier for states to extract wealth from the economy. The use of money, in particular, allowed states to commute both grain tax and labor service to cash payments, which they could store indefinitely and use for a variety of purposes. Conversely, powerful states could also establish standards for exchanging commodities that were intended to facilitate administration but also had the unintended effect of facilitating commerce. This happened in the Qin Empire.¹⁶

How States Grow

In the Mesopotamian example cited above, political institutions first arose in separate communities, and eventually one of them grew strong enough to extend its control over others. It then became a rival with local groups for the area’s surpluses. This is one of the central dynamics in the history of human political organization: there is only so much surplus produced in any given place, and different elite groups will compete for it. Since complex societies include various organized power groups, central governments seeking to increase their power must reduce that of other groups, and vice-versa. If a state wants to become stronger, it must gain control of the surpluses produced by more workers, which leaves less for other elites, who can be expected to work together to prevent this from happening. This, for example, is why Rome’s ruling elite conspired to kill Julius Caesar to prevent him from becoming their monarch, and why American oligarchs promote the virtues of “small government.”¹⁷

Early political organizations were run by small groups of people connected by blood relations and trust. Their leaders had very limited power and had to devote considerable attention to retaining and attracting followers by distributing wealth in the form of gifts or feasts. When they conquered new territory, leaders could do little more than to keep the best lands for themselves and parcel the rest out to their followers, thus providing them with the means to become rivals. Even when rulers succeeded in dominating other elites with force or co-opting them with gifts and intermarriage, they still had to devote time and resources to retaining their loyalty. This was the case with Bronze Age states in China, as demonstrated by the gradual weakening of the Western Zhou state as its leaders gave their land and subjects to their followers. But the Western Zhou alliance was very strong militarily, a reminder that weakly centralized states can be powerful when elites work together to realize shared interests.¹⁸

If we place states on a spectrum of centralization, most of the highly centralized ones are modern, while many premodern political systems were so decentralized that they were more like alliances than single states. Those of us living in industrial societies have grown accustomed to large and complex state structures, but these are possible only because our societies have vastly more energy and resources than premodern ones did. Agrarian societies produced small surpluses, so even when rulers did manage to conquer large areas, it was rarely worth the added expense of trying to administer them directly. It was more efficient to delegate the administration of territory to people based in each region. When central power was strong, such polities could work as a unit, but as they weakened, they became more like alliances of independent states. The ruler directly administered his own territory but had limited control over the affairs of his nominal subordinates. This situation has been called “feudal,” but even the central governments of relatively strong early modern states often had relatively limited control of local power structures. The less centralized a state is, the less power the ruler has to affect its environments.¹⁹

One reason that only a few premodern states developed the administrative structures necessary to directly rule large areas was that they did not need to. It was cheaper to get others to extract wealth and then take a percentage of their yield. For example, the Roman state often co-opted the ruling elites of the areas that it conquered and used their existing systems of extraction. One of these was tax farming, in which rulers sold the rights to collect taxes in a specific part of their domain, as immortalized in the Christian Gospels with phrases like “tax farmers and loose women.” Tax farming remained common in early modern Europe. China’s centralized bureaucracy was unusual in the premodern world, and it tended to give Chinese states considerable administrative control and stability. Of course, even in Chinese empires wealthy families tended to have more power in local society than the emperor’s officials. But China’s bureaucratic tradition is one of the main reasons its imperial system extended over such huge territories, lasted so long, and was so often rebuilt on the earlier model after it periodically fell apart.²⁰

Bureaucracy is significant for environmental history because its hierarchical chains of command gave rulers more power over local environments than looser forms of governance had. Bureaucracy was often developed so the central government could extract resources directly from producers who had previously paid taxes to local elites. This required governments to employ more officials and find systematic ways to control them. “Bureaucracy” means “rule by desks,” and it originated as a derogatory term implying that ruling should be done by warriors or aristocrats, not by clerks. The term indicates the central importance of writing and is typically used to suggest paperwork, red tape, and other problems involved in dealing with an impersonal and rule-bound administration. Scholars of early civilizations often use “bureaucracy” to refer to any political organization that employed writing, but this is so broad as to be impractical as an analytic tool. The most useful description of bureaucracy remains that of Max Weber, whose definition emphasized (1) general rules of administrative practice, including well-defined duties and powers of each position; (2) officials perceiving officeholding as their vocation; (3) a clear, hierarchical chain of command up which successful officials hoped to move during their careers; (4) a system for training officials; and (5) officials being paid salaries that corresponded to the levels of their positions. This describes rather well the early imperial bureaucracy of China, and I use the term “bureaucracy” to refer to a system with these five characteristics.²¹

Bureaucracy is a much more stable form of governance than more loosely organized political systems, whose success was strongly dependent on the abilities of their rulers. Given that hereditary monarchies inevitably produce incompetent, underage, or insane rulers from time to time—democracies are slightly better in this regard—bureaucracy greatly strengthens the continuity of the state by putting it in the hands of people hired for their skills. Another strength of bureaucracy is that, in contrast to states administered by groups of rich men, it tends to employ people who have no other income than their salaries, making it difficult for them to develop their own rival power bases because they are dependent on their employers. Writing increased the power of central governments because it was used to inform each branch of government as to what the others were doing, to keep records, and to monitor officials. In China these practices arose during the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 BCE). Whereas earlier states had only required that scribes keep basic records and convey messages, Eastern Zhou states were expanding in size and centralizing at the same time, which required that they employ more and more officials, not only to administer their subjects, but also to police one another.

These all seem like good things, from a government’s perspective, but bureaucracy is relatively expensive. Farmers could provide only so much surplus labor and grain, and the larger a state’s bureaucracy, the closer it pushed people toward poverty or starvation. Above I used the term “surplus” as though its meaning was straightforward, but in fact the amount of labor or resources that a person can be forced to provide can vary considerably. In its most basic sense, “surplus” simply means anything a person produces beyond what is necessary for them to live. This is a useful concept in situations in which people literally cannot produce much more than they need to stay alive, the situation of many unfortunate farmers in history. However, from the state’s perspective the issue is how to push its subjects to produce more. For example, Shang Yang argued that the state should force people who lived from foraging and other itinerant livelihoods to settle down and farm since the state had no way to tax them otherwise. This is a reminder that the pressure of tax and rent collectors often compelled people to produce more than they would have otherwise and has thus been a factor increasing the intensification of agriculture. But extracting too much pushed people to passively resist, flee, or revolt and could bring down the whole state. For this reason, rulers usually preferred a “prudent and durable rate of exploitation” to strategies that maximized accumulation. The collapse of the Qin Empire proves the wisdom of this strategy, and in fact Qin remained a paradigmatic lesson throughout Chinese history on the danger of overtaxing the people.²²

Violence, Patriarchy, and State-Strengthening

The transition from village-scale societies to powerful states was accompanied by an increase in the relative power of men. Male dominance is not a fundamental characteristic of humanity, a fact made clear by the wide variety of gender relations documented in ethnographic studies of small-scale human societies. But for some mysterious reason agrarian states around the world were all ruled by kings. Women were sometimes allowed to take the throne when they had no brothers of suitable pedigree—or when they managed to wrest it from their husbands—but even in those cases most of the people running the state were men. Patriarchy is therefore a central characteristic of large-scale political organizations. I think that a key reason states have been patriarchal is that they have all been founded by hierarchically organized groups of armed men. I offer this theory hesitantly, not so much because I am convinced it is correct but because patriarchy has been a core feature of states and empires in human history and should be analyzed rather than taken for granted. It is particularly relevant to this study because the male dominance of political systems arguably has much more profound effects on the way our societies treat their environments than does the sexual division of labor within families.²³

If environmental historians are to study human societies as ecological systems, we must take seriously the fact that humans are mammals and primates. All social theories presuppose an idea of human nature, whether they acknowledge it or not, and such ideas tend to differ with respect to how they understand the relationships between humans and other animals. The version of human nature now current in the humanities sees humans as immensely adaptable and thus treats most aspects of our societies as cultural rather than biological. This is partly a reaction to the ways that scholars have historically projected their own vision of human societies onto our biology, legitimating their own ideas by arguing that they are hardwired into our species. This is generally the preferred tactic of those who believe that male dominance is the natural order of things. When we venture into the biology of human societies, we are bound to make mistakes, but it is better to err in the exploration of important topics than to avoid them altogether.

Biologists tend to assume that the sex drive, whose purpose is to increase the reproductive success of an individual’s genes, always plays some role in mammalian behavior. It is well documented across premodern human societies that powerful men often sexually exploit multiple women, producing large numbers of descendants while preventing many other men from reproducing at all. This is well documented in China, where richer men tended to have concubines, while poor men had trouble marrying, something that is still true. The implication is that the lust for power is inseparable from sexual lust. Not only do powerful men have more access to sex (not only with women, of course), but their reproductive success arguably corresponds with control over territory or resources just as in other species. Women rarely fought in ancient combat, but they were often the “causes, stakes and victims of war.”²⁴

Apart from the fact that men are bigger than women on average, the main difference between the sexes in the world before modern birth control was that women in premodern societies spent much of their adult lives pregnant and rearing children. But this, as well as their other labor, was at least as important to society as men’s work, so it did not mean that they occupied a lower status. I suspect that male dominance increased as societies became more complex because group violence played a key role in the development of political institutions. As these institutions grew in strength, they raised the social value of organized violence and those who practiced it. The rise of competing armed polities created a dynamic in which organized violence became accepted as necessary to protect communities, and the men who excelled in it gained social prestige and military power, an ideal position from which to dominate their societies. Of course, women always had considerable power to make decisions about their own lives, but their social power diminished in relation to that of men and was increasingly related to their roles as wives and mothers of men.²⁵

Violence is found in all human societies, but there is great variation in how we deal with it. Many smaller-scale societies had well-established methods of minimizing violence and reducing social hierarchies. Building political systems required breaking down these customs and replacing them with ones that valorized violence. Successful state builders like the Zhou and the Romans placed high value on military prowess and made warfare a regular part of their annual schedules. All empires in world history have arguably been formed by particularly aggressive cultural groups, such as the Romans, the Chinese empires, the early Islamic caliphates, Genghis Khan’s Mongols, and modern Europeans. Some might argue that all human groups are equally prone to violence and that those who dominate others are simply those with better skills in warfare and governance, but this ignores the central importance of culture in human societies and normalizes cultures of violence. Societies that succeed in reducing hierarchy cannot compete with those that valorize violence, and the latter’s values become accepted as normal. Given the connections between warfare, state-strengthening, and resource use, the triumph of aggressive cultures is an important trend in world environmental history.²⁶

Not only was warfare an important factor in the initial formation of states, but it has remained a key factor in the growth of political organizations throughout history. War is expensive, and it forces administrators to improve existing methods of extraction and search for new sources of income. The enormous amount of wealth that is deployed for warfare also often results in administrative and technological innovation. Within a polity, poor military performance tends to weaken established power groups and facilitate reforms. Warfare also tends to destroy polities that are not as successful in mobilizing resources as their rivals, such as the decentralized kingdom of Poland that was gobbled up by its neighbors and the once-mighty pastoralists of Inner Asia who were conquered by Romanov Russia and Qing China. Most obviously, wars are usually fought by groups of armed men in a hierarchical command structure, which places them in an ideal position from which to impose their will on their own people and on any people unable to mobilize comparable armies. The importance of resource-gathering to military success is a central element in the formation of human civilization and thus in the ecological crisis in which we now find ourselves.²⁷

Warfare is also the reason most of the world is now ruled by states. While the idea that all societies progress through defined stages of social development (social evolutionism) is still widely accepted outside of academia, there is actually no inexorable trend in societies to grow in scale or complexity. Even when societies do become more stratified and politically centralized over time, they can also move in the other direction. The reason that most people are now subjects of states is simply that states have conquered most of the world. Even in cases like that of North China, which is a classic example of a society that did in a sense evolve from small villages to huge empires, this trend is visible only from a macro perspective. If we look into any specific period of Chinese history in any depth we see not an inevitable trend toward increasing political power but rather constant fluctuation.²⁸

Just as there is no simple path along which all societies develop, there is also no straightforward correlation between warfare and political organization. It depends on the broader geopolitical context. States with few rivals and steady revenues feel little pressure to find new sources of revenue. In contrast, those engaged in long-lasting wars with powerful rivals face strong pressure to seek new ways of extracting resources from their subject populations. The Roman state is an example of the former situation. For centuries Rome did not need a sophisticated tax-generating administration because it obtained enough revenue from pillaging and taxing conquered regions. Rome faced no major military threat and gained enormous wealth from exploiting areas outside of Italy, so the Roman aristocracy had the luxury of limiting the power and growth of the government to prevent it from threatening their own massive fortunes. It was only after persistent revenue shortfalls in the third century that Rome was forced to develop a bureaucracy and rationalize taxation. Similarly, the Han, Tang, and Qing empires in China all saw long periods without serious rivals.²⁹

In contrast, when multiple states of similar strength compete, any way of increasing revenue can provide an advantage. Examples of states compelled by expensive wars to improve their extraction systems include the Hellenistic states that fought over Alexander the Great’s empire, early modern Europe, Warring States–era China, and the Han Empire during its expensive wars in Inner Asia. Many of these innovations proved unsustainable, but others laid the foundation for more powerful and intrusive states, a dynamic explained clearly by Charles Tilly:

The building of an effective military machine imposed a heavy burden on the population involved: taxes, conscription, requisitions, and more. The very act of building it—when it worked—produced arrangements which could deliver resources to the government for other purposes. (Thus almost all the major European taxes began as “extraordinary levies” earmarked for particular wars, and became routine sources of government revenue.) It produced the means of enforcing the government’s will over stiff resistance: the army. It tended, indeed, to promote territorial consolidation, centralization, differentiation of the instruments of government and monopolization of the means of coercion, all the fundamental state-making processes. War made the state and the state made war.

This passage could be applied without much variation to the Eastern Zhou period in China, as described in subsequent chapters. And while we are on the topic of state-strengthening reforms, it is worth mentioning that the entire seventy-year history of the People’s Republic of China has been a state-strengthening project to counter the threat of hostile foreign powers, and there is nothing contradictory in the fact that it has been both a geopolitical success and an environmental disaster.³⁰

The key to success in long-term warfare between equals is to improve the state’s administrative capability to mobilize resources and human labor for wars. In Zhou China, as in early modern Europe, governments took control of the subjects and lands of rival elite groups and of resources that had previously been shared by commoners. Beyond simply extracting resources from more of the existing economy, strong bureaucratic governments could extract more by reorganizing both society and the environment to make them easier to monitor and exploit. James Scott has described how early modern European states strove to make their domains more legible to administrators, remodeling society and landscapes into structures that matched administrative categories and methods. He argues that when one considers state-strengthening reforms in these terms, “processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.” The Qin Empire actually established most of these (though its land tenure was anything but freehold) and probably went further in simplifying society for administrative rationalization than any state in the world had done up to that point. But Qin collapsed, and no subsequent Chinese dynasty maintained accurate records of population or land for very long. So Scott is right that states really achieved these aims only in modern times. But Chinese states tended to remain more bureaucratic than those elsewhere, and states came to occupy an unusually central place in East Asian cultures. Governments had such a profound influence on Chinese society that even the afterlife became understood as a bureaucracy, and religious documents written for underworld officials were modeled on those of living administrators.³¹

The administrative structures and techniques of the Qin Empire have been passed down since then despite two millennia of changing political practice. This happened not because China remained immobile but because each new ruler needed an administration and China’s unparalleled tradition of historical writing gave the educated classes a detailed historical record of the administrations of previous empires. While China’s literate elite claimed to draw their ideas from the wisdom of the Zhou rulers recorded in the Confucian classics, they actually knew much more about the Qin and Han system, which was laid out clearly in texts such as Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shi ji), Ban Gu’s Han History (Han shu), and Fan Ye’s Later Han History (Hou Han shu). These histories, compiled by central government officials, contain detailed explanations of the Han dynasty’s administration as well as lively biographies of powerful men that are filled with useful lessons for aspiring administrators. These histories were extremely popular, and scholars all over East Asia learned practical administrative methods and acquired general political acumen from them. This created some continuity in the history of Chinese administration. Of course the fact that people in the region have been reading these texts since they were written is just one aspect of a more general historical continuity. Unlike in Europe, there has been no interruption of knowledge in East Asia from ancient times to the present. With brief wartime intermissions, bureaucratic administrations have existed somewhere in China since the time of the Qin Empire.

While the idea that China’s empires have modified their environments will not be controversial, it is worth outlining the ways in which they did so, a topic we will return to in chapter 6. Most obviously, the distribution of Chinese-speaking peoples, their widespread intensive agriculture, and China’s current borders are the products of many centuries of conquest and assimilation. The replacement of diverse ecosystems with farms was accompanied by the gradual replacement of diverse linguistic groups with speakers of Chinese languages. Once a given territory had been conquered, states built infrastructure and provided military backing for internal colonization. For the first millennium of their existence, the empires directly operated farms and woodlands. States modified hydrological systems by building canals and irrigation systems, as well as dikes, that turned wetlands into farmland. Government manipulation of the Yellow River dramatically affected the history of the North China Plain. States promoted new crops and farming methods and facilitated population growth by preventing famine. And of course Chinese empires became role models for neighboring states that also transformed their environments. This book will explain how that imperial system came to exist.

CHAPTER TWO

Seeds of Life

How People Came to Build Their Own Ecosystems

The five grains grow from the soil. If people tend them well then each field will produce several bushels of grain plus a second yearly harvest; and each melon, peach, date and plum plant will yield bushels of fruit; and herbs and the many vegetables will be overflowing; and every cart will have one of the six livestock or wild birds and beasts in it; and if turtles, alligators, fish and eels breed on time then each will become a multitude; and songbirds, ducks and geese will fill the sky like a sea of smoke. . . . Surely there is surplus enough to feed humanity!

—XUNZI, third century BCE

DOMESTICATING PLANTS AND ANIMALS has allowed humans to dominate large areas of the world’s land surface. The alliance between people and grasses lies at the core of our system. We now use huge areas of the earth’s surface to grow wheat, maize, and rice. Similarly, pigs and cattle now constitute almost half of the earth’s mammals by weight. And domesticated species provide us not only with food but also with building materials, medicines, clothes, and companions. Each new tamed or domesticated species can be thought of as a tool in people’s ecological toolboxes. Since each thrives in a different soil and climate, each opened a new environment to human exploitation, allowing people to replace natural ecosystems with ones that they built themselves. The more of the earth that was farmed, the more of the available sunlight and water went to humans, whose population grew. This chapter examines how this process happened in North China.¹

The history of North China’s agricultural systems is one of increasingly domesticated landscapes. Early Neolithic (i.e., agricultural) peoples grew millets while also fishing, hunting, and foraging for wild plants. As agriculture expanded, people learned to cultivate more plants, raise more animals, and breed them for desired traits. Pigs and dogs foraged around villages, later joined by chickens. Fruit and nut trees could be planted on land too steep to grow grains. Ruminants like cattle and sheep allowed people to exploit grasslands and arid places that they had previously found little use for. As agricultural systems became more sophisticated, people became capable of producing surpluses that could support specialists in craft production, warfare, religion, and administration. Agricultural surpluses were the basis of civilization. By the end of the first millennium BCE, much of the forest and grassland in the lowlands of the Yellow River valley had been replaced by grain fields, vegetable plots, and fruit trees. Wild animals were gradually eliminated from the landscape and from people’s diets.

This chapter reviews the formation of North China’s agricultural system from its beginnings until the Zhou period (1046–221 BCE). It synthesizes results that archaeologists and scientists have published over the past two decades with information from ancient texts like the Book of Odes. Comparing archaeological evidence with written and excavated sources reveals the biases of each type of data and allows us to guess what information each leaves out. Many of the processes discussed in this chapter occurred across Eurasia, so we will move between large-scale trends and the specific case of the central Yellow River valley, which was among the most densely populated regions in East Asia for much of the Neolithic. But before getting into domestication we will review the geography of the study region and briefly describe the diverse ecosystems that were transformed by the rise of agricultural civilization.

Geography, Climate, and Ecology

This book is focused on Shaanxi’s Guanzhong Basin and the surrounding regions: the dry Loess Plateau to the north, the forested Qinling Mountains to the south, and the valleys that stretch eastward to the “Central Plain” around Luoyang, Henan (map 2). The Guanzhong Basin is the lower valley of the Wei River, the Yellow River’s largest tributary, so I will refer to this whole region as the central Yellow River valley. Most early Chinese states and empires were based either in the center of the Guanzhong near the modern city of Xi’an, or 300 kilometers to the east around Luoyang. The most fertile and populous part of ancient East Asia was the North China Plain to the east, but the Guanzhong was often chosen as a capital because it was surrounded by mountains and the Yellow River: a natural fortress. The Guanzhong is also free of the massive floods that occasionally devastate the North China Plain. This section will review the region’s climate and physical geography before turning to its ecology. I encourage readers interested in these topics to consult my other work.²

East Asia’s climate, and therefore its vegetation, is dominated by the monsoons. As the Eurasian continent warms in the spring and summer, its warm air rises and pulls moisture inland from the ocean so that most rain falls in the summer. Cold winters have the opposite effect, blowing cold, dusty air out from Inner Asia. The study region is situated around 34 degrees latitude, as are Los Angeles and Lebanon, but it is somewhat cooler than those places because most of it sits over four hundred meters in elevation. The fluctuation of the monsoons means that the level of annual precipitation fluctuates dramatically, from as low as four hundred millimeters in some years to over nine hundred in others. The region’s high evaporation rate also reduces the amount of moisture available to plants. While enough rain falls most years for farmers to grow millet without irrigation, even hardy millets would die in the driest years. Farmers in the region now have access to irrigation, which allows them to grow various crops, but for much of the period covered by this book farmers relied on hardy millets that could withstand all but the driest years.

The climate has also played an important role in creating the region’s land surface. Over the past few million years the world has cooled, and much of Inner Asia has become a desert whose vegetation is too sparse to protect its soils from wind. Storms have blown so much of this silt eastward that it has accumulated in layers tens of meters deep across an area of four hundred square kilometers, most of which lies north of the Wei River. This soil is called loess, and the region is known as the Loess Plateau (fig. 1). Shallower loess deposits are found across a much larger area. Most soils in the fertile river valleys of North China are composed to some degree of loess eroded from the plateau. As farmers and their flocks damaged the vegetation that held down the soil in the loess region, more soil washed into waterways, raising their beds and increasing the numbers of floods downstream.³

Map 2. The Guanzhong Basin and surrounding regions. To see where this is located in East Asia, see the rectangle on map 1. The star indicates the approximate location of figure 1.

Over the past two million years the earth’s climate has swung between cold glaciations and warmer interglacial periods. Human civilization has arisen within the current interglacial period known as the Holocene (the past 11,000 years). Twenty thousand years ago, during the most recent glaciation, North China was a cold steppe home to now-extinct species like mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. Some of the species from that time survived into historic times, including horses, humans, sika deer, and aurochs (the wild ancestors of domestic cattle). As the climate warmed, trees migrated northward into the Yellow River valley and the climate arrived at a temperature similar to that of the present in the early Holocene around ten thousand years ago.⁴

Figure 1. Loess hills overlooking the Yellow River in Lingbao County, Henan.

From around seven thousand to three thousand years ago, a period known as the Holocene Megathermal, the climate was slightly warmer and wetter than at present. It was roughly 1.5 degrees warmer and received around two hundred millimeters more precipitation per year. Earlier generations of scholars often believed that the climate at that time was much warmer than now because of the discovery in North China of species now found only far to the south. They reasoned that since animals like rhinoceroses are now found in the tropics, North China must once have had a tropical climate. But improvements in climate science have made clear that these species were actually eliminated from the Yellow River valley by human activity, not climate change. Our perception of the “natural” ranges of East Asia’s mammals is based on the observations of scientists over the past two centuries, when China’s ecosystems had already been transformed by human activity. In fact, North China’s climate in the Holocene Megathermal was not too different from its climate today. For example, the climate of the Guanzhong Basin at that time was similar to the modern climate of southern Henan, just a few hundred kilometers to the southeast. This warmer and wetter period ended between four thousand and three thousand years ago as the climate became slightly cooler and drier. It has stayed like that, on average, into modern times.⁵

It is tempting to try to link that period’s drying climate to changes in human societies. However, paleoclimate data tell us only about gradual changes in long-term averages, not the shorter events that really matter to farmers—like droughts and violent storms. The only exception are major floods, which leave distinctive fine-grained sediments. The drying trend probably made a difference in marginal zones that had just barely enough precipitation to grow millets. But for the most part we still lack the type of evidence necessary to understand the role of climate in the history of this period. It is especially complicated to isolate climate as a variable for this period because sheep and cattle happened to arrive around the same time. Herding these animals helped people subsist on arid landscapes precisely at the time when large areas of the Loess Plateau were becoming too dry for farming.

Chinese civilization has always been based in arable river valleys and plains. These are geologically young parts of the landscape composed of sediments eroded from surrounding loess and rocks. In terms of geology, the Wei River and the Yellow River to its east flow in a 1000-kilometer east-west geological crack between the North China Plate and the South China Plate. These came together over two hundred million years ago. The North China Plate is over two billion years old, and its features have been worn down over the ages. This is why the Loess Plateau’s hills are low and rolling, though they have become more dramatic in geologically recent time after being blanketed by a thick layer of loess, which erodes to form steep gullies. South of the Guanzhong, the steep slopes and narrow valleys of the Qinling Mountains are much younger, having risen over the past fifty million years along with the Tibetan Plateau. The Qinling Mountains reach their highest point at Mount Taibai (3,767 meters) and become smaller to the east. They are covered in lush forests because the cold temperatures of the high mountains force clouds moving northwestward from the ocean to drop their moisture. This casts a rain shadow to the north so that the Guanzhong Basin and the Loess Plateau are comparatively dry.

North China’s vegetation is often familiar to people from Europe or North America because the forests of all three regions evolved together, and plants have continued to migrate between them. Northern temperate forests formed in northern polar regions over fifty million years ago when the world was warm, and gradually moved southward, blanketing large swaths of the northern hemisphere. Since then, the earth has cooled and mountain ranges have risen, blocking precipitation from moving into the continent and causing grasslands to replace forests in the dry interiors. This process left both Eurasia and North America with forests in coastal or mountainous areas separated by vast inland grasslands and deserts. Between the two biomes of forests and grasslands lie savannas in which trees and shrubs grow in wetter areas and grasses and herbaceous plants dominate drier ones. The Guanzhong Basin lies in just such a boundary, between eastern forests and Inner Asian grasslands. Until people converted it to farmland, much of the region was covered with grasses, shrubs, and herbaceous plants like asters and Artemisia, while trees, including oaks, elms, cypresses, and pines, grew in valleys and other wet areas.⁶

Unlike the temperate forests of Europe and North America, which are divided from those in the tropics by seas and deserts, East Asia’s forest zone stretches all the way from Malaysia to Siberia, forming a continuum from the tropics to the taiga. This allowed the region’s flora and fauna to become remarkably diverse because they could migrate freely to the south or north as the climate shifted. East Asia was also spared glaciation because Inner Asia was so dry that ice sheets never formed there. In contrast, glaciers have repeatedly plowed over Europe and North America over the past two million years. In those places, flora migrating south encountered the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico, and many of them became extinct. Because of this, East Asia has the most diverse temperate ecosystems in the northern hemisphere. This diversity provided people with a great variety of plants and animals to domesticate and facilitated the rise of civilization there. But civilization has dramatically reduced this diversity, replacing virtually all of the natural ecosystems of lowland East Asia with farmland. Most trees that now grow in the Yellow River valley’s lowlands are those planted by people, mostly fruit trees or fast-growing timber trees like poplars. Forests survive only in high mountains like the Qinling.⁷

North China was also home to a diverse array of animals (fig. 2). Large herbivores included rhinoceroses, aurochs, wild water buffaloes, wild horses, and several species of deer. Carnivores included tigers, leopards, black and brown bears, wolves, dholes, raccoon dogs, and various smaller cats and weasels. Moles, shrews, bamboo rats, rock squirrels, porcupines, and badgers burrowed in the ground. Squirrels scampered in the trees. And various toads, geckos, lizards, and snakes lived in the forests and grasslands. Most of these species are now gone, or rare. Only the birds still retain any trace of their former diversity, because they can fly. I have watched birds across the region and have found that the most common birds now are sparrows, swallows, swifts, bulbuls, doves, wagtails, and magpies. Black kites and crows like rooks and jackdaws were also once common but are now rare. Wetlands once flourished in the summer rainy season along waterways and in poorly drained areas. They were home to hard- and soft-shelled turtles, frogs, toads, and salamanders. People regularly ate freshwater snails and mussels. The Qinling’s waterways are still home to the world’s largest amphibian, the endangered Chinese giant salamander, which grows up to two meters long and weighs up to fifty kilograms. In the streams south of Xi’an I have seen mallards, mandarin ducks, common kingfishers, little egrets, black-crowned night herons, and sandpipers. And of course rivers and wetlands were home to a wide variety of fish.⁸

This was the environment inhabited by the first farmers in the region. Although they came to depend more and more on domesticated plants and animals over the millennia, people continued to fish, hunt, and forage for wild plants, mushrooms, and aquatic creatures throughout the period of this study. The mythical transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer was actually a transition to farmer-fisher-hunter-forager.

The Origins of Food Production, 8000–5000 BCE

The domestication of plants and animals allowed our species to take over the world. Until a few decades ago, most scholars agreed that this was a wonderful thing. This is not surprising since scholars tend to come from agricultural societies in which it is widely believed that a life of sedentary farming is better than one of foraging, fishing, and hunting. This agricultural bias is so strong that scholars have only recently recognized it as such. Some have gone further, idealizing pre-agrarian life. We now know that foraging people are often aware of the possibility of growing their own food. Rather than being ignorant of farming, they may choose to avoid it because they already have a good diet and are not attracted by the heavy labor and reduced dietary variety of agrarian life. The reason agriculture has become the main subsistence strategy around the world is not that it makes life better. Rather it creates much denser populations, so that farming societies have the numbers, the complex social organizations, and the diseases to conquer foraging peoples. The entire Sino-Tibetan language family may have originated with the early farmers of the Yellow River valley, who spread across the continent as their numbers continued to grow, absorbing or eliminating other languages along the way.⁹

Figure 2. (overleaf) Native mammals of the central Yellow River valley. Larger animals are shown on the right, with smaller ones on the left at a different scale. For more information, see Lander and Brunson, “Wild Mammals of Ancient North China.”

Agriculture probably arose in the Holocene because it was the first interglacial warm period in which modern Homo sapiens were spread around the world. Farming flourished in the unusually stable Holocene climate. The first modern humans arrived in East Asia as early as 80,000 years ago. Paleolithic (pre-agricultural) humans seem to have prospered in the warming climate after the last glaciation. They invented pottery and better stone tools and found many new ways to exploit plant foods, a precursor to growing their own food. Nothing more than stone tools survives of their material culture, but they surely had a deep knowledge of the useful properties of organic materials and how to process them into food, clothing, and tools. Skills like basket weaving, whose traces are preserved in later pottery impressions, were essential for Paleolithic life.¹⁰

The “agricultural revolution” was once thought to have been an event that occurred relatively quickly, but in fact it began over ten thousand years ago and is not over yet. The archaeology of early domestication in China is not well developed, and we do not really understand how plants and animals were first domesticated there. Ethnographic research has shown that people in small foraging societies usually obtain resources from a defined area that centers on a place to which they usually return to share food. They need to have an intimate knowledge of which wild plants and animals are available at each time of year and usually have systems to regulate access to these resources. Based on this knowledge, people modify their environments in various ways, some of which increase the growth of useful plants and animals at the expense of ones for which they have no use. For example, they might burn forests to create meadows that attract deer or modify waterways to facilitate fishing. Given their profound knowledge of their ecosystems and how they could modify them, ancient people living in productive and diverse regions like North China must have understood how to shift toward a subsistence system more heavily focused on producing their own foods, but had no specific reason to do so as long as it was easier to gather wild resources. One of their main goals was surely to reduce the risk of starving during the winter and spring months when food was scarce. Early agriculture may have been an unintended consequence of foragers making decisions about how to obtain food from landscapes that they were beginning to modify.¹¹

Archaeologists no longer think in terms of a simple dichotomy between wild and domesticated species. When people harvest grasses and replant their seeds, the grasses quickly evolve traits suitable to human cultivation. But if people stop harvesting them, they soon develop traits they need to survive without humans. The inadequacy of the wild/domesticated dichotomy is also clear when we consider how people can reorganize their ecosystems without any domesticated species. Just by discarding the seeds of the fruit they collected, people often created accidental orchards around their villages. These fruit and nut trees created productive landscapes that lasted longer than individual human lives, creating multigenerational links to groves or orchards of which people might feel some kind of ownership. In the long term, their preference for larger and tastier fruits was a selection process that modified the plants themselves, but human action transformed the landscape long before this happened. The domestication of animals also involved long periods in which people managed the populations of species they hunted without consciously breeding them for desired traits. When I was in school I was taught that humans had captured and intentionally tamed the animals they sought to domesticate. However, it turns out that it took thousands of years of herding animals for people to build up the skills to intentionally catch and tame animals. This did eventually happen with horses and camels, but it is a relatively unusual form of domestication.¹²

The first species with which humans formed an alliance—for it was clearly a relationship of equals—was a powerful carnivore. Wolves once lived across the northern hemisphere, from the tundra through the forests and into the deserts of Eurasia and the Americas. They live and hunt in hierarchical packs, running at high speeds to take down large herbivores. They also hunt a wide variety of smaller animals such as snakes, birds, and rodents. Wolves were probably attracted to human settlements for their food scraps and gradually formed a symbiotic relationship with humans, after which people bred them to encourage various useful traits. The earliest evidence of dogs in North China dates to around ten thousand years ago, but we can assume that they were there before that since there is earlier evidence of dogs farther north. Dogs help people hunt and herd, but their most useful traits are their loyalty to those who feed them and their noisy and aggressive behavior toward strangers of any species. Along with their superior senses of hearing and smell, these traits make them the perfect alarm system. Groups of dogs not only intimidate large mammals like tigers and humans; they also hunt small animals that get into granaries and other food caches, creating a zone around human settlements that is safe to familiar people and animals but intimidating to almost any size of intruder, a characteristic as useful to people in a small hunting camp as to a farming village. And, to top it off, they are edible.¹³

Millets were the most important crops in North China’s history, the key plants that allowed people to gradually become sedentary (fig. 3). The main millets domesticated in the region were broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum, also called common millet) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica). Both are annual grasses with sturdy stems whose seeds are protected by hard hulls that allow them to be stored for several years when dried. Unlike perennial plants, some of which grow for many years, annuals produce seeds and then die at the end of each year. Annuals like millets and soybeans sprout in the spring, when the spring monsoon rains fall in the loess lands. They specialize in colonizing disturbed ecosystems and were probably common plants in the areas around human settlements.¹⁴

Millets are among the easiest grains to cultivate and the fastest to ripen, and they require relatively little water, which explains why they have been cultivated in so many parts of the world. Broomcorn millet has a growing season of about two months and can be grown in areas with four to five hundred millimeters of rain, while foxtail millet has a growing season of three months and requires more water. Recent research has shown that people ate wild millets thousands of years before they began to manage them. As people began to collect and then sow their seeds, millets adapted by evolving traits that facilitated the dispersal of their seeds, thereby beginning the domestication process. Some sites in early Neolithic North China had large numbers of grain storage pits and are the earliest known sites in East Asia in which people relied heavily on grain. The stores of millet at the Cishan site date as early as 8000 BCE, and the earliest millets widely agreed to show morphological evidence of domestication date to around 6000 BCE.¹⁵

As in other parts of the world, cultivating grains allowed people to store large quantities of food, allowing for population growth, increased population density, and the geographical expansion of agricultural peoples. The widespread cultivation of grains also made possible the formation of political organizations because, unlike many other food crops, grains grow above ground and all ripen at once, making it easier for elites to take their cut of the harvest. Grains, along with honey and wild fruit, were also fermented to make alcohol, which not only relieves pain and infection but also played an important role in social life from family gatherings to religious and political rituals. It is even possible that making alcohol was a main incentive for early foragers to cultivate grain. Millets remained the dominant grains in the region throughout the period of this study, though people also grew wheat, rice, and soybeans.¹⁶

Figure 3. Eurasian tree sparrows eating foxtail millet. Like pigeons, mice, and many other animals, sparrows capitalized on the spread of agriculture and became common, and vocal, members of the agrarian ecosystem.

The first people to cultivate millets were not farmers in any standard sense. They continued to travel between places that had wild resources such as fish or nuts at specific times of year. This seasonal cycle allowed them to plant millet at specific places and then return to harvest it later. They could choose to cultivate less when other food was abundant, but they could also grow a lot of millet if they wanted to. Although people were storing grain at Cishan in the North China Plain as early as 8000 BCE, archaeologists have yet to find any sites in the Guanzhong dating between 10,000 and 7000 BCE (map 3). Moreover, archaeological remains from the subsequent Laoguantai period (7000–5000 BCE) are both sparse and shallow. Despite the paucity of archaeological evidence, studies of charcoal in soil show that burning increased significantly in the Laoguantai period. This is presumably evidence of the region’s first farmers burning land to cultivate grain. Around the world early farmers tended to regularly burn the vegetation surrounding their settlements. This could have destroyed the vegetation that held soil in place and caused the erosion that can be seen in the archaeological record, though our earliest evidence of this comes from later periods.¹⁷

Map 3. Early Neolithic sites mentioned in the text.

Of the twenty-odd Laoguantai culture sites, Dadiwan is the best preserved and excavated. It is situated in the hills 100 kilometers to the northwest of the Guanzhong. For most of the sixth millennium BCE the site was seasonally occupied by people who subsisted largely on foraging and hunting but grew and stored broomcorn millet to eat and to feed to their dogs. Artifacts excavated from the Guanzhong suggest that farming was not a central part of subsistence at this time. They included a variety of nonagricultural tools such as bone arrowheads, shell- and stone-cutting tools, and barbed bone spearheads possibly used to spear fish. Stable isotopes from a small sample of human bones suggest that the people ate significant amounts of millet—though less than people a few millennia later—as well as plenty of fish and mollusks.¹⁸

Human populations were low, but they still seem to have reduced the diversity of animals in the plain. Archaeological sites in the forested mountains to the west of the Guanzhong contained a much greater diversity of animals than those in the plain. The greatest diversity of mammals was discovered at the Guantaoyuan site, which is situated on a terrace over thirty meters above the Wei River in the mountains west of the Guanzhong. Some agricultural tools were excavated, but the faunal assemblage, as well as spears and a fishing hook, show that these people did plenty of hunting and fishing. Around half of the remains came from seven species of deer. Other remains included carp, eagles, cranes, pheasants, golden snub-nosed monkeys, foxes, hog badgers, black bears, rhinoceroses, water buffaloes, aurochs, and gorals (similar to mountain goats). This was clearly a situation in which a small number of people took full advantage of the diversity of the region’s wildlife. Most later sites have far fewer species. It is worth noting that we do not have a very representative faunal record because until recently archaeologists in China rarely employed screens at archaeology digs, so they missed most of the bones of small animals.¹⁹

In terms of total numbers, deer and pigs made up most of the faunal remains excavated from Neolithic sites in this region. Wild pigs live in a wide variety of environments and are famous for their ability to eat almost anything, including acorns, insects, fungi, and carrion. Like dogs, pigs were attracted to human settlements for their edible refuse, something that people probably appreciated and encouraged because it tidied up their settlements and made pigs easier to kill and eat. Pigs lived alongside humans in a kind of semidomesticity for millennia. Most pigs at Dadiwan were killed when they were young, which suggests that they were a managed population, but the carbon isotopes in their bones suggest that they mainly ate wild foods. People did not necessarily aim to domesticate pigs, but they obviously would have preferred those that were less skittish or aggressive. This gradually caused more docile breeds to develop, which, as in the case of other domesticated animals, reduced the sizes of their brains. Humans still had plenty of wild animals to choose from at this time, so pigs would have to wait a few millennia to become people’s favorite source of meat.²⁰

Deer specialize in disturbed environments, which made them one of the few large mammals that could benefit from the early spread of farming. By providing deer with concentrated food sources, grain fields attracted them to settlements, where people could hunt them. More importantly, early farmers cleared patches of land and then abandoned them after a few seasons, creating a patchwork of vegetation types—perfect deer habitat. The most common deer excavated in North China are sika deer, which are relatively large (60–140 kilograms) generalists native to the temperate-subtropical forest region of East Asia. The closely related red deer (known in North America as elk) were also hunted. Elaphures (Père David’s deer) are around the same size as those two, but they specialize in river valleys and wetlands, as do the small water deer. Both are frequently found in lowland sites. Other commonly hunted deer were roe, a smaller northern species, and musk deer, dog-sized deer that defend their forest territories with sharp fangs.

People also hunted several other species of large mammals, but these animals had less to gain than deer from the spread of farming, and all of them eventually disappeared from the region. Asian two-horned (“Sumatran”) rhinoceroses were native to the region, which shows that the current tropical distribution of rhinoceroses is the result of humans’ extirpating them from temperate East Asia. Aurochs, the wild ancestors of domesticated cattle, were also native to the region, but are now extinct. Their history remains poorly understood because their bones are easily confused with those of domesticated cattle. The water buffaloes excavated from many sites and frequently depicted on Bronze-Age ritual vessels are not the ancestors of domesticated water buffaloes, as was once thought, but are rather a wild species that is also now extinct. Domesticated water buffaloes were later brought from India to China. Other species excavated in the area include raccoon dogs, wild cats, porcupines, badgers, and gazelles. People, in other words, were just one of the animals in the landscape.²¹

Early Sedentary Societies, c. 5000–3000 BCE

People of the central Yellow River valley first came to rely heavily on domesticated plants and animals during the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, the time of the Yangshao archaeological culture. This is when people settled in villages and their populations began to grow (map 4). Year-round settlements left much more substantial archaeological remains than the seasonal camps of earlier times, and the Guanzhong is home to several of the best-preserved and -excavated Neolithic sites in China. The region was one of the most densely settled areas of East Asia at this time. Both pollen and zooarchaeological evidence suggest that humans were a significant factor in the region’s ecology. Nonetheless, the population was still much smaller than it would later become. Villages that were home to a few hundred people were scattered across the landscape, leaving plenty of room for wild plants and animals, which remained important in people’s diets.²²

As people became increasingly sedentary, they were able to collect more things and put more effort into producing them. The quantity and quality of pottery increased.²³ People had previously worn mostly skins and furs, but they began to make more of their textiles from plants like hemp. We know this because sites from this period contain many spindle whorls, which were used to spin fibers into thread. This period also has the earliest evidence of differences between families in terms of wealth or status. Whereas houses in fifth-millennium-BCE settlements were roughly equal in size, later sites often had one building that was significantly larger and clearly differentiated from other buildings, indicating either that some families achieved a favored status or that buildings were constructed for community activities. There is also evidence from burials that males were beginning to occupy a higher social position than women, which suggests that inequality between the sexes began as soon as material inequalities began to emerge.²⁴

The maps of archaeological sites in this chapter show that Neolithic people tended to concentrate along waterways and avoided plains without running water. It should be emphasized that maps 4 and 5 are not the results of systematic surveys, nor do they depict all sites from a specific time period. Rather, they depict all known settlements of specific archaeological cultures as identified by archaeologists. They depict all known sites from very long periods, which means that most of these sites were not occupied at the same time. Although some of the sites contain thick cultural deposits and seem to have been used repeatedly or perhaps even continuously for centuries, others are shallow and were inhabited briefly. There were undoubtedly still foraging groups who migrated to exploit seasonal resources and whose short-term settlements are unlikely to be found by archaeologists. Even in permanently occupied sites people would not have constantly tilled the same fields. They would have farmed each for a few years and then abandoned it for any number of years before burning it and planting it again. Land was abundant, and the villagers could practice relatively long fallows even while living at a single site, which saved them from having to fertilize the fields.²⁵

Map 4. (overleaf) Archaeological sites of the Yangshao culture. Each dot indicates an archaeological site identified by archaeologists as belonging to the Yangshao culture (c. 5000–3000 BCE). The numbers indicate the general locations of ① Beishouling 北首嶺, ② Anban 案板, ③ Banpo 半坡, ④ Jiangzhai 姜寨, ⑤ Lingkoucun 零口村, ⑥ Shijia 史家, and ⑦ Xipo 西坡.

The early Yangshao sites of Jiangzhai and Banpo, both east of Xi’an, are by far the best-excavated villages in the Guanzhong in any period. Like other villages from this period, they centered on a communal open space surrounded by a ring of houses, around which they dug ditches about five meters deep. These ditches may have served for defense from humans or wild animals and perhaps also as gardens. The division of these villages into several compounds of about the same size suggests that there was little socioeconomic stratification. Banpo was one of the first Chinese Neolithic sites to be extensively excavated, in the 1950s. For decades it was one of the main sites upon which scholars based their analysis of China’s prehistory. Thousands of artifacts were discovered at the site, including ceramics, stone-cutting tools, grinding stones, and various tools made of bone and antler, such as needles and arrowheads. Vessel types included pots used to carry water, tripods placed over fires for cooking, large storage jars, and polished red ware for eating. Cutting tools made of shell and ceramic were probably used to harvest grain. Spindle whorls and impressions of basket weaves on pottery show that people wove various plants into textiles and other objects. People seem to have eaten plenty of fish. Notched stones assumed to be fish net weights were found at many sites, as were bone fishhooks and ceramics with fish painted on them.²⁶

Fifteen kilometers northeast of Banpo, the Jiangzhai site consisted of more than sixty houses clustered into five or so groups, four of which clearly had one building larger than the others. These have been interpreted as representing a division of the village into extended family groups. There were some differences of wealth between households as well as indications of economic specialization, both of which suggest that the society was gradually becoming divided into family groups that held wealth privately. Like other contemporary sites, Jiangzhai’s material culture included a variety of stone and bone tools, spindle whorls, and ceramics.²⁷

Jiangzhai’s pollen record shows the usual predominance of Artemisia and other herbaceous plants, plus a mix of coniferous and deciduous trees. Ten pollen samples taken from the Lingkoucun site to the east suggest that villagers cleared the woodlands around their settlements. During the four centuries after 5400 BCE, tree pollen at that site declined from an average of 17 percent to 3 percent, while grass pollen rose from an average of 13 percent to 80 percent. The samples from the earlier period include pollen from spruce, fir, pine, hemlock, hazel, birch, oak, elm, hackberry, and wingnut, but only pine was consistently found in the later periods. People probably cleared most of the woods around the site for firewood and land to farm. The percentage of Typha (cattails or bulrushes) also declined over time, which indicates a reduction of wetlands in the area.²⁸

Human skeletons from this period were relatively tall and had few physiological deficiencies. They also had well-used teeth with few caries, very different from the teeth of later people who ate lots of boiled grain. All of this suggests that they had a healthy mixed diet composed of both wild and domesticated species. The analysis of isotopes in human bones shows that Yangshao people depended more on millets and pigs than had earlier people. Millets were the main staple of Yangshao villages, but chestnut, hazelnut, pine nut, and hackberry seeds found at Banpo suggest that nuts and fruits were also important. Wild walnuts have been found at other Neolithic sites and may have been gathered in the Guanzhong as well. Nuts are nutritious and durable and were probably an important food source at some times of year. Less palatable nuts, such as acorns, could still provide plenty of food if crops failed. As agricultural populations grew in subsequent millennia, the people cleared forests and their nut trees, reducing the resilience of farming communities to crop failures. There is also evidence that people may have brewed beer at this time.²⁹

In these early villages, pigs and dogs wandered freely. Pigs became an inseparable part of human communities at this time, though people still also ate plenty of deer and other animals. Pigs foraged for their own food, cleaned up village refuse, and ate any extra or spoiled crops. The pigs of Neolithic China are the ancestors of China’s indigenous domestic pigs, which early modern Europeans bred with their own hogs to create the breeds now exploited in industrial pig farming globally. People in Henan tended to eat more pigs than their neighbors in the Guanzhong, who ate more wild animals. China’s dogs gradually became smaller. The remarkable similarity of the dogs that roam freely in human communities around the world suggests that there is some evolutionary advantage in that niche for brown dogs that weigh about fifteen kilograms. From this period until recent decades, people, dogs, and pigs have lived together in China, sharing each other’s sounds, smells, and even diseases.³⁰

People had already reduced the diversity of wildlife in the plain by this time, but farming villages were still outposts of humanity surrounded by wild spaces. Animals excavated from sites in the Guanzhong Plain include wild sheep (probably argali), wild horses, raccoon dogs, dholes, badgers, hog badgers, hedgehogs, short-faced moles, five kinds of deer (red, sika, musk, water, and roe), as well as pheasants, pelicans, eagles, cranes, carp, soft-shelled turtles, and freshwater snails. This shows that people gathered animal protein from forests, wetlands, and mountains. The contemporaneous site at Dadiwan, in the mountains to the west, included even more diverse wildlife. In addition to those mentioned above, it had leopards, tigers, leopard cats, flying squirrels, rhinoceroses, wild horses, serows, and a single mysterious elephant bone. Most of these animals would once have inhabited the plains (the goatlike serow and argali sheep live only in high mountains), so the absence of these other animals from sites in the Guanzhong Plain was probably due to human activity. Of course, we cannot be sure that animals whose bones were not found in Neolithic sites were absent from the region.³¹

Let us now turn to the fourth millennium BCE, the second half of the Yangshao period. The population continued to grow. Several sites of this period are larger than any earlier site and contain sizeable buildings and rammed-earth walls that suggest growing social stratification and intersettlement violence. In particular, the middle Yangshao Xipo site in Henan and the late Yangshao strata at Dadiwan and at Anban in the western Guanzhong were much larger than other settlements in their regions. They were probably regional centers. All three settlements had one building that was significantly larger than the others, evidence either of growing inequality or of centralized ritual activity.³²

The trend toward more farming and less hunting continued in the fourth millennium. At Jiangzhai, the percentage of hoes and other farming tools increased to one-third of the total tools found. The quality of these tools also improved, with most stone tools being polished and many having holes drilled through them. New agricultural tools came into use, such as rectangular to semicircular knives of stone and ceramic, along with stone and mussel-shell sickles, both of which were probably used for harvesting grains. As in the early Yangshao, fish net weights and spindle whorls are evidence of string- and cloth-making. There seems to have been a gradual reduction in the number of fish spears, but not net weights. An increased use of nets could indicate that larger fish were becoming less common as fishing pressure increased, making spears less useful than nets. Nets can have a greater impact on fish populations because they catch smaller fish.³³

Foxtail millet gradually overtook broomcorn millet as the main crop. As millet fields came to occupy larger areas, various disturbance-adapted plants moved into them and became agricultural weeds, most notably wild millets, but also herbs such as purslane, cinquefoil, bedstraw, perilla, chenopods, and knotweed. Chenopods (e.g., lamb’s quarters) and perilla may have been cultivated. Soybeans were a weedy plant that grew around human settlements and produced nutritious seeds. At some point people began to select and plant soybeans with higher levels of oil content, eventually leading to the formation of oilier cultivars. People also planted dry rice, which was a well-established crop in the Yangzi valley by this time, but it required more water than millets and remained a minor crop in the central Yellow River region.³⁴

Millets are more than 10 percent protein, but they are low in lysine and other amino acids, so overreliance on them causes malnutrition as well as caries. The poor oral health in the skulls excavated from the mid-Yangshao Xipo site suggests that those people’s diets were overly dependent on grains. That site had a higher population density than any site in the Guanzhong. It is probably not a coincidence that the earliest traces of malnutrition come from the largest settlement of the time. Growing populations often overexploit resources that could be hunted or foraged, forcing them to rely more heavily on grains, which has been the general dietary trend for most of China’s history. There was also a greater difference in body sizes between males and females at Xipo than at smaller sites, suggesting preferential treatment of boys in situations of food scarcity. Along with the evidence of increasing differences between men’s and women’s tombs mentioned above, we can vaguely discern the formation of gender inequalities. The transition toward a sedentary lifestyle allowed women to have more children, which reduced their mobility and led to a more gendered division of labor by restricting women to work that could be done around the home.³⁵

People were continually experimenting with plants and learning to cultivate more of them. Several of the world’s most popular fruits were domesticated in China, but we know little about this history. The archaeological study of plant remains is a fairly new field in China, and archaeologists are more likely to recover plants that were eaten year-round rather than seasonal ones such as fruits. The poems in the first-millennium BCE Book of Odes mention jujubes, a.k.a. Chinese dates (Ziziphus jujuba), and several fruits of the Prunus genus, probably including peaches, apricots, and cherries. The earliest peach stones similar to those of modern domesticated forms were found in lower Yangzi sites of the fourth millennium BCE, and genetic research suggests that cherries were first domesticated around the Sichuan Basin. The Odes also mention various pears or crab apples, as well as Chinese quince, though none of these were necessarily domesticated. Domesticated apples, which are now one of the most common fruits in the region, probably arrived in China from Central Asia sometime in the past two millennia. We can be sure that future research will reveal a long history of fruit cultivation in North China. Cultivating fruit and nut trees allows people to cultivate sloping land unsuitable for farming and to plant trees far from their homes that they need visit only at harvest time.³⁶

Just as people’s dependence on cultivated plants increased in this period, the ratio of domesticated animals to wild ones also increased. This was especially clear at large sites such as Xipo, where pigs constituted over four-fifths of animal remains. Pigs and sika deer remained the most common animals at most sites in the Guanzhong. In addition to those, the Dongying site contained remains of aurochs, wild water buffaloes, water and musk deer, badgers, cats, and wild sheep. It was not until the arrival of domesticated sheep and cattle in the subsequent Longshan period that domesticated animals mostly replaced wild ones in people’s diets.³⁷

As agriculture occupied more of the landscape, various plants and animals came to inhabit it. Weeds and insects flourished in farmed fields, as did hedgehogs, hares, and hamsters. Rodents such as mice and rats took advantage of all the food in settlements. Sparrows, pigeons, and other birds specialized in eating agricultural crops and their insect pests. Bats and swallows learned to roost in buildings, perfect locations from which to hunt the many insects that flew around villages. Domesticated cats had not yet arrived in China from Southwest Asia, but wild cats frequented human settlements to hunt all these small animals. Farming villages were becoming their own ecosystems.³⁸

Agricultural societies were expanding, as was their environmental impact. Systematic archaeological surveys in western Henan revealed that there were larger and more numerous settlements during the middle Yangshao period than at any other time in the Neolithic. They also showed that the most densely populated areas were later abandoned, possibly due to environmental degradation. Similarly, studies of sedimentation in the lower Yellow River show that it was about this time that erosion began to increase in North China, at least partly caused by human activity. There is also local evidence that farmers in the Guanzhong began to transform soils by adding organic materials and mineral grains. The late Yangshao was probably the period of greatest population density and site size in the Guanzhong before the Bronze Age.³⁹

The Rise of Complex Societies, c. 3000–1046 BCE

The pace of change accelerated after 3000 BCE. The use of oracle bones for divination became widespread, multiroom buildings became increasingly common, ceramic technology continued to improve, and metallurgy arrived from Inner Asia. The trend toward increased reliance on domesticated species was accelerated by the arrival of cattle, sheep, and horses, which allowed people to exploit arid lands they previously had had little use for. These animals made possible a whole new form of human subsistence, one that required some people to become more mobile. They also became an important new form of wealth. Chickens arrived at this time from the south, joining pigs and dogs as other omnivores foraging in human settlements. As we will discuss in the next chapter, societies became much more stratified and unequal in this period. The Longshan period (c. 3000–1800 BCE) saw the rise of large walled towns across much of North China, and the subsequent Bronze Age (2000–500 BCE) saw the rise of East Asia’s first cities and states.⁴⁰

The society of the Guanzhong dramatically and mysteriously diverged from those of regions to the east over these two millennia. While cities such as Taosi, Erlitou, and Erligang flourished a few hundred kilometers away, the Guanzhong had fewer and smaller settlements than it had had before. This divergence began in the third millennium BCE and grew over time. Its trajectory is hard to date in the Guanzhong because archaeologists have dated most sites according to their ceramics, and it is possible that certain ceramic styles were produced in one region long after new styles had been adopted in others. The city and culture of Erlitou emerged from the Longshan and flourished in the region around Luoyang between 1900 and 1500 BCE while the material culture of the Guanzhong region remained more traditionally Longshan. The powerful state of Erligang subsequently arose farther east. Erligang people seem to have migrated into the eastern Guanzhong after about 1500 BCE, and their culture gradually merged with and displaced local ceramic styles in the western Guanzhong over the following centuries.⁴¹

The Guanzhong diverged from its neighbors very slowly. In the third millennium BCE, the population of the Guanzhong remained highest in the Zhouyuan and the gently sloping land south of the Wei River (map 5). Some of these areas had such high densities of settlements that much of the land was probably exploited to some degree. The northeastern quarter of the basin remained sparsely populated, and the high percentage of deer and water buffaloes remains at the sites of Kangjia and Baijia suggests that it was still home to many large wild animals. However, even in those areas people seem to have depended more heavily on farming than earlier peoples had. As in neighboring regions, there is some evidence of increasing inequality in the Longshan-era Guanzhong. This includes evidence of possible human sacrifices and walls built between households that probably served to separate the wealth of individual families. But unlike in areas to the east, there were few large towns in the Guanzhong and no elite goods or rich burials that would indicate socioeconomic stratification. The population declined in the second millennium BCE.⁴²

Map 5. Archaeological sites of the Longshan culture. Each dot indicates an archaeological site identified by archaeologists as belonging to the Longshan culture. Most date to the third millennium BCE, but some sites in the Guanzhong probably date to the early second millennium. The numbers indicate the general locations of ① Fengxi 灃西 and Keshengzhuang 客省莊, ② Dongying 東營, ③ Laoniupo 老牛坡, ④ Jiangzhai 姜寨, ⑤ Kangjia 康家 and Baijiacun 白家村, and ⑥ Taosi 陶寺. I have also included ⑦ the post-Longshan Erlitou 二里頭 site, on the eastern edge of the map. Shuanghuaishu 雙槐樹 is near Erlitou. There are no dots in the top-left corner because we have no map of Longshan culture sites from Gansu.

Tools excavated from sites dated to the third millennium BCE suggest that the trend toward increasing reliance on agriculture continued. In addition to farm tools, most sites had mortars and pestles, bone needles, and spindle whorls. The storage pits excavated at many sites were probably used to store grain. There is little evidence of innovation in agricultural tools, but that does not mean that agricultural practices stayed the same. People undoubtedly continued to experiment with cropping methods, crop varieties, irrigation, and other techniques over the millennia. As we will discuss in the next chapter, early texts reveal that people used fire for both hunting and agricultural land clearance. Third-millennium settlements in some areas of Henan were substantial enough to destroy surrounding vegetation and cause erosion. While we cannot quantify the use of the practices, people were clearly transforming the environments around their settlements with fire and cultivation.⁴³

In additions to millets, people grew rice, wheat, and soybeans. They may have been experimenting with cultivating chenopods and oats. Soybeans seem to have remained a minor crop. Wheat arrived from the west in the third millennium BCE but did not flourish because it was native to the dry summers and wet winters of the Mediterranean. It took millennia for East Asian farmers to develop strains that flourished in their climate, and even then wheat did not become popular until the Han era, when people began milling it to make flour. Millet remained the more reliable choice for farmers worried about crop failure. We know that apricots and peaches were cultivated in this period because they arrived in Central Asia in the early second millennium along with millets and artifacts similar to those of the Yellow River valley. Wild apricot seeds and yellowhorn nuts were excavated from pits in the Guanzhong. Burned wood preserved in soil also reveals the spread of peaches and apricots, and more generally suggests an increase in burning in the second millennium BCE. There is some evidence that increased burning and cultivation caused erosion at this time.⁴⁴

Hemp had probably been cultivated for millennia by this time, but this is the earliest period for which we have evidence of textiles in the form of impressions on soil and on ceramics. Other plant fibers may also have been used, and people also wore furs and leather as well. The abundance of spindle whorls and fabric impressions on pottery makes clear that cloth was widely used. A boar tusk carved into a shape that resembles a silkworm was excavated from the recently discovered site of Shuanghuaishu, northeast of Luoyang, suggesting that people had already learned to unravel silk cocoons and weave them into cloth.⁴⁵

Pigs and deer remained the main sources of meat, though very few sites have yielded well-preserved and -studied faunal remains. At the Dongying site the ratio of pigs to deer increased over earlier periods, but sika remained the most common animal at the Kangjia site. Two-thirds of the pigs and sheep at Kangjia were killed before they reached thirty months, and most of the dogs were also killed young, evidence that they were raised by people for meat. Both sites had freshwater mussels, catfish, pheasants, hares, foxes, dogs, cats, water deer, water buffaloes, and cattle. Kangjia also had common carp, swans, Reeves’ turtles, black bears, and tigers, while Dongying had musk deer and sheep. The percentage of large herbivores declined compared to earlier periods. Despite all these animal bones, we should not assume that people ate a lot of meat. Scholars comparing the human remains at Kangjia to those of Yangshao sites found a clear decrease in human stature and possible evidence of anemia, which is caused by malnutrition or chronic parasites. Moreover, there were more missing teeth, more caries, and less tooth wear, all of which suggest that the people ate less meat and more boiled grains and were somewhat malnourished. Although it is a small sample size, it reinforces the general impression that people’s diets became less diverse and nutritious as they came to rely more heavily on grains.⁴⁶

This finding is not unique to East Asia. As farming people around the world became more sedentary, grew more dependent on grains, and came to live in daily contact with more domesticated mammals, their health often suffered. In particular, a diet centered on grains is not as diverse as the diets of foraging peoples and can cause malnutrition. It also causes caries in teeth, which could be serious problems in a world without dentists. Living in permanent settlements also facilitated the spread of illnesses. Larger populations could support diseases that permanently inhabited human societies, as well as parasites such as roundworms and tapeworms that lived in human digestive tracts. Tuberculosis has been with humans since they left Africa, and a particularly virulent strain developed in Neolithic North China. The arrival of domesticated bovids (cattle, sheep, and goats) probably also increased diseases. Close proximity to animals allowed parasites and diseases such as flu and smallpox to spread between humans and domesticated birds and mammals. Unfortunately, we know little about the early history of other diseases in China, but we do know that later Chinese populations suffered from smallpox, pulmonary diseases such as pneumonia and dysentery, and fever-producing illnesses such as typhoid, typhus, and influenzas. While unpleasant for individuals, diseases gave farming communities an epidemiological edge over foragers. People living in sparsely populated areas were often healthier than those in disease-ridden agricultural societies, especially those with livestock, but when the two societies met the latter’s diseases provided them with a powerful advantage. This is why most people in the Americas and Australia are now the descendants of people from Eurasia and Africa.⁴⁷

This was the first period from which we have clear evidence of cultural exchange across Eurasia. Cattle, sheep, horses, wheat, and metallurgy all arrived in East Asia during this period and gradually transformed East Asian society. Metallurgy and horses greatly increased the power of the rulers over the ruled, as we will discuss in the following chapter. The animals that more directly affected most people’s lives and the environment were the bovids. Because they were ruminants that evolved to subsist on low-quality plant matter such as grasses, bovids thrived in arid and alpine environments that browsing animals such as deer cannot tolerate. Domesticating them opened whole new landscapes to human exploitation, and people’s herds gradually displaced the native fauna. Because they are social animals, people can herd them, and this created the new social and economic role of herders, people who often spent significant time away from their communities following the fresh pastures. Cattle, sheep, and goats were initially domesticated in West Asia. Along with horses, they were the basis for the pastoral nomadic groups that would soon begin to form on the Eurasian steppe. Cattle and sheep arrived in East Asia as early as the fourth millennium, but they became widespread only after 2000. Chickens arrived in the Yellow River valley toward the end of the second millennium BCE but became widespread only later.⁴⁸

The incorporation of bovids into people’s subsistence strategies probably had significant social and environmental effects, though these emerged slowly. Cattle can pull loads, and it is possible that people in East Asia were already using them to pull light plows in this period. There is no good evidence of this in China, but people in Mesopotamia had been plowing with oxen since the fourth millennium, and East Asians may well have been familiar with the practice. The most obvious social consequence of the arrival of bovids is that they became an important source of wealth. Since each animal was a source of meat, leather, and, potentially, labor, a herd of them was a valuable possession, which means that grasslands also came to have new value. Cattle gradually replaced pigs as the main sacrificial animals, suggesting that they were regarded as valuable and prestigious animals.⁴⁹

We do not know if people in China used milk. Cattle and sheep do not produce meat as quickly as pigs, but their milk was appreciated from early times in Europe and Mesopotamia. The peoples of eastern Inner Asia began consuming the milk of cattle and sheep as early as 3000 BCE, and it became a regular part of their diets over the subsequent millennium. The lack of milk products in Chinese diets is often explained by lactose intolerance, but Europeans consumed milk by making reduced-lactose products such as cheese and yogurt even before the genetic mutation arose that allowed them to digest lactose. Likewise, processed milk products are central to the diets of Inner Asian peoples, who are only slightly more lactose-tolerant than Chinese people. It is generally assumed that people in North China adopted dairy only after Inner Asians conquered the region in the first millennium CE. However, the issue may not have been a cultural or biological aversion to dairy but simply a scarcity of bovids in the densely populated Yellow River lowlands.⁵⁰

Domesticated animals tend to occupy the same habitats as their wild relatives. Because of this, the expansion of domesticated herds reduces the land available for wild animals. The only large wild animals that have thrived despite the spread of their domesticated relatives are wild boar. In contrast, the spread of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses probably contributed to the extinction of aurochs and wild horses and to the decline in the numbers of many other species. Large herds of grazing animals like cattle and sheep often eat tree seedlings and prevent forests from growing. This meant that after people cut the trees around their settlements, the landscape was more likely to remain treeless. But bovids are much better than deer at subsisting on the poor vegetation that remains after an area has been deforested and overgrazed. They therefore made human societies much more resilient to the environmental degradation that they caused. The somewhat symbiotic relationship that had formed between deer and early agricultural populations faded away as farming and pastoralism displaced deer from the landscape, and from human diets.

The arrival of bovids corresponded to a slight but enduring drying trend in the climate, the end of the mid-Holocene warm period. This surely helped pastoralism become a key subsistence strategy in the arid loess region of North China. The earliest evidence we have of climatic change at this time are climatic fluctuations of the late third millennium BCE that were felt across much of Eurasia. There were huge floods in the Guanzhong at this time, though they did not necessarily affect the areas where most people lived. The urban civilizations of the Yangzi valley mysteriously declined around this time, but societies just to the north flourished, so we must look beyond climatic explanations. The plague spread through other parts of Eurasia in this period, a reminder that there is a long prehistory of disease that scholars are just beginning to discover. Perhaps most importantly, we must consider the relationships between increasingly militarized polities and their neighbors, a topic explored in the next chapter.⁵¹

The end of the second millennium BCE was another period of increased climatic instability. Climate records from a cave south of Xi’an reveal both very wet and very dry years at this time. There were also enormous floods, far greater than any recorded in modern times, on the Yellow, Wei, and Jing Rivers. The stratigraphy of the Guanzhong clearly indicates the end of the Holocene megathermal: the dark soils produced by the wetter conditions of the mid-Holocene reverted to beige loess. The transition was not the same across the region, and one well-dated profile shows it occurring many centuries later. Nonetheless, the general drying trend is clear. This was around the time that the Zhou and their allies conquered the Shang, and it is interesting to speculate whether climate played a role in pushing them to do so. The rest of the Zhou period had a climate pretty similar to the modern one, so we will rarely discuss climate in the rest of this book.⁵²

The nature of our evidence changes as we move into the Bronze Age. As archaeologists in China come closer to the era of texts, their priorities switch to a focus on identifying places and events mentioned in historical texts. This means that they focus their attention on excavating cities and tombs, not villages. Urban centers like Erlitou and Erligang have received considerable attention because archaeologists associate them with the Xia and Shang dynasties mentioned in historical texts. In Shaanxi, the Laoniupo site east of Xi’an has clear ties to Erligang, while the Nianzipo site on the upper Jing River has been explored as a possible settlement of the Zhou people before they conquered the Shang.

Only a few sites have been discovered from the second-millennium Guanzhong, and very few have been excavated. They contain an array of tools and implements similar to those of their Longshan predecessors: rectangular stone knives, bone arrowheads and needles, oracle bones, and spindle whorls. There are also a few bronze implements and arrowheads. Laoniupo is the largest and most thoroughly excavated second-millennium site in the Guanzhong. Its strata from the 1450–1220 BCE period contain assemblages of stone knives and hoes, arrowheads, oracle bones, and bone tools. It had far more fish net weights than other contemporary sites. Fish, mollusks, and other aquatic animals seem to have remained important sources of protein for communities near waterways, and people fashioned small fish and turtles of bronze. Bones excavated from the mid- to late second millennium at Nianzipo belonged to cattle, pigs, and dogs, with a smaller number from wild horses, goats, and deer. By the time writing appeared in the late second millennium, the societies of this region were already fully agricultural, though Zhou-era documents make clear that they were still surrounded by a wide variety of wild plants and animals.⁵³

The Zhou Period, 1046–221 BCE

Around 1046 BCE a coalition of peoples from the Guanzhong marched eastward to the North China Plain, conquered the Shang dynasty, and founded the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou ruled from the Guanzhong and Luoyang for almost three centuries (the Western Zhou period, 1046–771). In 771 BCE they were conquered and moved their weakened court eastward to Luoyang, where they hung on as nominal kings for five centuries, a period known as the Eastern Zhou period. The Eastern Zhou was a time of great change, especially its second half, the Warring States period, when both commerce and state power expanded dramatically. Despite the enormous social changes during this period, most farmers continued to use tools of wood, stone, and bone. This section will discuss the plants, followed by the animals of the period and will conclude with its farming methods.

For most of the second millennium BCE there had been far lower densities of people in the Guanzhong than in regions to the east. The founding of the Zhou dynasty transformed the Guanzhong into an important political center and a wealthy and populous agricultural region. Because it had been sparsely populated, the region probably had more natural resources than the more densely populated regions to the east. This was a good reason for the Zhou to move their court back to the Guanzhong after conquering the Shang, though they did establish an administrative center at Luoyang. Soil research shows that erosion began to increase substantially at sites at the eastern end of the Guanzhong Basin around this time, probably caused by the expansion of farming.⁵⁴

This was the first period for which we have written accounts, which means that we have a substantially different body of evidence than we do for earlier times. While our archaeological evidence for this period consists mostly of tombs, which do not tell us much about subsistence, the Book of Odes, which dates to the first half of the Zhou period, contains abundant references to plants and animals. Zhou society was generally agricultural, but the Odes show that wild plants and animals played an important role in both subsistence and culture. There is no evidence of markets in the Western Zhou period, and people seem to have consumed resources drawn almost entirely from their surrounding areas. The subsequent centuries were to see a profound transformation of society as urbanization, commercialization, and the growth of powerful centralized states transformed the conditions of production for farmers. Unfortunately, we have little material evidence of Zhou-era farming because archaeologists have not excavated and published information on any villages from this period. Even though the technological changes in farming are poorly understood, we can be sure that the incentive structures, and the pressures on farmers, changed profoundly.

Our understanding of this period’s agriculture is different from that of earlier periods before we had texts, which tell us about farming methods and about crops that cannot be preserved archaeologically. Millets remained the staples throughout this period and are by far the most commonly mentioned grains in the Odes. Hemp was grown not only for its fibers but also for its seeds, which were often listed in texts as one of the “five grains.” Soybeans were planted more widely over time, though they were not highly regarded as a food crop. Adzuki and mung beans were also domesticated in East Asia. It is possible that the ability of soybeans to grow in poor soils and improve them by fixing nitrogen led people to plant them more widely as increasing population density led to a reduction in fallow times in the Warring States–Han period. Soybeans were planted as a famine crop in some areas, but perhaps not in the Guanzhong since they are less tolerant of drought than millets. They were not highly regarded because they are difficult to digest. They would not become a popular food until people learned to turn them into sprouts, tofu, and various sauces, most of which occurred after the period covered in this book. Zhou people consumed meat sauces and preserves, and it seems likely that the later development of sophisticated soy-processing methods was partly a response to the decreasing availability of animal protein. Wheat was not widely consumed until the spread during the Han dynasty of milling stones, which allowed people to grind it into flour and make it into breads and noodles, which gradually became staples of the region.⁵⁵

The Odes are particularly useful because they mention fruits and vegetables that were rarely or never preserved archaeologically. This gives us a window into a variety of species that had probably been cultivated for a long time. People grew several fruits of the Prunus genus, probably including peaches, plums, cherries, and “Japanese apricot.” Hundreds of wild or domesticated apricot seeds were found in a pit in the Zhouyuan, along with seeds of some smaller wild Prunus fruits. The pit may have been treated with fire to ensure dryness, and the dried apricots may have been placed there as fruit for storage. Or perhaps only the seeds were kept, since apricot seeds are edible with some processing. Another pit contained almost two hundred jujube seeds. These were probably stored as fruit since the dried fruit can be stored for long periods and the seeds are inedible. Wild jujube plants have sharp thorns and are widely planted for hedges, while the domesticated one has larger fruits. Both types produce nutritious edible fruits, and the dried fruits are now added to soup and tea for both flavor and medicinal value. As mentioned earlier, the Odes also refer to fruits that were probably some kinds of pears, crab apples, and quince. Gou 枸 may have referred to the “oriental raisin tree” (Hovenia dulcis), whose sweet seed pods are still eaten in the region. Persimmons, one of the most common fruits in the region now, were apparently not widely cultivated until sweet varieties and grafting technologies were developed after the Han dynasty. Mulberries were used both to feed silkworms and for their fruit.⁵⁶

Nuts were probably an important food source. Chestnuts and hazelnuts are mentioned frequently in the Odes, and chestnuts are still popular in North China. As mentioned above, Neolithic people ate wild walnuts, and people in the Zhou period probably did, too, even though they are not mentioned in the Odes. Wild walnuts are smaller than domesticated ones, which probably arrived in East Asia no earlier than the Han and have since become the most important tree nuts in much of North China. People cultivated a variety of gourds and melons. Bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria) are edible but are mainly appreciated because they can be dried to make lightweight watertight containers. They arrived in East Asia from Africa at least 10,000 years ago. Their seeds have been excavated across North China, including in the Zhouyuan pit with the apricots, mentioned above. The pit also contained more than 150 muskmelon seeds (Cucumis melo). Muskmelons are native to Asia. They come in sweet forms that can be eaten as fruit and in less sweet forms that are eaten as vegetables.⁵⁷

The Odes mention a variety of vegetables. Since archaeologists are unlikely to excavate the seeds of many vegetables, we know almost nothing of their history before written texts appeared. Brassica rapa may have existed in multiple forms at this time, such as turnips, bok choi, and napa cabbage. It would not be surprising if other brassicas, like Chinese cabbage and canola, were also grown at this time. Mallow was also cultivated as a green vegetable. There were not many strong flavors in the cuisine of the time, so we can be sure that chives or green onions played an important culinary role. The numbing Sichuan peppers (Zanthoxylum sp.) were used for flavor long before they were combined with New World chile peppers to create the famous spicy flavor of Sichuan food.⁵⁸

Many of China’s fruits and vegetables have a long history of domestication about which virtually nothing is known. But there is no question that the first step in domesticating any plant is to discover the useful properties of its wild form, and foraging for wild plants is a common theme in the Odes. Many different wild and domesticated plants are referred to in the Odes, making clear that this was a rural society in which most people were familiar with the characteristics and cultural meanings of a variety of plants. In addition to those mentioned above, a variety of other edible plants are mentioned in the Odes that cannot necessarily be identified with certainty, but have traditionally been identified with edible leafy plants, some of which may have been cultivated. It should also be emphasized that plants and animals have always been used as medicine.⁵⁹

Plants were also a key source of textiles. People made clothing from skins as well as from the processed and woven fibers of plants, especially hemp. Hemp is mentioned several times in the Odes, including in references to soaking it to loosen the fibers. Rough hemp fabric dated to the Zhou period was excavated in Jingyang, north of Xi’an, and older pieces have been found elsewhere. Hemp remained a common clothing material into the second millennium CE, when it was gradually replaced by cotton. The Odes also contain references to the use of ramie, another textile crop, and kudzu vine, which was used to make shoes and other coarse woven goods. Archaeologists found the impressions of fabric they identified as silk at the site of the Western Zhou capital of Feng-Hao, west of Xi’an. The leaves of mulberry trees are used to feed silkworms, and the mulberry is the most commonly mentioned plant in the Odes. The idea that silk production is the ideal woman’s occupation, as canonized in the Odes and other classical texts, later came to play a major role in cementing ideas of the sexual division of labor in China.⁶⁰

Woody plants provided people with much of their materials and energy. Most of the wood that people used was burned to cook or to heat their houses. Cutting and collecting wood surely had a substantial impact on the woodlands surrounding human settlements, and firewood scarcity was one of the first consequences of increasing human populations. People employed a wide variety of trees to make implements and build buildings, which were often semi-subterranean with mud walls. Woven shoots, bark, grasses, and vines were used to make many of the basic items in daily use in China from the Paleolithic until the spread of plastic in recent decades. From baskets to bags to fish traps and fences, flexible plant materials were one of the most important raw materials people used. Baskets of various kinds are frequently mentioned in early texts. They were probably made of various materials, including reeds, grasses, vines, and roots. People also wore hats woven from grasses or bamboo, as they still do. Although the use of roofing tiles spread in this period, most Zhou people probably roofed their houses with thatch.⁶¹

Excavated bones suggest that much of the meat eaten in the Guanzhong came from pigs, cattle, and sheep. Other excavated animals include horses, buffaloes, sika deer, bears, hares, turtles, carp, mussels, and chickens. Zooarchaeologists have only recently learned to distinguish chickens from wild pheasants, which are fairly common even now, so we still know little about chicken domestication. It may have been similar to that of pigs and dogs in that chickens were initially attracted to human settlements for their food supplies, and people found them useful and integrated them into their communities. Chickens produce meat much more quickly than large mammals, and poorer people eventually came to eat them and their eggs much more often than they ate pigs or cattle.⁶²

As in earlier periods, fish were probably among the most important sources of protein. Because archaeologists have not excavated rural settlements from this period, we lack the examples of fish net weights and other fishing tools that we have for earlier periods. However, the people of the time did make fish out of jade and metal. They also made songs about fish, such as odes that were probably sung to accompany offerings of fish in ancestral temples. The use of nets and fish traps were probably the main fishing methods, though Ode 24 does mention fishing line made of silk. Fish net weights were very common in Neolithic settlements, and, although we have no Zhou domestic sites for comparison, there are various terms for fish nets and traps in the Odes. The traps were probably installed in weirs that channeled fish into traps. These can be built in shallow rivers with nets or by driving a row of sharpened sticks into a river bottom, forming a wall that lets small fish out and channels larger ones toward the trap. As more and more flat, dry land was converted for farming, people increased their exploitation of wetlands, which were scattered along waterways and poorly drained parts of the plains. Elaphures and water deer, both of which specialize in wetlands, were eventually extirpated from the Yellow River valley, and water buffaloes were driven to extinction. People could still catch aquatic creatures such as snails, mussels, and at least three kinds of turtles.⁶³

As in many other societies, the higher one’s status, the more meat one ate. Elites not only had access to more livestock but also hunted large wild animals. As political organizations developed, their leaders came to hunt regularly as a form of military training and to provide flesh to sacrifice to the ancestors. These hunts may have been a significant source of food. The “Lucky Day” ode describes the chariot preparations, the sacrifices before the hunt, the large herds of deer near the Qi and Ju Rivers of the Zhouyuan, and the hunt itself: “We selected our horses there where the animals assemble. The does and stags were in great numbers; by the Qi and the Ju rivers we pursued them, the grounds of the Son of Heaven. Look in the middle of the plain; it is broad and rich in game. They rush, they move, some in groups, some in pairs. We lead all the attendants, in order to please the king. We draw our bows and grasp our arrows; we shoot a small boar and kill a big buffalo.”⁶⁴

While elites continued to find deer and other large wildlife to hunt, the same was not true of commoners, who had to make do with smaller game. The continuing decline in the ratio of deer bones to those of domesticates is a clear indication of increasingly intense land use by humans, a trend that had been ongoing since the first agricultural societies. Deer were often depicted in Western Zhou artifacts, but this declined in subsequent centuries. Deer became scarce in the lowlands as more and more arable land was being farmed, and much of the other land was used for grazing cattle, sheep, and goats. Just as the numbers of farmers in the lowlands expanded, so did the numbers of herders in regions suitable for grazing.⁶⁵

Pastoral nomadism continued to expand across arid Inner Asia during the Zhou period. While the Zhou and Qin were traditionally associated with pastoralism because they moved from the Loess Plateau to the north and west of the Guanzhong, in fact they practiced a mix of farming and herding, as did most people in that region. The increasing density of farmers gradually reduced the amount of grazing land in the arable lowlands, but there was always plenty of land on the Loess Plateau for herding.

Let us now turn to farming methods, something that we know a bit more about in this period because of the textual evidence. While a modern farmer would find Zhou-era agriculture primitive, it would have looked quite intensive to a visitor from the Yangshao period. Zhou people had access to a much larger number of domesticated plants and animals than their Yangshao predecessors, which allowed them to make use of a much wider variety of land types. They produced more food in a given space because of a wider variety of crops and improved varieties, along with improved agricultural methods. Although we have a general idea of what plants and animals people employed, we know very little about many key elements of farming, such as fallow time, planting techniques, fertilizer, irrigation, and the point when they began using animals to pull plows. Practices like double-cropping, planting in ridges and furrows, and using fertilizers are first mentioned in Zhou-era texts, but it would be a mistake to take this as evidence that they were either new or widespread. Farming practices differed according to microclimate, soil type, population density, proximity to markets, and many other factors. Historians have cited anecdotal textual evidence to argue that crop yields increased over the thousand years of the Eastern Zhou-Han period. This would not be surprising but remains impossible to prove.⁶⁶

Irrigation is a topic to which historians have devoted considerable attention, but its origins in China remain a mystery. Small-scale irrigation must have been common among Neolithic rice farmers in the Yangzi valley and may well have been common in the Yellow River valley as well, but it is difficult to find archaeological evidence of it. The earliest evidence of artificial water control in the Guanzhong are moats and ponds dug in the Western Zhou capitals of Feng and Hao, which lay on either side of the Feng River west of Xi’an. A moat over ten meters wide and several meters deep extended for at least four kilometers around Hao. Part of it was dug right through a low area that was already a wetland or a lake and was later the deepest part of the Kunming reservoir, which was created in the Han era. It may have served to drain the area as well as delineate and protect the town. This proves that Western Zhou people were capable of building irrigation infrastructure, but we do not know if they did. Ambiguous evidence of water control is found on an inscribed Western Zhou bronze ritual vessel that records a grant of over three hundred waterways of some kind. They are presumed to be small irrigation or drainage ditches between fields.⁶⁷

As for fertilizers, the most basic form of fertilizing is fallowing, which consists of letting plants grow on a field and then plowing them into the soil, often after burning. Fallowing is as old as farming, but the first evidence of it comes from an ode that contains the lines “They ply their hoes on the ground, clearing away the sowthistle and smart-weed. These weeds being decayed, the millets grow luxuriantly.” The “Monthly Ordinances” (Yue ling) says that plants killed by summer rains can “be used as a green manure for the fields and pastures and as a fertilizer to enrich the ground.” Similarly, Xunzi wrote of “making frequent applications of manure to fertilize the fields.” While earlier farmers could just leave their fields fallow and burn their vegetation for nutrients, increasing population densities reduced fallow times and forced the farmers to work to improve the quality of their soil. One of the reasons pigs remained important in Chinese farming over the millennia was that their manure provided essential fertilizer.⁶⁸

Historians of early China have long debated when people began to use livestock to pull plows. Horses were used to pull chariots in the Shang period, but there is no clear evidence of ox-drawn plows in China until they are mentioned in Warring States–era texts. Animal traction is significant because it considerably increases the wealth of those who have cattle compared to those who do not. Cultivating with oxen produces less food from a given acreage than does horticulture but can produce considerably more grain per input of human labor, increasing the incomes of those already wealthy enough to own land. And they can further increase their income by renting their oxen to others. Cattle also enrich fields with their manure and pull wheeled vehicles. As the population grew in the agricultural centers of North China, land overtook labor as the limiting factor in agricultural production, making it cheaper to exploit human labor than to use scarce land for grazing cattle.⁶⁹

The earliest clear evidence of oxen pulling plows comes from texts of the fifth or fourth century BCE. Early Chinese writings reveal no evidence of ox-drawn plows. Triangular stone implements excavated from Yangzi valley Neolithic sites are often called plowshares, but there were no domesticated bovids to pull them. It is possible that people pulled the plows but more likely that they served some other purpose. Zooarchaeologists have argued that excavated cattle bones show pathologies caused by pulling loads, but this is inconclusive. Archaeologists have also shown that cattle at the Western Zhou capital of Feng were killed at a relatively advanced age, suggesting that they were used for labor. In either case the oxen could have pulled carts, not plows. Until the adoption of the more effective breast-strap harness sometime around the third century BCE, harnesses included a strap around the throat that could easily choke animals when they pulled hard, a significant impediment to the widespread use of animal traction.⁷⁰

One important clue as to the early Chinese use of oxen is found in an argument made by an official to convince the king of Zhao not to go to war against Qin, its rival: “Qin farms with oxen, and can transport food for her troops by river and provision her crack troops with the harvest from first-grade lands. Her discipline is strict and policies are carried out. We cannot engage her, your majesty.” The state of Qin was spacious, and officials reserved land to support oxen. As we know from its laws, they also lent oxen to farmers. Officials knew that most people lacked access to cattle, so they made cattle available. The practice of including miniature oxen drawing wheeled vehicles in tombs may have originated in Qin during the Warring States period and spread eastward, which also suggests that oxen were more common in Qin. The issue of animal traction in early China has often been discussed as though the issue was whether or not people were familiar with the technology. However, the bigger issue was probably access to oxen and horses. Animals have generally played a much smaller role in East Asian farming than in the Near East or Europe. By the end of our period, populations in the core agricultural areas of the Yellow River valley were high enough that there was little land for cattle, and this is why they were not widely used for farming despite the widespread knowledge of this technology.⁷¹

The passage from Xunzi that serves as the epigraph to this chapter exemplifies the North Chinese agricultural system in the third century BCE. Grain came first, followed by fruits and then vegetables, and only then did the text mention animals, which were considerably less important than plants in most people’s diets. By Xunzi’s time there were few large wild animals left in the lowlands of North China. Aurochs, wild horses, and wild water buffaloes eventually went extinct. While the lowlands were densely populated with farmers, mountains and wetlands were still home to a variety of fish, reptiles, birds, and wild plants. This explains the frequent reference in ancient texts to the products of the “mountains and wetlands,” the two types of landscape that could not be easily converted to farms and still provided habitat to wild animals.

Many scholars believe that agricultural productivity increased in the final centuries of the Zhou period, which would not be surprising given the profound social, economic, and political changes. But most people were probably using farming tools similar to those of their Neolithic ancestors, which suggests that the main factors influencing farming were social, not technological. The opportunities created by expanding markets led people to produce cash crops and to grow more food to gain income. At least as important were pressures from states that sought to extract more labor and resources from farmers, forcing them to work harder and grow more food. The increasing power of states over people and environments is the topic of the rest of this book.

CHAPTER THREE

Herding People

The Rise of Political Organizations in China

Only by spending a thousand gold coins per day can one mobilize a hundred thousand troops.

—Sunzi’s Art of War, fifth century BCE

IT ALL BEGAN WITH farming. By domesticating plants and animals, people gained the ability to build ecosystems that could produce reliable supplies of food and other materials. As they came to depend more heavily on a few crops, farmers began to store grain to tide them over when their fields were damaged by droughts, storms, or pests. This ability to produce extra food made possible the rise of human civilization, since these surpluses came to feed specialists such as artisans, soldiers, scribes, and bureaucrats. Rulers knew that their fortunes depended on farming and often sought ways to expand the area of land under cultivation. This chapter will trace the growth of agrarian political systems in East Asia from their beginnings to the powerful states of the third century BCE.

Political power has always been about controlling the surplus labor and resources of the population. Because grain taxes are their main income, agrarian states have a fundamental interest in expanding farmland and increasing the populations of their subjects and livestock, and thus in reducing the amount of land available for ecosystems that do not benefit them, a category that includes most living things. In order to build militaries, states have to mobilize not only soldiers but also the materials to feed and house them. They usually devote considerable resources to supporting ideological systems that help convince their subjects to obey authority and pay their taxes. They build infrastructure like roads to move their armies and also build monumental buildings to inspire respect for political institutions. All of these resources are produced by people exploiting their environments. Political institutions allow leaders to mobilize far more labor and resources to transform environments than could ever be achieved by societies without states. The formation of political systems provided humans with a powerful organizational capacity to replace natural ecosystems with agricultural ones. Throughout human history, then, political organizations have played an active role in expanding the productivity, and thus the environmental impact, of human societies.¹

While powerful political systems evolved only a few times in human history, they specialized in making war, and thus tended to subjugate surrounding peoples.² While people could, and did, flee the taxes and labor service demands of these states, the states occupied the most fertile land, leaving inaccessible mountains and wetlands for the refugees. By controlling the best land, states thus tended to rule over the largest human populations, and they usually wanted those populations to grow. There are examples of rulers who had political incentives to preserve natural ecosystems, such as forests protected for timber to build boats, reserves for hunting wildlife, and the forests protected by Indian kings to ensure a supply of war elephants.³ But most rulers had good reason to convert wild ecosystems into farms, orchards, and pastures, so the question of how strong states developed is fundamentally an ecological one.

One might imagine that political systems arose when some charismatic leader convinced people to follow him or when frightened farmers offered to pay strongmen for protection, as in Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai. But political systems formed so gradually that the process may instead be compared to the domestication of animals. Just as it took thousands of years for wild boars to become household pigs, it took many generations for relatively egalitarian societies to become ones in which most people accepted the domination of a small elite as the nature of things.

In this chapter I will trace the formation of political systems in East Asia from the earliest cities to the centralized bureaucracies of the Warring States period. My objective is not to explain how or why these systems formed, since that is one of the central questions explored by archaeologists. Rather I will explore the ecology of these political systems, which means I will consider how they affected the distribution of plants and animals and the movement of resources and energy. How did they extract resources, including human labor, from society? What did they use these resources to achieve? What did they do to maintain the stability of increasingly simplified agricultural ecosystems? My general hypothesis is that the growth in state power did not necessarily benefit humans as individuals, but it allowed agroecosystems to expand across the landscape and eventually dominate the ecology of East Asia.

In the Yellow River valley, we can trace the beginnings of this process to the small farming villages where, over six thousand years ago, property that the community had previously held in common began to be owned by separate families. As described in chapter 1, organizations gradually developed that gave some people command over the surplus labor and resources of their communities, and these gradually grew into political institutions. By the mid-second millennium BCE, the Erligang state could mobilize enough workers to build a huge walled city and dominate the central Yellow River region (map 6). The Shang dynasty at Anyang (c. 1200–1046 BCE) inherited Erligang’s governance methods and developed a new administrative tool—writing. The Western Zhou conquered the Shang in 1046 BCE and established an alliance of aristocratic kingdoms far more extensive than that of the Shang. The defeat of the Western Zhou court in 771 BCE created a power vacuum and a long period of inter-state rivalry known as the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 BCE). Endemic warfare between these states led them to develop new administrative methods to extend their control over more people and land and to extract more grain and labor from their subjects. This led to the formation of East Asia’s first centralized bureaucratic states, which could directly rule large territories with millions of inhabitants. As described in the following two chapters, the state of Qin used these administrative techniques to conquer all the other states and establish China’s imperial system.

The Origins of Political Power in East Asia

Archaeological evidence provides us with a general idea of how societies gradually became divided into rulers and ruled. Most basically, the sizes of settlements are directly related to the amount of the surrounding region from which they extracted labor and materials. The growth in the size of the largest settlements over the millennia is thus indirect evidence of the growth of institutions of control and resource extraction. Increasingly large defensive walls around towns reflect the ability of those communities to mobilize people to build, attack, or defend such walls. Cemeteries also provide important evidence, since the growth in the size and opulence of the largest tombs reveals that elites had found a way of monopolizing the surplus resources and labor of many others. Increasing numbers of weapons buried in tombs also suggest an increased respect for organized violence—warfare. While a close look at any aspect of this history makes clear how limited our knowledge is, a macro perspective reveals a process of sociocultural evolution in which society gets more complex and political structures become increasingly sophisticated.⁴

Map 6. Bronze Age settlements. The Zhou court governed from the Zhouyuan, Feng-Hao, and Luoyang.

The earliest signs of social stratification in the Yellow River Basin can be dated to the fourth millennium BCE, as we discussed in the previous chapter. Several sites from this period are relatively large and contain rammed-earth walls that suggest growing socioeconomic differentiation and violence between settlements. Sites like Anban, Dadiwan, and Xipo were bigger than surrounding towns (see maps 3 and 4). Each had one building that was much larger than the others, which was presumably the house of a rich family, a site of centralized ritual activity, or both. By the third millennium BCE (the Longshan period), some areas saw considerable population growth, growing social stratification, and the beginnings of male dominance. Archaeologists have discovered more than twenty walled towns from this period, suggesting that central towns drew labor and resources from a network of surrounding villages to inflict violence on others and to defend themselves from it. The differences between the goods placed in tombs reveal increasing inequality. And cattle and sheep arrived from Central Asia, which allowed some people to specialize in herding animals and provided a new form in which wealth could be accumulated, thus increasing the ecological and economic complexity of human societies. In the Guanzhong we see, for the first time, walls separating individual households and family livestock pens, which suggests that wealth was increasingly held separately by households rather than by whole communities. However, social stratification was less pronounced in the Guanzhong than in some other areas.⁵

A handful of much larger urban centers arose in the second half of the third millennium across the Yangzi and Yellow River valleys that reveal stratification and political organization. Tombs filled with valuables reveal that elites employed craftspeople to make treasures for them. Most notably, jades finely carved in similar styles have been found across a large swath of East Asia, evidence of long-distance interaction. Large walls reveal organizations capable of mobilizing large numbers of people, and at least one of these towns (Liangzhu) rebuilt the hydrology of the surrounding region. The earliest large town in the central Yellow River valley was Taosi, in the Fen River valley a few days’ walk to the northeast of the Guanzhong. It flourished between 2300 and 1900 BCE. Its walls encompassed an area of 289 hectares (1 hectare = 2.5 acres), and within them walled enclosures surrounded complexes of larger buildings, separating their wealthier inhabitants from the rest. The stratification of Taosi’s society is also clear from the fact that a few tombs contained hundreds of burial goods, while most tombs had few or none. The larger tombs with wooden coffins contained the remains of men, in some cases with women buried on the side, clear evidence that men now held the highest status.⁶

These towns had shrunk or disappeared by the early second millennium BCE, and for the next millennium the largest urban centers were all within the modern province of Henan. These settlements have received an enormous amount of attention from Chinese archaeologists because they are clearly ancestral to the Chinese imperial system, and their existence is hinted at in texts written many centuries later. Between roughly 1700 and 1500 BCE, Erlitou, east of Luoyang, was home to a walled site similar in size to Taosi. Within the walls was a walled compound that contained the rammed-earth foundations of several large buildings that were probably palaces or temples. Workshops produced pottery, bone, and bronze goods, and a few tombs contained large numbers of high-quality pieces, clear evidence of elite status. As Erlitou declined, a walled site was built a few kilometers to the east at Yanshi, and by 1500 BCE an area of about 200 hectares within the Yanshi site was surrounded by a sturdy wall that enclosed several compounds that themselves enclosed elite architecture and workshops.⁷

The establishment of Erlitou is considered the beginning of the Bronze Age in East Asia because it was the first site where bronze sacrificial vessels were cast. Bronze had previously been used to make knives and other small tools, but this was the beginning of the long tradition whereby the region’s elites practiced rituals in which they ate and drank from bronze vessels. Over the next millennium, enormous quantities of bronze were used to make such vessels, as well as weapons. The elite monopoly on bronze weapons made it easier for rulers to impose their will on their subjects. The term “Bronze Age” is appropriate because bronze technology changed society, but it is worth pointing out that bronze was considered a precious material and was rarely used to make farm tools, so it had little effect on subsistence. Commoners continued to farm with tools of wood, stone, and bone until the spread of iron a thousand years later, but their overlords now wielded sharp weapons.⁸

The scale of political organizations increased dramatically in the subsequent century with the growth of the city and state of Erligang. Located ninety kilometers east of Erlitou in Zhengzhou, the modern capital of Henan, Erligang flourished from the sixteenth century BCE to the thirteenth. Unfortunately, Erligang cannot be excavated because it is buried under the modern city, but its seven-kilometer outer wall was so massive that it still encloses an 1800-hectare area of downtown Zhengzhou. Within that outer wall, a square walled district the size of the entire site of Erlitou (three hundred hectares) contained numerous large buildings and was presumably a palace area. Bronze production increased enormously in scale and sophistication, which shows both that the state could get plenty of copper and tin from distant regions and that it could support skilled craftspeople.⁹

Feasting had played an important role in people’s social lives for millennia. During the Erligang period, elites served food and drink from shiny bronze vessels during ritual feasts. These vessels were often decorated with the faces of fanged beasts, such as the one shown on the title page. We lack texts from this period, but those written centuries later reveal that rulers considered their authority to derive from various spirits, including those of their dead ancestors. People had to feed these ancestors to keep them happy, or at least to prevent them from getting angry and inflicting harm. So they sacrificed domestic and wild animals, and sometimes humans, in ritual ceremonies. They would then cook the flesh of the animals and present it to the ancestors in bronze vessels. Depictions of wild animals on these vessels may have played some role in connecting the animal to the spirit world, where human ancestors feasted on the sacrificial meat. Killing animals in sacrifices and hunts, and killing humans in warfare, were central aspects of rulership. So were the feasts, which allowed those with access to meat and millet beer to consolidate alliances and woo followers. Of course, building political organizations also required the ruling classes to inflict violence on the commoners whose labor was the basis of their own power.¹⁰

The Erligang people established a scattered network of settlements over an enormous area. Using modern cities as references, these extended west to Xi’an, east to Jinan, north to Beijing, and as far south as Wuhan on the Yangzi River. Moreover, the Erligang culture continued to expand for more than a century even after Erligang itself was abandoned sometime after 1400 BCE. There is no way that a Bronze-Age polity could have administered such a huge territory. It is more likely that Erligang’s history was similar to that of the Zhou people a few centuries later. The Zhou conquered much of the same region and established a network of semi-independent colonies ruled by kin and allies that continued to expand and hybridize with local peoples for centuries after the ruling house declined in power, as described below. In any case, by establishing communities with a shared culture across a large region, the Erligang people laid a foundation for the subsequent Shang and Zhou states.¹¹

After Erligang declined, the center of political power shifted about two hundred kilometers northeastward to Anyang. In those days, the Yellow River flowed northward across the North China Plain, entering the ocean near Beijing. Its summer floods would have spread unpredictably across the lowlands of the plain. Archaeological surveys suggest that the center of the plain had few settlements and was used more for fishing and hunting than for farming, though it is also possible that settlements in those areas are buried under three millennia of flood sediments. The center of Shang power was the area of relatively well-drained land between the flood-prone lowlands of the plain and the Taihang Mountains. The first city built in the area, soon after the decline of Erligang, is known as Huanbei. It is a walled site of almost five hundred hectares that was occupied for a few generations and then abandoned. It has not been well explored but represents clear continuity between Erligang and the famous site a few kilometers to the south, which was the capital of the Shang dynasty from the mid-thirteenth century until the Zhou conquered it in about 1046 BCE. The Shang called this site “the Great Town Shang” 大邑商, but for convenience I will simply call it “Anyang.”¹²

Anyang is not only the best-explored archaeological site in all of China but also the earliest site in East Asia to have writing. Tens of thousands of bones and turtle shells inscribed with records of divination were found there, providing us with much better evidence of Anyang’s political economy than we have for any earlier site. The main things the Shang king divined about were harvests, wars, and sacrifices. Because Anyang is the first city with writing, it is the oldest excavated settlement that can be firmly identified with places and people mentioned in historical texts written many centuries later. Anyang was much larger than Erligang had been. It was not walled but was composed of various settlements across an area of about 24 square kilometers, one of which was a seventy-hectare palace area. The royal cemetery contained enormous tombs that, before they were looted, were filled with expensive burial goods like jades, bronzes, and East Asia’s earliest known horses and chariots. The enormous quantity of bronze cast at the site proves that the Shang had access to large quantities of rare metals brought in from long distances, and the sophistication of its workshop production rivals that of any ancient civilization.

The Shang did not think of their city as the capital of a state composed of a defined territory. Political power was instead understood to center on the town where the ruling dynasty lived, particularly the altars at which the rulers worshipped their dynastic ancestors. The Shang believed that the world was filled with powerful spirits, including those of the sky, the directions, mountains, rivers, and their own ancestors, all of which received sacrificial offerings. Kinship and political power were inseparable because the spirits of the ancestors of the ruling family were believed to still play a role, however indirect, in rulership. On a more mundane level, patrilineal lineages (a.k.a. clans) were the main units into which society was divided. Anyang was the city where the altars of the main lineage of the Shang ruling house were located, but the Shang state was also composed of other lineages, some of which were understood to be blood relatives of the ruling house. The Shang ruling house intermarried and formed alliances with the lineages that were outside of this group.

Patrilineal kinship was the defining principle of political organization, uniting living rulers with their powerful deceased ancestors. The state was composed of the lands and subjects of the various lineages that accepted the dominance of the king, most of which were relatively autonomous. The Shang military consisted of all the armed followers these groups could muster. The king could not count on the support of these lineages and thus spent much of his time traveling around managing his relationships with them with both threats and rewards. Marriage alliances were particularly powerful. Each child born from such marriages literally united the two families, giving both families a mutual interest in the success of their shared offspring. This explains why marriages remained a key concern of elites throughout this period and, indeed, throughout human history. It was a fully patriarchal system in which all rulers were men and the most powerful ancestors were also male. However, women were able to formally play a more important role in governance than they would in later periods of Chinese history. Female ancestors were offered sacrifices just as men were, though theirs were neither as numerous nor as important as those offered to male ancestors. We do not know much about how gender relations among commoners changed over the two millennia covered by this chapter, but there is evidence that people began to feed their sons better than their daughters over time, indicating increasing gender disparities. The fact that the Shang sacrificed enemy men to their gods suggests that they preferred to keep women alive, perhaps because they were considered less dangerous, and probably because they could bear children.¹³

The basis of Shang power was the surplus labor of its subjects, who provided crops and livestock, though we know little about how this worked. The core of Shang power was the arc of arable land stretching to the east and south of the Taihang Mountains. Beyond this arc, Shang power fluctuated. At times the Shang extended their control westward through the mountains into the Fen and Wei River valleys and eastward across the plain to the ocean, where they obtained salt. Even when Shang military power extended over large areas, we can assume that Anyang was mostly provisioned from its hinterland because it is inefficient to transport grain and other bulk goods by land. This logic is shown in the “Tribute of Yu,” a text written centuries later and eventually canonized in the Book of Documents. It describes a system in which farmers near the capital provisioned the city with unprocessed grain and straw as well as labor service. Those living farther away brought only polished grain. Beyond that, common farmers served other lords because it was too far for them to transport materials to the capital. This general picture seems to be confirmed by the divinatory inscriptions on harvests, though we have little information on which social groups did most of the agricultural labor or how the state appropriated its surplus. We can assume that the Shang’s most loyal subjects were members of the various related lineages, but there were also enslaved captives and other non-lineage members, and we have no idea what percentage of the population each of these groups comprised. We do know that the king was able to mobilize thousands of people to fight on short notice and that his officials directly managed some farming, so it is possible that much of the king’s grain income was provided by subjects doing unpaid labor on his fields.¹⁴

Beyond the Shang center, allied polities paid tribute to the Shang with goods. Thousands of turtle shells were used for divination at Anyang without any evidence of turtle bones, which suggests that people brought turtle shells to the site from a large surrounding region. Inscriptions on cattle scapulae and turtle plastrons (the bottoms of turtles’ shells) reveal that close allies tended to provide regular supplies of plastrons and that polities less closely allied with the Shang tended to bring them captive humans and cattle. Given that turtle shells were the materials used for divination and that both cattle and people were killed in sacrifices, it seems that these divination records are strongly biased toward economic activity related to divination and should not be considered representative of Shang relations with other polities in general. However, they also reveal that the Shang king sometimes requisitioned people, cattle, horses, and sheep from close allies.¹⁵

The large numbers of livestock consumed at the site suggests that cattle and pigs were two of the main resources the Shang collected from its wider hinterland. Domestic animals were after all resources that could walk themselves to the capital. One bone workshop contained thirty-four tons of bones, revealing that Anyang was able to mobilize large numbers of cattle, pigs, and deer and turn their bones, pig tusks, and deer antlers into implements and decorative pins. Archaeologists estimate that this workshop contains the remains of 113,000 cattle, an average of two a day for the 150 years in which it was in use, and that it could have produced over four million artifacts from the cattle bones alone. And this was just one of three such bone workshops at Anyang. Such a large number of goods was obviously produced not for local use but for distribution across a large area, probably in return for livestock and other goods. There must have been a slaughterhouse that distributed body parts: a cow’s lower legs were sent to one workshop to make hairpins, its shoulder blades were sent to be used for divination, and we can be sure that its meat was also divided up and sent to different destinations. There were also workshops making various other things, such as stone sickles that were presumably distributed to agricultural workers and, most famously, bronze ritual vessels.¹⁶

While most of the food consumed at Anyang probably came from its hinterland, it obtained more valuable things through its relationships with a network of distant polities scattered across the Yellow and Yangzi valleys. Cowries were transported from southern oceans, probably in a series of exchanges. Metals were surely the luxury items most important to the rulers, but the locations of the copper, tin, and lead used in their bronzes are not well understood. Some of this metal probably came from the Yangzi valley, or even farther south, and must have been obtained through some form of trade, perhaps gift exchanges between the Shang rulers and those in that region.¹⁷

Domesticated horses arrived from Inner Asia at this time, helping rulers consolidate their control over their subjects. Unlike domestic dogs, pigs, and cattle, which have been transformed by millennia of selective breeding, horses are as much tamed as domesticated. People had not yet developed the technology to ride horses, so they hitched them to chariots that had arrived along with horses. Chariots were impractical for warfare on rough terrain, but they allowed elites to ride through settlements towering over their subjects on vehicles pulled by these intimidating beasts and wielding sharp weapons. Since horses require grazing land and specialists to maintain them and their equipment, they made it more expensive to be a member of the elite and became a key means of differentiating those with wealth and power from those without. The prestige value of horses is clear from the poems about them in the Book of Odes and from the fact that pits containing horses and chariots became standard parts of elite burials for the next millennium.¹⁸

Hunting was an important part of elite culture. It provided food, some of which was presented in ritual sacrifices, and was also a military training exercise. The king regularly divined about hunting, for example: “the king really caught 2 female tigers, 1 aurochs, 21 deer, 2 boars, 127 antlerless deer, 2 tigers, 2 hares, 27 pheasants.” These body counts regularly went into the hundreds. The focus was clearly on larger animals. By killing off larger animals, they eliminated animals that could damage crops and people. As Mencius said a millennium later, “The Duke of Zhou . . . drove far away the tiger, leopards, rhinoceroses and elephants, and everyone was greatly delighted.” This passage shows that hunting large animals was considered a kind of public service. When one considers how difficult it would be to farm and herd in a landscape with herbivores like deer, buffaloes, and boars eating one’s crops and wolves, tigers, and leopards eating one’s livestock or children, it is not surprising that commoners might appreciate aristocrats hunting large animals. Fire was used to drive prey toward hunters, which created good conditions for livestock and also for deer, the one kind of larger wild animal that could benefit from the mosaic of vegetation types created by low-intensity farming.¹⁹

While royal hunts could not have been as ecologically significant as the everyday hunting of the far more numerous commoners, they could have had a substantial impact on large animals that reproduce slowly. North China’s rhinoceroses were eventually extirpated, and its aurochs and wild water buffaloes were driven to extinction. Hunting remained an aristocratic pursuit for the next three millennia and surely played a part in the destruction of larger animals. However, I have no doubt that the main factor in eliminating large mammals was the gradual replacement of their habitat with farmland and with domesticated grazers. The densely populated lowlands of Henan were probably the first places in East Asia from which these megafauna were permanently eliminated.²⁰

The animal imagery on bronze ritual vessels is often too stylized for us to identify the animals intended, but there are some motifs that are unmistakable, such as the annual growth rings on the horns of water buffaloes (fig. 4). These large and dangerous creatures are among the most common animals depicted on Shang and Zhou bronzes, and I suspect this relates to the fact that they were powerful animals that elites liked to hunt. The fact that horses, so important in elite culture, were only rarely depicted in bronze also suggests that the animals on bronzes were prey. At Anyang it has been shown that wild animal remains were more common in the palaces and temples than in workshops or houses, which suggests that wild animals were eaten by the elites who hunted them.²¹

I was first introduced to China’s environmental history when my undergraduate teacher Greg Blue gave me Mark Elvin’s essay “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth” and joked, “I guess that lets the Shang off the hook!”²² It took me several years to understand why this was funny, but eventually I realized that he had a point. In fact, the Erligang and Shang states played an important role in Chinese environmental history because they developed much larger political organizations than had previously existed. These maintained stability over large areas for long time periods, encouraging the spread of farming and the growth of human populations. They showed how successful rulers could monopolize the surplus labor and resources of large numbers of people and use them to make intricate bronzes, chariots, monumental buildings, and other impressive objects. They also invented writing and began to use this powerful new tool in administration. All of these practices inspired their rivals, and it is not surprising that when the Shang were overthrown their conquerors did not destroy their civilization but rather copied it. Their conquerors were the Zhou, who had once been allies, but in 1046 or so led a coalition of peoples from the west that overthrew the Shang and founded the Zhou dynasty.²³

Figure 4. Bronze ritual vessel with the horns of a wild water buffalo. Note the buffalo heads on the handles and lid. Photograph © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Who were the Zhou, and how did they get so powerful? From an archaeological perspective, one would not have expected the conquerors of the Shang to come from the Guanzhong, since few substantial sites from the second millennium BCE have been discovered there. It seems to have been sparsely populated, but its people had much in common with their neighbors to the east. The material culture of early Erligang (c. 1500 BCE) sites in the eastern Guanzhong are so similar to that of Erligang itself that it seems likely that they were colonists from that area. Over the subsequent century, Erligang influence spread across the Guanzhong, though the cultures of the western part of the basin retained indigenous elements and influences from other neighboring regions. The Shang culture of Anyang similarly first reached the eastern Guanzhong and eventually influenced the whole basin. Given the closer connections of the eastern Guanzhong with Anyang, it is perhaps not a coincidence that it was the Zhou people of the western Guanzhong who eventually conquered the Shang. They were far enough from Anyang to retain some independence.²⁴

The largest and most thoroughly excavated site of this period in the Guanzhong is Laoniupo, which lies east of Xi’an on a terrace overlooking the Ba River. During the Erligang period, it was a small settlement from which archaeologists excavated farming and fishing tools like those from late Neolithic sites, as well as molds for making bronze arrowheads and dagger-axes (ge 戈, daggers mounted perpendicularly on poles), the latter of which, at least, were clearly for use against humans. A copper-smelting settlement fourteen kilometers southeast of Laoniupo is our earliest evidence of smelting in the Guanzhong. The site included fish net weights, bronze arrowheads and dagger-axes, oracle bones, and two semiprocessed copper disks. This may have been a site where copper was smelted after being mined in the Qinling to the southeast, after which it was sent to centers like Erligang or Yanshi. The five small graves at the site contain skeletons whose heads, feet, and other body parts were cut off before burial, perhaps the remains of slaves or convicts working at the site.²⁵

By the time of Anyang, Laoniupo had become a large site with elite architecture, a significant bronze industry, and burials that closely followed Shang practices from Henan. By the eleventh century it had large graves in which were found bronze ritual vessels and people killed to accompany the main tomb occupant. This period also saw the region’s first unambiguously domesticated horse remains at Laoniupo and at Feng, the site west of Xi’an that would later be a Zhou capital. Laoniupo had an Anyang-style buried horse and chariot. The era of full-blown socioeconomic inequality had arrived in the Guanzhong, with bronze-wielding, chariot-riding elites ruling over people who farmed with tools similar to those used by their late Neolithic ancestors.²⁶

The people who inhabited Laoniupo and neighboring sites were not the Zhou but were probably closer allies of the Shang. The historical record suggests that the Zhou were a relatively small but militarily powerful group who colonized the western Guanzhong a few generations before they conquered the Shang. Two poems in the Major Court Songs (da ya) of the Book of Odes depict the Zhou colonization of the Zhouyuan, the “Plain of Zhou,” in the western Guanzhong. These poems date roughly to the ninth or eighth century BCE and reflect the ideas of that period rather than the earlier events they depict.²⁷ It is remarkable to have such clear descriptions of colonization from texts that are almost three thousand years old, and they are worth quoting at length. “August Sovereign” celebrates the labor of the Zhou’s ancestors as they colonized the plain: “They cleared them, moved them, the dead trees, the fallen trunks; trimmed them, levelled them, the clumps and stumps; opened them, cleft them, the tamarisk woods, the stave-tree woods; pulled them up, cut them back the wild mulberries, the cudranias. . . . God examined his hills. The oak trees were uprooted, the pines and cypresses were cleared. God made a dynasty.”²⁸ Those of us living in places with more recent episodes of settler colonialism are quite familiar with this kind of commemoration of first colonists tearing out trees to make farmland.

Another ode celebrating the Zhou arrival in the Guanzhong is “Spreading Out.” It depicts the Zhou people arriving in the Zhouyuan, finding it fertile, and burning turtle shells to divine about where to build. It describes how they surveyed and laid out the new settlement. As was standard in the region, and can still be seen sometimes today, walls were built by putting the region’s loess soil in a wooden frame and then pounding it solid:

The Plain of Zhou was very fertile, its buttercup and sowthistle sweet as malt sugar. “Here we will make a start; here take counsel, here engrave our turtle shell, which says ‘stop,’ it says, ‘halt’; build houses here.” So he halted, so he stopped. And left and right he drew the boundaries of big plots and little; he opened up the ground, he counted the acres from west to east; everywhere he took his task in hand. Then he summoned his Master of Works, then he summoned his Master of Lands, and made them build houses. Dead-straight were their plumb lines; the planks were lashed to hold the earth; they made the Hall of Ancestors, very venerable. They titled the earth with a rattling. They pounded it with a dull thud. . . . They raised the outer gate; the outer gate soared high. They raised the inner gate; the inner gate was strong. They raised the great earth mound, whence excursions of war might start. And in the time that followed they did not abate their sacrifices, did not let fall their high renown; the oak forests were laid low; roads were opened up. The Kun tribes scampered away.²⁹

The Hall of Ancestors and the “earth mound” were the altars considered the spiritual heart of the dynasty, where the rulers sacrificed to their ancestors and other spirits. This hymn may have been sung centuries after the events it depicts, in rituals held at those altars. Note the implicit connection in the final lines between the removal of unwanted vegetation and the removal of unwanted people. According to this poem, the Zhou conquered the Guanzhong by attacking and driving out the local people and taking their land, the same fate that their descendants would later suffer.

Archaeological evidence seems to confirm these stories that the ancestors of the Zhou ruling house migrated into the Zhouyuan region from the Loess Plateau to the north.³⁰ They later led an alliance of groups to conquer the Shang in allegiance with various other groups, perhaps including those at Laoniupo. Archaeologists have searched hard for traces of the Zhou before they conquered the Shang but have found very little. Given that the Guanzhong has probably received as much attention from archaeologists as any place on earth, the lack of these sites can be taken as evidence of absence. It seems that the Zhou were able to conquer the Shang not based on their sophisticated urban political system but rather because of their ability to unite a variety of groups small enough that they did not leave substantial archaeological traces. This fits with the traditional account of the Zhou conquest of the Shang, which depicts the Zhou not as a powerful kingdom but as a righteous polity that united many small groups to march on Anyang together. Having conquered the Shang, the Zhou needed to develop a system that could extend their small alliance into an organization that could maintain control without a strong central power. They succeeded.³¹

The Western Zhou

After conquering the Shang in 1046 BCE, the Zhou established a confederacy so resilient that it ruled much of the Yellow River valley for the next eight centuries. The Zhou period was the classical period of Chinese civilization, when the corpus of texts was written that would subsequently be canonized. It holds a cultural relevance similar to that of contemporaneous periods in the Indian, Hebrew, and Greek traditions. Over eight centuries, the various Zhou states conquered other ethnic groups and one another, playing a central role in the cultural homogenization of the Yellow River region and the creation of the Chinese ethnic group. It has even been hypothesized that this was a key period in the formation of the Chinese language as the language of the Zhou ruling elite merged with those of the regions they conquered. The Zhou was also a key period in North China’s environmental history since the stability of the Zhou polities over these centuries created ideal conditions for the expansion of the agricultural population. At the beginning of the Zhou period, much of the region was still wild, as shown by the fact that Zhou elites could easily find large wild animals to hunt. By the end, the lowlands were home to tens of millions of people and the megafauna were distant memories.³²

The Zhou period is divided into the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE), when the royal court was based in the Guanzhong in the west, and the Eastern Zhou (771–221 BCE), when the weakened court retreated to its eastern capital in Luoyang. While the fall of the Western Zhou transformed the political dynamics across the Zhou world, many of the regional states that the Zhou kings had founded in the 1040s continued to flourish for centuries. Our understanding of this period is biased by our knowledge that it ended with the founding of the imperial system, but it is worth trying to understand it on its own terms. Whereas no later Chinese empire lasted more than a few centuries, several Zhou states existed for fully eight centuries, and they built a robust inter-state diplomatic system more similar to that of early modern Europe than to imperial China. This was particularly true of the Eastern Zhou period, which is conventionally divided into the Spring and Autumn (771–481 BCE) and Warring States (481–221 BCE) periods, both named after historical texts. The periodization of the Eastern Zhou period is confusing because it technically ended when Qin destroyed Zhou in 256 BCE, but it is also generally considered to include the Warring States period, which ended with the founding of the Qin Empire in 221 BCE. Moreover, the Zhou era did not entirely end with the founding of the Qin Empire because Qin was itself one of the states enfeoffed by the Zhou king. The last state of the Zhou era to fall was Qin itself, in 206 BCE.

The Zhou inherited the governance methods of the Shang, and their state represents another step in the long-term development of increasingly powerful administrative structures. Like the Shang, the Zhou lacked the bureaucratic technologies necessary to administer such a large domain, and instead parceled out their conquests to relatives and allies. From an environmental perspective, the Western Zhou state played a central role in maintaining the stability and gradual expansion of agricultural society, but that was the extent of its environmental power. It was decentralized enough that its king had little influence over how land was exploited outside of his own landholdings.

The key to the longevity of the Zhou system lay in its political integration of kinship and religion in a way that incentivized a scattered network of polities to remain part of the alliance while staying economically independent. After conquering the Shang, the Zhou founded garrisons to rule over settlements across the middle and lower Yellow River valley, enfeoffing a relative or ally in each one. They maintained direct control only in the Guanzhong and Luoyang regions. Most of these polities were ruled by an aristocratic family that traced its patriline to the founders of the Zhou royal house, sometimes fictitiously. Rituals performed to honor these shared ancestors tied these states to the central court and to each other, and many activities that we would consider “political” were conducted in temples as rituals involving deceased ancestors. These states acknowledged the paramount position of the king and accompanied him into battle when required but did not pay him any substantial tribute. This system allowed for a great deal of flexibility when it came to actual political power. One notable aspect of early Chinese political systems, compared with those elsewhere, is that they had something of a monopoly on political and religious legitimacy. There were no deliberative assemblies of the elite like senates or parliaments, nor were there independent landholding religious organizations until the arrival of Buddhism in the first millennium CE.³³

We know very little about the internal administration of the regional Zhou states, so we will focus on the Zhou court in the Guanzhong and Luoyang, the only areas under the administration of the Zhou court. The Zhou ruling house administered only its own landholdings, which we can assume were substantial, while much of the other land was owned and administered by economically independent lineages. While the Zhou states in the east were far away and increasingly distinct from the central court, the lineages in the Guanzhong were key members of the Zhou ruling elite. They served in the royal administration, intermarried with the ruling family, and engaged in the types of factionalism and rivalry common to all royal courts. Like the Shang kings before them, the Zhou kings had many allies and nominal subordinates whose loyalty was not assured and who had to be provided with gifts and other honors. Several inscriptions mention the kings’ awarding settlements and fields to their supporters. The king did not receive any comparable gifts in return, and these land gifts gradually transferred much of the wealth and power of the Zhou court to other lineages, which was one reason for the decline of the royal house. Of course, lords were expected to contribute resources and troops in times of war, not an insignificant expense.³⁴

The establishment of the Western Zhou state turned the Guanzhong, until then a backwater, into a prosperous capital region. As its population grew, more and more of its land was cultivated. As in earlier periods, the main population center was the western end of the plain, notably the Zhouyuan, while the northeastern part of the plain remained sparsely inhabited. The Zhouyuan had been home to the Zhou people before they conquered the Shang and remained one of their capitals, the site of many altars, and also home to many other aristocratic families. The other population center was around the other Western Zhou capital area at the twin cities of Feng and Hao to the west of Xi’an. Archaeologists have excavated the foundations of elite architecture, probably palaces and temples, in both the Zhouyuan and the Feng-Hao capital areas. One building excavated in the Zhouyuan is clearly a precursor of later Chinese buildings both in layout and in its use of roof tiles. Archaeologists have recently discovered canals or moats at both sites, and also an artificial pond or reservoir at the site of Feng that may have provided the city with water.³⁵

No Western Zhou cities have been discovered, which seems to confirm the traditional idea that Zhou society was mostly composed of self-sufficient estates. Given the enormous amount of time and effort archaeologists have devoted to finding town sites in this region, their failure to find any from this period strongly suggests that they did not exist. Unfortunately, the Zhou capital of Feng-Hao was destroyed by subsequent activity, especially the construction of Kunming Lake almost a thousand years later, so we do not know much about it. With the caveat that we do not know the scale of Feng-Hao, we can otherwise be fairly certain that the settlements of the Western Zhou Guanzhong consisted mostly of small communities that were relatively self-sufficient. There is little evidence that markets played much of a role in the economy. Wealth often circulated in the form of gifts between elites, and most commodities were consumed close to where they were produced.³⁶

Horses and chariots became standard markers of elite status in the Western Zhou, in contrast to the Shang, where only the rulers at Anyang had them. The Zhou people were probably already more dependent on herding than the Shang, and the location of the Zhou court in the Guanzhong gave it easy access to grazing land in the Loess Plateau, which lies within the natural range of wild horses and is thus ideal horse pasture. Moreover, the Jing River valley, north of the Zhouyuan, was the borderland between the territories of the Zhou and those of more pastoral people, who were probably main sources of horses. As in the Shang, Zhou elites often hunted to provide ancestral sacrifices, to train for warfare, and to provide themselves with large amounts of meat to eat (fig. 5).³⁷

Pits from a bone workshop have been excavated at the Western Zhou capital at Feng-Hao. It produced mainly hairpins, but also made arrowheads and awls. Most were made from the bones of cattle, but some were made of horse and water buffalo bones and of deer antlers. The Shang had previously produced bone hairpins on a massive scale at Anyang, and it seems quite likely that artisans working for elite Zhou families also produced trinkets, tools, and fashion accessories that were widely distributed through a gift economy. Nonetheless, this type of trade was small in scale and most people’s environmental impact was local. As in earlier periods, clothing was made from hemp and leather, and the Odes refer to the use of raccoon dog and fox fur to make clothing.³⁸

Although the period is called the Bronze Age, Zhou farmers continued to use the same kinds of stone, bone, and wood tools that their late Neolithic ancestors had used. Only a few hundred bronze tools have been found in the Wei River region that date to the five centuries of the Shang and Western Zhou periods. Given that many thousands of bronze ritual vessels, chariot parts, and weapons have been found in the region, it is clear that bronze was a luxury material used for rituals and warfare. Commoners used tools made of wood, stone, and bone until the spread of iron in the third and second centuries BCE.³⁹

Figure 5. Bronze basin decorated with a hunting scene, c. fifth century BCE. On the left, a chariot pulled by four horses chases four deer while its passenger attacks a beast with a spear. Above it is a two-horse chariot. The chariot passengers were presumably of higher status than those on foot. Note the people hunting birds with bows and the fish underneath. The composition seems to revel in the wide variety of birds and beasts being hunted, and in their terror.

The “Seventh Month” ode, which probably dates to the Spring and Autumn period, is the most comprehensive description of society in the first half of the Zhou period and has played a large role in shaping perceptions of Zhou society. It depicts the annual cycle of tasks on a lineage estate and represents the relationship between ruler and ruled as a harmonious one, with the commoners doing farm labor and other work for the lord and then feasting with him at the end of the year. It describes the daughter of a farmer being promised to marry the son of the lord, which suggests that there was no social chasm between lords and their subordinates, which one might expect on a small estate. In any case, this poem depicts only one type of settlement, and we can be sure that there were other forms of social organization.⁴⁰

Despite the continuity in the types of farming tools used, there may well have been changes in farming methods. Some of the odes suggest that farmers worked in large groups. For example, the ode “They Clear Away the Grass,” the epigraph to this book, provides a description of the agricultural season. This hymn, which was presumably sung during rituals in the Zhou ancestral temples, reveals the connections among grain farming, ancestral rituals, and political power. It seems to depict common farmers working the land of the lord and being supervised and fed while they did so.⁴¹

The basis of Western Zhou political power was the labor service that farmers provided to their lords. In the tradition of later Confucian thinkers, this labor system was named after the character jing 井, whose four lines divide a space neatly into nine. This is often called the “well-field” system because jing means “a well for drawing water,” but the character is actually used for its shape, not its meaning. The idea is that blocks of land were divided into nine equal sections, of which eight were distributed to individual families who then worked the ninth block together and gave all of its harvest to their lord. The jing field system served as a utopian ideal in Chinese thought throughout Chinese history because it was understood as the political system of the ancient sage kings. Because of this, much of the debate on the Western Zhou political economy has focused on whether this system ever really existed in the form described in much later texts. While the idea that land was divided into even grids is clearly artificial, it does contain a core of truth in that farmers probably did work their lord’s land without paying taxes from their own private plots.⁴²

The earliest evidence of this comes from the Odes. Ode 212, “The Great Field,” mentions “rain on our lord’s fields and then on our private plots.” Ode 290, “They Clear Away the Grass,” links working communally on the lord’s land with the production of alcohol to be offered to the ancestors. It suggests that working on the lord’s land may have originated with people working together to provide materials to sacrifice to shared ancestors. As we will see below, this kind of agricultural labor service existed for several centuries after this. Confucians argued that it was less exploitative than collecting a percentage of a farmer’s own harvests in taxes. Unlike those taxed directly, farmers working on the lord’s land had no incentive to work hard, and therefore had to be supervised by field inspectors. Our only information on landownership comes from bronze inscriptions recording exchanges of private land, which suggest that land was owned by lineages or other corporate groups and could be exchanged with the king’s permission.⁴³

We know little about the common people of the Western Zhou. Bronze inscriptions record that the king granted hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people to newly established lords or officials along with land. It is possible that these people were in a situation like slavery or serfdom. However, it is also possible that they were common farmers and that this grant merely meant that they now did their labor service for a new lord. The king also awarded people whose status stood somewhere between low-ranked officials and high-ranked servants without fixed duties. The king also awarded artisans who produced goods of wood, leather, clay, or bronze and probably built and maintained buildings. The artisans at a stone jewelry workshop excavated in the Zhouyuan may have been such people.⁴⁴

Much of the core Zhou population was organized into lineages, which could also be called clans. Even high-ranking aristocratic lineages expanded over the centuries so that eventually many of their descendants were common farmers, a pattern common to fecund aristocracies around the world. We know that many people were lineage members, but we cannot assume that everyone was part of a lineage organization. The fact that large groups of people were granted by the king to his followers may indicate that some people were not attached to any lineage. As will be discussed below, the importance of lineages as social institutions declined over the eight centuries of the Zhou period. Centralizing states worked to reduce the power of lineages because they were rivals to centralizing states for the loyalty and, especially, the grain and labor of the population. But after a high point of political centralization in the Qin and Western Han Empires, lineages again became powerful forces in society. We could summarize this relationship by saying that the ability of governments to centralize over the past three millennia has fluctuated inversely with the ability of wealthy families to mobilize local people and resources for their own benefit.⁴⁵

We will now consider the Western Zhou government in more depth. We have little evidence of how the state funded itself, but it seems likely that most of the income of the royal house came from its own landholdings. In fact, we have no evidence of real wealth being transferred from other lineages to the royal house. It may seem strange to us that the king was expected to give valuables and land to his subordinates in order to maintain his paramount position, but it is quite common in human history for political leaders to redistribute wealth to their powerful followers rather than collect it from them. It is also common for royal houses to have so much land and so many subjects that they can remain economically independent of other nobles. This was the case in Romanov Russia and Tokugawa Japan.⁴⁶

While it was certainly the biggest landholder, the Western Zhou royal house shared the Guanzhong and Luoyang regions with many other aristocratic houses, each of which had its own estates. The Zhou government was headed by the king and his family, but most of its other officials were men of these aristocratic families. The only Western Zhou administrative documents that have survived are a few dozen texts that were cast onto bronze vessels. About sixty of these are records of the ceremony in which the king appointed noblemen to official positions. Each of these men was assigned to carry out a different task, which means that the government appointed men to carry out specific jobs that needed to be done, in contrast to a more bureaucratic system in which duties were divided into regular staff positions. Sons were often assigned jobs similar to those their fathers had done. A few of these tasks were related to the environment, such as an official charged with protecting something called yan 堰 in the five main towns of the Guanzhong. Yan may refer to artificial reservoirs or weirs built on rivers to catch fish, or perhaps even to toilets. Another was assigned to manage the “nine reservoirs,” which may have been used for irrigation. Others were assigned the management of forests and of wetlands or other nonagricultural lands (these positions were lin 林 and yu 虞). These officials managed the landholdings of the royal house, since the king had no real authority over how other families used their land.⁴⁷

The total number of official posts with regularized duties probably did not exceed a few dozen, although more than one person may have held each post simultaneously. Many titles included the word “scribe” (shi 史), evidence that writing had an important role in the practice of government. There were three top positions in government. The Supervisor of Construction (sigong 司工) was responsible for construction, public works, and some general administration. The title of Supervisor of Lands (situ 司土) was eventually replaced with the homophonous Supervisor of the Multitudes (situ 司徒), which suggests that the management of agricultural lands was largely a matter of managing the labor force that worked them. Likewise, the fact that the chief military official was called Supervisor of Horses (sima 司馬) demonstrates the importance of horses to the army.⁴⁸

It is unclear if officials were paid for their services. It might seem obvious that officials should be rewarded for their work, but even in the early United States many believed that only those wealthy enough to serve without pay would be immune from corruption. It is quite possible that officials did not need remuneration—they were after all landed aristocrats—or that, as in imperial China, they were expected to use their power to enrich themselves. In the subsequent Eastern Zhou period, officials were often granted the revenue from specific lands rather than fixed salaries or hereditary fiefs.⁴⁹ Records of the Zhou king transferring land from one person to another may include examples of such land used to support officials while they fulfilled their duties, though it seems more likely that they were permanent gifts. Gifts given to new officials sometimes included alienable wealth, such as cowries or raw bronze ingots, but more often the king gave appointees objects of symbolic value that could not be exchanged or used to pay people, such as clothing or chariot decorations that showed they had been honored by the king.⁵⁰

It was traditionally believed that the Western Zhou kings collected tribute from their subordinates, but there is little evidence of it. Given that both the earlier Shang dynasty and the later Eastern Zhou rulers received tribute from smaller polities, the Western Zhou court also must have received some kind of tribute, but the question is whether it consisted of substantial wealth or mere symbols of allegiance. Tribute payments to the Shang were sometimes quite valuable, such as hundreds of sheep. They included grain, cattle, humans, handicrafts, wild animals such as deer, elephants, monkeys, and tigers, and luxury items such as cowries, metal, elephant tusks, and jade. In contrast, Eastern Zhou tribute was a ritual gesture of subservience rather than a transfer of real wealth. Larger Eastern Zhou states paid tribute to the Zhou king, and smaller states paid tribute to larger ones. Discussions of tribute in that period concerned who gave tribute to whom and whether it was delivered each year, not the value of the items. Given that our sources on the Western Zhou were written by the political elite and often concern the relationships between the Zhou rulers and other aristocrats and polities, the absence of tribute from them suggests that it was not a major concern.⁵¹

Horses were a major concern. Horses and chariots were vehicles, status symbols, and war machines. With or without chariots, horses were buried in pits accompanying elite tombs that have been excavated in the hundreds across the Zhou cultural sphere. For most of the Zhou period people did not know how to ride horses, instead using them to pull chariots and other wheeled vehicles. This meant that the military importance of horses was limited compared to later periods. But the sheer number of inscriptions concerned with horses, and the fact that the chief military official was called Supervisor of Horses, makes clear that they were nonetheless very important to Zhou rulers. Large areas must have been devoted to breeding them, and there must have been an official system for procuring horses, some of which probably came from pastoral peoples outside of the Zhou sphere of influence. As will be discussed in the following chapter, the state of Qin originated as a horse-breeding polity on the western edge of the Zhou realm.⁵²

Rulers at this time began to create parks for wild animals, which probably reflects their declining numbers around population centers. The Western Zhou kings had at least one royal park, which is mentioned in bronze inscriptions and in this ode: “The king was in the Divine Park, where the does and stags lay resting; the does and stags were sleek, the white birds were glistening; the king was by the Divine Pool; oh, the plentiful fishes leapt.” Centuries later, Mencius held up the Western Zhou parks as examples of royal generosity for allowing commoners to forage in them, in contrast to the greedy king of Qi, who kept the people out. Mencius may not have been wrong, because Qin laws specifically allowed people to hunt smaller animals in its hunting parks, which proves that there was a tradition of allowing commoners to hunt in royal parks as long as they left the biggest animals for the nobles.⁵³

In conclusion, the main environmental effect of the Western Zhou state was its success in establishing peace, which allowed agrarian civilization to flourish across the Yellow River valley and beyond. The Zhou royal house seems to have collected income only from its own land. Rather than receiving taxes from its subordinates, it was expected to give them goods and land, a system that has more in common with potlatch systems than with centralized bureaucratic states. It was the development of new administrative techniques in the subsequent Eastern Zhou period that gave states direct control over the land and labor of their subjects, giving them the power to transform the environment on a large scale.

The Spring and Autumn Period

In 771 BCE the Zhou court was defeated and fled eastward to Luoyang, where it hung on as a minor polity for five more centuries. It was perhaps not initially obvious that the power of the Zhou royal house had been permanently weakened, but as that became clear the Zhou states began to jockey for power. The scale and duration of warfare increased for the next five centuries, one reason people like Confucius (d. 479 BCE) looked back on the Western Zhou as an age of peace and good governance. At the beginning of this period, the network of Zhou states did not extend very far south of the Yellow River valley, but over the subsequent centuries the geopolitical arena expanded dramatically and states situated far to the south in the Yangzi valley became key players. Cities formed and grew considerably over these centuries, and urbanites came to play an increasingly important role in politics, supporting rulers they liked and deposing those they did not. Marriage remained a central concern of elites, and there is some evidence of increasing gender imbalance.⁵⁴

The main trend in Spring and Autumn political history is that strong states extinguished weak ones. There may have been over two hundred polities at the beginning of the period, but only a handful remained three centuries later. Many of these polities were single settlements of which we know nothing more than their names. Like the Shang and Western Zhou states described above, the larger states of the Spring and Autumn period were composed of various lineages that were nominally under the control of one ruling house but were in fact semi-independent. In order to build their power, the ruling houses had to weaken these lineages and take control over their land and people, something that was obviously resisted. Some royal houses succeeded in gradually appropriating the taxation income and military service of their rivals’ subjects and extending their judicial authority over them. But these tensions sometimes erupted into violence, and in several states rival lineages managed to overthrow the ruling house and establish themselves as rulers. Regardless of which family ended up on the throne, by the fifth century BCE most people were the subjects of a few large states. The Zhou ruling elite shared a common culture and their dominance over eight centuries helped make the populations of the Yellow, Huai, and Han River valleys increasingly culturally homogeneous. State-strengthening also involved the assimilation of non-Zhou peoples, a gradual process that involved considerable violence and whose environmental consequences remain unknown. In retrospect, the creation of a relatively homogeneous population across such a large region greatly facilitated the subsequent formation of the Qin and Han empires.⁵⁵

Scholars of the Eastern Zhou period tend to treat the violence of the period as though it was a natural outcome of the declining central power of the Zhou royal house, but the culture of the Zhou aristocracy was particularly violent. Warfare was not something they avoided if they could but was rather a routine seasonal activity that they scheduled so that it did not interfere with the agricultural calendar. And when there was no war, they would organize massive hunts. Killing animals as sacrifices to spirits and ancestors was a central element of the Zhou religious and political system. Political agreements in this period were achieved in oath-swearing ceremonies in which participants killed animals, smeared the blood on their lips, and promised loyalty. Sacrifice remained a key element of political rituals throughout the period discussed in this chapter, gradually becoming bureaucratized as states levied specific taxes for sacrifices and set aside land to provide animals and other resources for them.⁵⁶

As in the Western Zhou period, one of the main requirements for holding a position of political power in the Spring and Autumn period was a high aristocratic rank. This meant that many of the men in government were the ruler’s relatives, and thus potential rivals. To reduce this threat, rulers increasingly allowed members of less powerful lineages to occupy high government positions. But this allowed those lineages to grow in power. In several major states (especially Qi, Lu, and Jin) these ministerial families eventually deposed the ruling houses and took the throne. It became clear that the safest people to put in positions of power were men without important family connections. This was the rationale for the rise of the shi 士 (variously translated as “knights” or “scholars”) to positions of political power. These were often men from long-irrelevant aristocratic lineages. They had the necessary education and political acumen to hold office but lacked the family connections to build their own power base.⁵⁷ They were appointed to office based on their skills and were directly accountable to their superiors. The emphasis on skills greatly increased the stability and professionalism of governments and was a key step in the development of professional bureaucracies.

Another administrative innovation was the development of written laws. There had been some rules in the Western Zhou for trying and punishing miscreants, but there is no evidence of written laws. Rather than having a formal legal system staffed by legal experts, people brought suits to various Western Zhou officials, or even the king himself, to adjudicate. The origins of China’s long tradition of complex written legal statutes can probably be traced to Spring and Autumn–era texts written to specify the appropriate punishments for specific crimes. While most legal documents were written for internal use, states also began in the sixth century to publicly display laws. This was immediately opposed by traditionalists on the grounds that knowing the rules would help people challenge official rulings. Confucius argued that displaying penal laws would destroy the Zhou rules of nobility. He correctly considered codified law an attack on aristocratic privilege because it established a direct relationship between the state and the people, diminishing the undefined authority of increasingly irrelevant minor nobles like himself.⁵⁸

As in earlier periods, polities were understood not as territorial units but as the domains of specific ruling families, whose landholdings were often scattered across large areas. The development of territorial states, in which the rulers conceptualized their domains as much in terms of the space that they administered as of the distribution of their subjects, was directly related to the development of bureaucratic techniques for controlling large areas. Even then, the power of states was based on their control of people rather than land. Until the invention of modern surveillance and transportation technology in the twentieth century, state power always ranged from strong control in population centers to vague hegemony in the hinterland.⁵⁹

The decentralized power structure that characterized Zhou states up to this period is quite common in world history. The development of centralized bureaucratic governments is far less common. Over the course of the Eastern Zhou period, central governments came to establish direct administrative control over populations that eventually numbered in the millions. Warfare seems to have played a key role in this. As wars increased in scale and cost, rulers sought new sources of soldiers and resources from lineages that were nominally subordinate to them but who had traditionally led their own subjects to war. These reforms seem to have begun with the establishment of military districts to improve recruitment capabilities. This was presumably an attempt by central courts to take direct control over soldiers that normally fought under their own lineage leaders, so it reduced the military capabilities of rival lineages.⁶⁰

The first state to institute thorough reforms was Zheng, near modern Zhengzhou. This began with a water control project that offended powerful interests who then rebelled and killed government leaders. Zheng’s ruler subsequently tried to appoint Zichan, whose father had been one of the murdered leaders, to enact further reforms in 543 BCE, but he declined. His explanation of his refusal shows the limits of state power at the time: “The state is small and is constrained by neighboring states, the lineages are powerful and receive many favors; it cannot be done.” Zichan accepted the job only after the ruler promised to back him against powerful interests. He proceeded to enact reforms that consisted of “having urban and rural distinguished, superiors and inferiors given their duties, fields divided with borders and ditches, villages and fields collected into groups of five families.” The Zheng state was extending administration over the land and people of the various lineages and making itself the arbiter of aristocratic status. This may also be the earliest evidence of the five-family mutual responsibility system later adopted in Qin. A few years later, Zichan instituted a levy (fu 賦), a term that probably originally referred to military service but was eventually commuted to a tax.⁶¹

The most detailed passage on state-strengthening reforms in the Spring and Autumn period is a record from the southern state of Chu (see map 7):

Wei Yan was the Minister of War, and [Head of State] Zi Mu had him regulate the tax levies and count armor and weapons. On the jiawu day, Wei Yan recorded the ground and fields, measured the forests in the mountains, added up the wetlands and marshes, distinguished hills from tombs, noted barren and saline ground, calculated border wetlands, graded reservoirs and weirs, put livestock to graze in marshy places, divided fertile land into grids, and adjusted the levies based on the income of each area. He established the levies of chariots, register of horses and the numbers of chariots, weapons, foot soldiers, armor and shields to be levied.⁶²

The fact that this survey was completed by the Minister of War demonstrates the close links between surveying resources, intensifying governance, and military procurement. It also suggests that states were surveying more systematically in order to extend their control over resources that had previously lain outside their control. To take control over new lands and subjects, states created spatial units that were administered by appointed officials instead of other lineages. Because they were the first territorial units directly administered by officials, the establishment of these units is usually considered the first step toward bureaucratic territorial administration in China. The term for these was xian 縣, a word that first appeared in this context during the Spring and Autumn period. However, at the time xian were closer to hereditary fiefs than centrally administered territories. In the state of Jin many xian belonged to powerful lineages rather than the royal house, and Chu’s xian “retained a great deal of autonomy, the governor having a free hand to enlist some of the inhabitants for military service and to levy taxes.” It took centuries for the tradition of hereditary fiefs to gradually be replaced with salaried administrative positions. The conventional translation of xian as “county” is therefore acceptable only from the fourth century onward, when xian came to be administrative extensions of the central government.⁶³

Building state power usually requires destroying existing forms of social organization. We know from modern history that this is usually met with some kind of resistance, but the only traces we have of everyday forms of peasant resistance in early China are records from the Qin Empire of people running away from state control. However, we do have considerable evidence of conservative members of the lower aristocracy resisting administrative standardization in other states, most famously Confucius and his school. They defended the more flexible and classist earlier traditions from state-led standardizing reforms that diminished aristocratic privilege. They also criticized the practice of states extending their control over nonagricultural lands like forests and wetlands. They considered these shared resources, especially insofar as people depended on these resources for survival or when their crops failed, so the state’s taking them over ran counter to their moral economy. While versions of these critiques later became the official Confucian ideology, states won this fight and continued building their bureaucracies. Like earlier moves by polities to get people to do labor service and pay taxes, many of these state-strengthening reforms began as radical ideas and ended up as the status quo.⁶⁴

Given that taxation is the activity whereby states collect the energy and resources they need to function, it is frustrating how little information we have on the history of taxes in early China. As discussed above, the Western Zhou extracted surpluses from commoners not by taxing their crops but by requiring them to perform agricultural and other labor for the state. This was possible because political units were small and there was relatively little distance between lord and subject. As states grew during the Eastern Zhou period, they gradually replaced labor service with taxation taken as a percentage of crops. This had the benefit, for the state, of eliminating the need for supervision of agricultural labor. Whereas previously people could work slowly when laboring on their lord’s land, now that they paid a percentage of their own harvests in taxes, they were effectively giving the state a cut of the labor they did for their own benefit. Standardized extraction was convenient for state officials but not for their subjects.

Our best evidence of taxation comes from texts of the Confucian tradition that record resistance to reforms. The Spring and Autumn Annals (after which this period is named) record that the state of Lu began taxing fields by area in 594 BCE. All agree that this meant collecting a percentage of the harvest as a tax, but there is disagreement as to whether it replaced labor service on the lord’s land or was imposed in addition to it. Writing centuries later, commentator He Xiu (129–182 CE) argued that Lu’s lord had to tax land because he had no favor or loyalty from the people, who were therefore not willing to work hard on his land. This shows an awareness that taxation was a harsher form of extraction than labor service because it could be imposed on people by force regardless of whether they consented. Directly following the passage in the Annals about Lu’s beginning to tax fields is the phrase “in the winter, the locust larvae hatched; there was famine,” which some commentators interpreted as celestial punishment for altering the ancient taxation system.⁶⁵

Another passage on taxation concerns reforms in Lu a century later. Confucius objected to the plan of Lu’s officials to levy regular taxes on fields, since these taxes had previously been levied only during wars and other emergencies. Confucius says that the former (Western Zhou) kings “taxed fields based on labor and equalized the labor based on the distance laborers lived from the fields. They collected military taxes from the towns based on how much people had. They had each man do labor service but took his age into consideration. So they could collect levies from widowers, widows, orphans and sick people when the chariots were leaving for war, but not when there was no war.”⁶⁶ In other words, extraction should be flexible, based on the producer’s capacities and on the state’s needs, not a regular tax. This passage was written at least a century after the period in question, long after Confucius died, but its administrative conservatism and concern with the fair treatment of commoners identifies it as a product of the Confucian school. In addition to opposing new taxes, Confucius argued against the injustice of administrative standardization. Whereas flexible systems could take individual situations into account, standardization required eliminating compassion. Mencius echoed this when arguing that standardized taxation is cruel because it takes the same taxes in years of plenty, when it could take more, as in years of dearth, when it should take less.⁶⁷

Despite the objections of Confucius and his followers, Lu’s rulers probably considered these reforms necessary because their rivals were taking similar measures. More flexible taxation was quite practical within the early Zhou system, when most people lived in small communities, but building stronger states required standardizing extraction. These reforms only increased in intensity during the Warring States period, as a handful of powerful states fielded increasingly large armies for longer campaigns. Despite its reforms, Lu was eventually destroyed by Chu. The objections of the Confucians had little effect when they were alive, but they became increasingly influential over the next two millennia. Eventually these ideas came to structure many of the debates regarding the appropriate level of taxation and state intervention in society.

Another way to increase state power was to find new sectors of the economy to extract resources from. Early Zhou states had essentially been composed only of the landholdings and human subjects of their ruling lineages. In other words, polities claimed ownership over specific territories, and the rest of the land was not claimed by any polity. As states expanded their control, they appointed officials to collect taxes on resource extraction in more remote areas. This was perceived as immoral because these areas had previously provided food and materials to commoners. One clear statement of this was a critique of Lu’s Lord Zhuang for being “greedy for the profit from the mountains, forests, grasslands and marshes. He competed with the people in gaining the wealth from the fields, fisheries, firewood and edible plants.” The Guliang commentary also states that the resources of mountain forests were for the benefit of the people, so establishing officials to police them was improper. Similarly, an official of Qi complained, “The timber on the mountainsides is watched over by foresters. The rushes in the marshes are watched over by boatmen. The firewood and kindling in the lowlands are watched over by wardens. The salt and mussels in the sea are watched over by coast guards,” after which the remorseful ruler supposedly removed all of these offending officials. This is also clear from Mencius’s belief that the royal parks of the early Zhou kings were open to commoners and there were no government controls on the weirs.⁶⁸

The extension of state control over resources was not just about monopolizing them but also involved enforcing the sustainable use of those resources, as is clear from the numerous references to conservation in Warring States texts. Like their Western Zhou predecessors, many rulers also had their own hunting parks, which protected larger animals that were becoming rare elsewhere. Qin may have had its own hunting park in the Spring and Autumn period. As in other aristocratic cultures and modern conservationism, the desire of the rich and powerful to kill wild animals is often the most powerful force ensuring their protection.⁶⁹

The Spring and Autumn period saw many key innovations in state power, and these processes would only intensify in the subsequent centuries, which are appropriately known as the Warring States period.

The Warring States

Only a few powerful kingdoms remained by the Warring States period, an era characterized by a relatively stable group of states roughly similar in size to those of early modern Europe. Also as in Europe, they were organized in a multistate system with established diplomatic protocols in which frequent and increasingly large-scale warfare led to administrative innovation. The scale of warfare increased dramatically, and by the third century BCE some armies included hundreds of thousands of men. Each state was powerful enough to resist its neighbors but paid careful attention to any development that might give its rivals an advantage, so effective innovations tended to be adopted by rivals sooner or later.⁷⁰

The profound changes that occurred in politics during this period were mirrored in many other aspects of life. Commerce expanded enormously and became a factor in many people’s lives. Sima Qian reports that merchants became fabulously rich by dealing in unprocessed products such as grain, timber, bamboo, fruit, and livestock; processed ones such as pickled foods, alcohol, textiles, and hides; and manufactures such as lacquer vessels and iron tools, which first became common toward the end of this period. Increased commerce was probably a main factor in the technological innovations in craft production that occurred during this period, such as new kilns for pottery, better spinning wheels for making thread, and improved looms for making fabric. Lacquer also became more widely available. Expansions in commerce and improvements in technology probably made handicrafts more widely available, potentially increasing consumption levels and thus the ecological footprint of the average person. The fact that merchants were making fortunes buying agricultural commodities and selling a variety of processed goods makes clear that this was neither just commerce in luxuries for elites nor occasional agricultural exchange. Commercial exchange was widespread.⁷¹

Warfare also became much larger in scale and more brutal in this period. In earlier periods wars were usually fought in winter, the agricultural off-season, and were fought according to aristocratic codes, as though their purpose was as much to gain glory for the commanders as to defeat the enemy. Over the Warring States period this gradually gave way to ruthless large-scale infantry warfare led by military professionals. Cities were fortified and besieged. Horseback riding was first mastered by steppe nomads and gradually adopted by the Zhou states. As the steppe warriors became adept at horseback riding, they became increasingly powerful. The northern states of Qin, Zhao, and Yan controlled some steppe areas and were in constant contact with pastoral groups beyond their borders, which gave them access to horses and helped them master cavalry techniques for warfare before their southern rivals (fig. 6 and map 7).⁷²

Unlike the Spring and Autumn period, for which we have yearly annals, our knowledge of Warring States political history comes from less systematic sources. One reason for this is that Qin burned the annals of its rivals as it conquered them, leaving only Qin’s for later historians (though some were later excavated from tombs). For these reasons, we know more about the records of Shang Yang’s fourth-century reforms in Qin than about those of any other state. Because it is well known that Qin adopted many of these reforms from Wei and other rivals, Qin’s system is often assumed to resemble theirs, but in fact some of its more distant rivals (most notably Chu and Qi) probably had quite different systems. In any case, I will discuss Qin at some length in the next chapter, so here I will merely summarize some of the main developments in Warring States administration.⁷³

The Warring States period was the time when real bureaucracy first developed in China. “Bureaucracy” literally means “rule by desks” and was originally a derogatory term, presumably coined by people who thought that government should be ruled by aristocrats and warriors rather than by armies of clerks. It later became a key concept in the study of political organization. Although many ancient rulers employed scribes to read and write for them, a state cannot be considered fully bureaucratic until the scribes or clerks form the core of the government. The court or legislative body at the top of the hierarchy makes the key decisions, but the bureaucracy is what actually governs. Max Weber noted that bureaucracy’s strength compared to less standardized forms of administration lies in its precision, continuity, discretion, predictability, reduced costs, and, of course, the fact that much information is written down and easily accessible to officials.⁷⁴

Figure 6. Ceramic model excavated from a late fourth-century BCE tomb at Taerpo in the Qin capital Xianyang. It is the earliest known depiction of a person on horseback in East Asia, evidence of the close association between Qin and the pastoralists of Inner Asia, who had been riding horses for centuries by this time. Note the painted bridle.

Map 7. Approximate territories controlled by the major states of the Warring States period around 350 BCE. Jin had split into Zhao, Wei, and Han. Han had absorbed Zheng and now encircled the Zhou court in Luoyang. The outer borders of Qin, Chu, Zhao, and Yan are nothing more than suggestions of the general reach of their power, something that we cannot even estimate for Shu and Yue.

Initially a skill used only by scribes employed for specific purposes, writing became more widespread in this period as people found new uses for it. Whereas earlier governance had often involved groups of men who knew each other, writing could replace personal ties of trust with more objective and standardized practices. The state could not expand to encompass millions of subjects without these kinds of technologies. Each improvement in the central government’s ability to monitor its officials increased the amount of territory and number of people it was able to control. These administrative innovations included requiring written rules for the conduct of officials, procedures for enforcing those rules, and a system of reliably moving information, materials, and people. Whereas administrators in the early Zhou period had a shared interest in effective governance because they were all members of the ruling classes, once they were replaced with lower-status professionals their superiors needed to find ways to evaluate them. Their performance had to be monitored by other officials, who then promoted, demoted, or punished them. A key technique of centralizing power was to employ capable men who had no other source of income and to pay them in grain rather than land. Their careers thus depended on pleasing the ruler. As described above, increasing the power of central governments required diminishing that of other aristocratic lineages, and it was the men of these impoverished lineages who then became officials of the increasingly bureaucratic state. Not only did the increased centralization of states reduce other sources of patronage but rulers could also reward capable servants very handsomely. Some did award land to capable followers, but they tended to award them the tax income of a given area without giving them direct control over it.⁷⁵

Standardizing administrative practice required the development of written codes of conduct, which, as discussed above, built on centuries of written regulations. The importance of regulating officials can be seen clearly in Qin’s laws, discussed in subsequent chapters. One archaeological indicator of the increase in the routine administrative use of writing is the use of seals. Seals were used in earlier periods to imprint writing and patterns on pottery and bronze-casting molds. In the mid–Eastern Zhou period people began to use them to imprint the marks of officials on the clay used to seal documents, which became a common practice. Seals are formal mechanisms of authentication and proof used for communication between the various functionaries of the state, such as officials and soldiers. Their proliferation shows that state administrations were expanding to sizes in which officials no longer personally knew the people with whom they communicated, and documents were being sent long distances. Like the tallies given to military commanders to limit their ability to wage war without permission, seals were physical signs of the delegation of the king’s authority. These made it clear that an official’s power came from his superiors and could be removed along with the seal.⁷⁶

In addition to literacy, some officials needed more specialized skills. Mathematics were essential for administrative tasks such as collecting taxes, evaluating fields, converting between different types of commodities, and building infrastructure. These skills are apparent both in the practical use of mathematics in administration and from mathematical “textbooks” that have been excavated from Qin and Han tombs. One important use of these skills was to regulate the sizes of fields, which was essential for standardizing taxation and for granting land to commoners. These make clear how important measurements were to administration, which led states to standardize measures such as those of distance, weight, and volume. Early imperial documents are often full of mathematical errors, evidence that many officials never received much education in mathematics.⁷⁷

Perhaps the most telling evidence of how thoroughly these reforms transformed society comes from popular religion. Although earlier practices such as sacrifice and divination were still employed, the underworld was increasingly understood as a bureaucracy, and people came to use the same administrative practices they used in dealing with the state to communicate with underworld officials. The bureaucracy had become such a routine part of people’s lives that it became their model for how the cosmos functioned.⁷⁸

The growth of states vastly increased the ability of human societies to transform their environments. The Shang and Western Zhou states created the stability necessary for the expansion of agrarian civilization, but their environmental impact did not go beyond this, since their control of land and labor was limited. In the Eastern Zhou period, increasingly powerful states fought bigger wars, commerce expanded, and bureaucrats, militarists, and merchants largely replaced the old aristocracy in the upper classes of society. Whereas Western Zhou commoners had labored for local elites, by the late Warring States period they paid taxes and performed statute and military labor for large, impersonal states. Improved administrations gave central governments a far greater ability to mobilize resources, and the growth of commerce and transportation allowed people to sell the products of their own environments to distant markets and, conversely, to consume resources from distant places.

The pressure of war, particularly the need to find more resources and soldiers, forced Eastern Zhou states to innovate in their administrative organization. This involved eliminating rival aristocratic lineages and extending the taxation and military service requirements of people who had previously been exempt or ignored. States also took control of resources that had previously been communal or at least untaxed. The Warring States period thus saw the formation of states that had far more power to transform the environment than their predecessors had. And then, in the decade that ended in 221 BCE, the mighty state of Qin suddenly conquered them all and founded China’s first empire. Qin will be the focus of the next two chapters.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Power in the West

A History of the State of Qin

The land of Qin is a stronghold sheltered by mountains and encircled by the Yellow River, a country defended on all four sides. For over twenty Qin lords, from Lord Mu down to the King of Qin, Qin’s leaders were among the mightiest of the Zhou lords. Was this because Qin had talented leaders generation after generation? No; it was their geographical position.

—JIA YI (201–169 BCE), “On Qin’s Faults”

QIN’S WAS THE SHORTEST dynasty in Chinese imperial history but also the longest. By the time Qin collapsed only fourteen years after it founded China’s first empire in 221 BCE, its royal family had reigned for over six centuries. For most of this time Qin had been a regional power, formidable enough, but not one that anyone would have expected to conquer the known world. But that is what it did, laying the foundation for over two millennia of bureaucratic agrarian states in East Asia. Qin’s successors have played a key role in transforming the ecology of the subcontinent.

A few decades after Qin’s collapse, prominent thinker Jia Yi pondered why Qin had prevailed over the other Zhou states. He concluded that Qin’s success was due to the fertility and natural defenses of the Guanzhong Basin. Given that Qin was the only Zhou state that did not need to build a wall around its capital, it is hard to deny the role of geography. Unlike its rivals, which were mostly clustered together in the central and lower Yellow River valley, Qin could endure internal strife or incompetent rulers without the threat of immediate attack from its distant neighbors. And while Qin had little pressure to adopt the state-strengthening reforms that its eastern rivals developed to stay ahead of their neighbors, it had the luxury of doing so in its own time.

But it was not all geography. Qin would not have been able to conquer the Guanzhong without a strong military, and it had particularly powerful rulers. Unlike rival states, many of whose ruling houses governed alongside other aristocratic houses of similar strength, Qin’s ruling family seems to have had no internal rivals at all. It was one of only two ruling families of the period that was never deposed, and this longevity gave it considerable legitimacy. Like England two millennia later, Qin achieved hegemony after centuries as a second-tier power partly because its government had been more centralized than those of its rivals all along. Without the strength of its royal house, it is doubtful that Qin would have succeeded in enacting the radical fourth-century reforms that reorganized its society and its landscape.¹

Qin’s reforms are what make it so important to the environmental history of East Asia because they greatly increased the state’s power to modify the ecosystems under its control. In its early centuries Qin grew by conquering land and people. But its reforms went beyond simple expansion and improved the state’s ability to extract surpluses from the population it already controlled. These policies, traditionally credited to minister Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE), not only systematized the central government but also reorganized society to improve the state’s ability to govern it. In order to strengthen its military, the state awarded men ranks based on their success in war, providing substantial incentives for men to fight. Qin moved its capital into the center of the Guanzhong Basin, which had previously been sparsely occupied, and laid out fields in standardized plots that could be redistributed to families. The higher their rank, the more land they received.

Qin’s emphasis on expanding agriculture surely helps explain the dramatic increase in charcoal in the region’s soil in the first millennium BCE. People burned vegetation to create new fields and to prepare the old ones for tilling. Qin also built dams and canals that reorganized the hydrology of whole regions, including the Zheng Guo Canal just north of its capital at Xianyang 咸陽 (map 8). Qin and other Zhou states also made society more ethnically and ecologically uniform by conquering and assimilating other ethnic groups, such as the Rong, their traditional enemies. Qin’s reforms created an effective administrative system that was inherited and improved by the Han Dynasty and became the classical model of an empire. Qin’s institutions were developed by transforming the agricultural landscape of its core region, and they later came to transform ecosystems across East Asia.²

Map 8. Important locations in Qin history.

This chapter examines the history of Qin from its origins until the mid-third century BCE, when King Zheng, later called the First Emperor, took the throne. We will begin by reviewing the ecological basis of society through the annual cycle in the lives of farmers. We will then review Qin’s enigmatic early history before discussing its subsequent movement into the central Guanzhong, its state-strengthening reforms, and the Zheng Guo Canal project. This will be followed in the next chapter by an analysis of the political ecology of the Qin state during the reign of the First Emperor, the pinnacle of Qin’s power.

The Seasonal Cycle

Before getting into the affairs of the political elite, let us consider the lives of everyday people, whose labor was, after all, the foundation of state power. It can be difficult for those of us accustomed to electricity and internal combustion engines to imagine what life was like without them. It was a world much slower and quieter than the one we live in. Before the light pollution of modern times, celestial bodies shone far more brightly in the night sky, and people paid careful attention to them. The loudest sounds were birds singing, dogs barking, pigs grunting, and chickens clucking, not to mention people talking, yelling, singing, and laughing. As the Book of Odes makes clear, this was a world in which people had a much deeper familiarity with plants and animals than modern urbanites can imagine. Their lives followed the seasons much more closely than do those of modern urbanites.

We know about the annual farming cycle in this period from the kinds of archaeological and textual evidence presented in chapter 2 and from several early “almanacs” that lay out the changing seasons, the most famous of which was the “Monthly Ordinances.” These are probably written examples of an oral folk genre through which people communicated common wisdom on the passing of the seasons. They include plenty of information that we would consider inaccurate or superstitious: hawks become doves, mice become quails, and birds enter the sea and become mollusks. I will leave these issues for intellectual historians and will quote only passages that I consider plausible. These texts follow several different early Chinese calendars, so I will organize them according to the months of the Gregorian calendar.³

Let us begin in the winter, when people celebrated the new year. In December “the ice becomes harder, the ground begins to crack, and the nightingale no longer sings.” Winter was clear and dry; it rarely rained or snowed. An average January day in the Guanzhong rose above freezing in the afternoon and dropped below it at night. People burned wood to cook and to heat their smoky, chimneyless, mud-walled houses. Winter was the agricultural off-season, when people built and repaired the materials they used during the rest of the year. They twisted hemp into thread, wove it into fabric on simple looms, and then fashioned clothes from it. They plaited reeds, bamboo, and other plant materials into baskets, mats, and fences. They built and repaired farm tools, carving wooden handles and polishing stone blades. People continued to fish even when the water froze over. Large animals like water buffaloes and rhinoceroses had mostly been eliminated from the lowlands by this time, but deer and boars were still common in the early centuries of this period, and people hunted them. Since wild mammals like foxes, raccoon dogs, and wild cats had their winter coats, people hunted or trapped them to make their own winter coats. This was also the time when lords called up their subjects to do labor service, which could include construction and repairs, large-scale hunts, and war.⁴

In early March, “hibernating creatures all stir, opening up their burrows, and making their first appearance.” In subsequent weeks, “the rains begin, the peach and plum trees blossom, the golden oriole sings,” “swallows return,” and chives begin to grow, the first fresh herbs of the season. In April, “all the sprouts issue forth and the buds fully open,” “the paulownia trees begin to bloom,” “the doves flap their wings and the hoopoes alight on the mulberries.” Mulberry trees were valued both for their sweet berries and because their leaves were the main food of silkworms, whose cocoons were unraveled and woven into cloth far lighter than hemp and skins. In the late spring, “breeding bulls and stallions are allowed to roam the pastures with the cows and mares.” They had been kept separate while the females raised their young but were now allowed to couple so that calves and foals would be born early the next year. People repaired water infrastructure such as ditches and dikes in preparation for the coming rainy season. Dust storms blew across North China from Inner Asia at this time of year, turning the sky beige. Despite the flourishing vegetation, this was the time of year when food supplies began to run short and people foraged for wild resources to supplement them. They hoped the rains arrived on time. Winter wheat was harvested at this time, the first harvest since the fall.⁵

Most of the year’s rain falls in the summer, sometimes in torrential downpours. From June to August the afternoon temperature regularly exceeds 30°C (86°F). In June, “the apricots ripen in the orchards, the frogs croak, the royal melon blooms,” “cicadas begin to sing, the midsummer herbs begin to grow, and the tree hibiscus blooms.” As anyone who has been in China during the summer knows, cicadas can be very noisy, an arboreal orchestra of miniature power saws. Gnats gather in clouds. This was the height of the agricultural season, and the crops were vulnerable to drought, violent storms, and animal pests. The annals periodically record swarms of insects attacking crops, sometimes causing famine. In July, “the soil is steaming wet, and great rains arrive regularly. People burn the cut grasses on the ground and flood it with water that kills the plants as effectively as boiling water. The grass can then be used as a green manure for the fields and pastures and as a fertilizer to enrich the ground.” As populations grew over the centuries, fallow times diminished and people had to put more effort into fertilizing their fields. The summer was the time of fresh fruit: peaches, cherries, mulberries, and melons. Leafy vegetables like mallows were plentiful, as were others, like gourds and beans.⁶

In September, “cooling breezes arise, the wild geese arrive, and the swallows depart.” Autumn was a time of pleasant weather and, if harvests had been good, plentiful food. But there was plenty of work to do. People harvested millets with stone hand knives, cutting off the dry, ripe heads of the millets and storing them whole in granaries, where the intact husks could protect the grains for several years. They had to be threshed and winnowed before being boiled, either into soupy gruel or until the water evaporated and they could be eaten dry. Because millets lack some amino acids, people who depended too heavily on them became malnourished, and skeletal remains from this period show that people were often much less healthy than their Neolithic ancestors. This was less of a problem for the carnivorous aristocracy. In the early Zhou period, fall was the time when people had to harvest their lord’s crops for him, but this service was gradually converted to a tax, so they had to give some of their grain to the state. According to the “Monthly Ordinances,” at this time of the year the king “orders the several directors to hasten the people’s gathering of the harvest, making them devote their attention to accumulating large stores of vegetables and other provisions. He then urges the people to sow the winter wheat.”⁷

In October, “the leaves of the plants and trees turn yellow and fall, after which they can be cut for fuel and made into charcoal. Insects burrow deeper holes and plaster up the entrances.”⁸ Jujubes were harvested in the autumn and were among the only fruits that could be stored for the winter. This was also the season for cutting wild rushes, which were used to thatch rooves and weave baskets. Hemp stems were soaked to break them into fibers. As vegetation withered, leaving little for livestock to eat, people slaughtered many of their animals, perhaps giving a pig to their lord (fig. 7). They prepared meat by curing and pickling it and by making the meat sauces that were popular in this period. In November, when “water begins to freeze and cold starts to penetrate the earth,” people took out their coats, hemp-padded clothes, and furs, without which they would not survive the winter. As the weather cooled, people began to heat their homes, attracting pests: “In the seventh month crickets are out in the wilds; in the eighth month in the farm. In the ninth month at the door. In the tenth month the cricket goes under my bed. I stop up every hole to smoke out the rats, plugging the windows, plastering the doors.” As human ecosystems expanded across the landscape, their various inhabitants flourished, such as the mice and rats that took a cut of their grain in addition to the one taken by their lords. People used parasitic rodents as a metaphor for parasitic rulers when they sang, “Big rat, big rat, do not gobble our millet!”⁹

Figure 7. Ceramic livestock from Yangling, the tomb of Emperor Jing of the Han dynasty (d. 141 BCE) in Xianyang. Along with humans, livestock were now among the most numerous animals in the low-lands, while many of the animals shown in figure 2 were gone.

Labor was divided by gender in ways that are common to agricultural societies. Women who were pregnant or raising children stayed closer to the home. They therefore tended to do more weaving and clothes-making, and weaving silk came to be the stereotypical female activity. The flip side of this, according to classical Chinese gender stereotypes, is that men were supposed to work in the fields, though we can be sure that women did, too. Archaeological studies carried out on a small sample of human bones reveal that people fed boys better than girls. In later periods of Chinese history this was often justified on the grounds that girls would leave home once they were married, whereas boys remained central to the family.¹⁰

Most aspects of the seasonal cycle described here continued across the centuries, but some things changed. As population density increased, the amount of grazing land in core farming areas diminished, crowding out grazing animals such as cattle and sheep and leaving only animals that could live in human settlements, namely, dogs, pigs, and chickens. People ingeniously enclosed pigs in pens and built their own toilets over them. This kept pigs from damaging crops, converted household waste into meat, and provided a ready source of manure for fields. In the most densely populated areas, which at this time were mostly in the modern provinces of Henan, Hebei, and Shandong, there was so little grazing land that only wealthier people could afford to keep cattle and thus plow with oxen. The Qin heartland was not as densely populated as those regions, and cattle were more common. And, of course, there were large herds just to the north, on the Loess Plateau.

Apart from the growth of state power, the most important change in society was probably the increase of commerce. Markets grew up and gradually integrated the manors and villages that had once been self-reliant into local and long-distance trade networks. By the third century BCE, merchants were getting rich by selling commodities like grain, timber, bamboo, fruit, and livestock; processed goods like pickled foods, liquor, textiles, and hides; and craft products of metal, ceramic, and lacquer. Larger markets prompted artisans to invent new kilns for pottery, better spinning wheels for making thread, and improved looms for making fabric. Farmers in agricultural centers like the Guanzhong could sell their products and buy craft goods of higher quality than they could produce themselves. They were no longer dependent on their own local communities for goods. Unfortunately, we have little record of mercantile activity in this period and cannot evaluate its effects on people’s lives or on how they used their environments. We can be sure that local products of the woods and wetlands were increasingly used as commodities. Iron tools became more common in the third century BCE, though it was only in the Han era that they became ubiquitous. Iron probably made some farm work easier and facilitated digging wells and ditches, but for most of this period Qin people used stone and wood tools not so different from those used by late Neolithic farmers. Now that we have briefly reviewed the subsistence economy, let us turn to the history of the state of Qin.¹¹

The Rise of Qin

Qin’s early history is something of a mystery. How did such a powerful polity arise from the western hinterland of the Zhou world? Records of early Qin history are so sparse that we usually know little about the people involved, leaving us to simply speak of “Qin” as if it were a person. Our main source is the “Basic Annals of Qin” in Sima Qian’s Historical Records (c. 100 BCE). It includes material from Qin’s annals, the only official historical records of the Warring States period that survived Qin’s conquests above ground (though others have since been excavated). The earliest reliable records in the “Basic Annals” probably date to the ninth century BCE. They state that Zhou King Xiao assigned a local leader named Feizi to breed horses and enfeoffed him at a place in the upper Wei River valley called Qin, which is the origin of the dynasty’s name. Qin’s control of prime horse-breeding land was a key source of its strength throughout its history.¹²

As a reward for fighting against their mutual enemies the Rong, a group discussed below, the “Basic Annals” further records that Zhou King Xuan awarded Qin’s Lord Zhuang another fief. Both of these fiefs are located in the upper Wei River valley and can be associated with burials from the late Western Zhou period that have been excavated in that region. We can identify corpses buried in a cemetery at Maojiaping with Qin because later Qin people buried their dead in a flexed position with their heads pointing west. The connection with Qin is further strengthened by the similarity of artifacts in these burial places with those found at the enormous tombs of early Qin rulers excavated just to the south at Dabuzishan. These are the earliest archaeological finds that can be convincingly linked with Qin, which means that these were the same groups from which Qin arose, not that the people buried at Maojiaping were directly affiliated with the Qin polity. Unfortunately, it is impossible to securely identify textual records of the Rong with any specific excavated remains, though they are probably connected with an archaeological culture known as Siwa.¹³

The fall of the Zhou court in 771 BCE was probably traumatic for Qin leaders when it happened, but in the long run it allowed them to move into the Guanzhong Basin. In that year, a coalition of disgruntled Zhou nobles and Rong people drove the Zhou court eastward from the Guanzhong to Luoyang. This marks the transition from the Western Zhou to the Eastern Zhou period. Qin’s armies helped the Zhou king flee to Luoyang, and he rewarded them by promoting Qin’s leader to the status of lord (gong 公), allowing Qin to engage as an equal in diplomatic rituals with other Zhou states. The “Basic Annals” records that the Zhou king then awarded Qin the core agricultural areas of the Guanzhong, namely the Zhouyuan and the Zhou capital area west of modern Xi’an. This was not much of a gift because the area was occupied by the Rong and it took Qin almost sixty years to conquer it. Qin finally moved its capital to a site in the Baoji area of the western Guanzhong in 714 BCE. The arrival of Qin people in the Guanzhong is clear archaeologically because their flexed-body, west-pointing burials contrast with those of the Shang and Zhou, who buried their dead lying flat on their backs in north-south-oriented tombs. The Qin newcomers probably ruled over an existing population of Zhou and Rong commoners who gradually merged to become the Qin people.¹⁴

In 677, Qin moved its capital thirty kilometers eastward to Yong 雍, in the Zhouyuan, where it was to remain for almost three centuries. Yong lay at the confluence of the travel routes that connected the upper Wei River valley to the west, the Sichuan Basin to the south, and the Yellow River valley to the east, a natural meeting point for the movement of people and commodities between these regions. As its name suggests, the Zhouyuan (which means “Zhou Plain”) was considered the heartland of the Zhou people. It had been a primary ritual center of the Western Zhou state, and Qin’s occupation of it must have increased its standing among the other Zhou lords, each of whom traced his lineage to the founders of the Zhou dynasty. Worship of the Zhou dynasty’s founding ancestors remained central to the ritual system that symbolically united the Zhou alliance even as the Zhou ruling house declined in importance.¹⁵

The power of the Qin royal house is clearly demonstrated by the enormous sizes of its royal burials. Elite tombs in other Zhou states of the Spring and Autumn period reveal a gradation in the sizes and wealth levels of tombs: those of rulers were somewhat larger than those of the upper elite, but the two were otherwise similar. In Qin, however, the tombs of the rulers were vastly larger and more lavish than those of other lineages, while those of other aristocrats were “roughly comparable to those of equivalent status from other parts of the Zhou realm.” This is already apparent in the massive and lavishly furnished tombs at Dabuzishan, which were built when Qin was still based in the mountains of the upper Wei River valley. During their three centuries at Yong, the Qin people buried their leaders in a 24-square-kilometer moated necropolis located just south of the town that includes 44 tombs. The labor force available to the Qin rulers is clear from the only one of these tombs to have been excavated (fig. 8). It is by far the largest tomb that we know of in East Asia up to that time and is believed to be the tomb of Qin Lord Jing 景 (r. 577–537 BCE). It contained the remains of 166 people who were killed to accompany the lord in death. Several of Qin’s other royal tombs are almost as big. The expense of building these complexes was just the beginning. Regular sacrifices were made at the tomb of each Qin ruler, whose number of course increased over the centuries. Each tomb complex was provided with an estate to furnish the livestock and other resources used in the sacrifices, so over time considerable areas of the Guanzhong became ritual landscapes dedicated to the royal ancestors. Qin’s tradition of massive royal tombs continued throughout its history, culminating in the mausoleum of the First Emperor, which is not only the largest tomb complex in all of Chinese history but arguably the largest tomb complex ever built for a single person in human history.¹⁶

These massive tombs suggest that Qin rulers sought to rival the Zhou kings. This is made explicit in the inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels claiming that the Qin ruling house had “received the celestial mandate.” Qin’s rulers may have felt entitled to make this claim because their court was located in the previous heartland of Zhou. But they probably chose Yong as a capital not so much because of its symbolic importance to the Zhou ritual system as because it was the best tract of farmland in the Guanzhong. The foundations of Qin’s palaces and temples at Yong are among the best preserved of any elite architecture from this period. Yong was built alongside a natural waterway that was gradually expanded to form two moats, one around the central palace area and another around the whole townsite. There was also a small dam built to the northwest of the site to create or expand a small lake that provided the town with water and probably also fish and other edible creatures. These discoveries reveal that the Qin people were engaged in large-scale water control works hundreds of years before they built the Zheng Guo Canal, the earliest one mentioned in traditional sources. This is not surprising because the Western Zhou had modified the waterways around their capital at Feng a few centuries earlier.¹⁷

Figure 8. Qin Lord Jing’s tomb being excavated in the early 1980s. This picture was taken as archaeologists were just beginning to uncover the coffins of dozens of people killed to accompany the lord in death. The main tomb chamber lay under those. Like most large tombs in China, it had been thoroughly looted over the centuries. Between the ramps on each end the tomb measures three hundred meters and is twenty-four meters deep.

The Zhouyuan seems to have had plenty of wildlife at this time. The century of wars between the fall of Zhou and the arrival of Qin probably reduced the human population and left space for wild animals. Like the rulers of Shang and Zhou before them, Qin’s rulers hunted regularly. Sometime in the mid–Eastern Zhou period Qin’s rulers had large drum-shaped stones inscribed with poems on hunting and fishing. Discovered hundreds of years later, these stones became among the most famous examples of Eastern Zhou writing and are now on display in the Forbidden City in Beijing. They commemorate Qin elites hunting sika deer, elaphures, boars, pheasants, and hares. One of the damaged inscriptions suggests that Qin established a hunting park in the Zhouyuan. Perhaps Qin’s success in expanding agriculture reduced the amount of land for wildlife, making it necessary for rulers to protect their dwindling habitats so they could keep hunting.¹⁸

Qin’s early administration had little in common with the centralized bureaucracy it would later become. Like other Zhou states of this period, Qin had few regular offices with defined duties. It was governed by a group of aristocrats who served the ruler as advisors, generals, and administrators. Instead of being assigned to offices, these men were appointed to specific ranks that signified their positions in the political hierarchy, and they were assigned to carry out administrative tasks as necessary. Writing did not play a major role in Qin administration at that time, but there was no strong incentive to modernize it. Qin’s capital at Yong sat at the extreme west side of the Zhou world, hundreds of kilometers from any other powerful state. From this position Qin began to consolidate its power.¹⁹

Qin’s Expansion

Like other Eastern Zhou states, Qin grew by conquering and absorbing other polities. After moving into the Guanzhong, Qin conquered various settlements, which led it to experiment with new ways of administering land and people. According to the Historical Records, Qin made four of these settlements into xian, which are the earliest recorded xian. As discussed in chapter 3, xian were initially more like fiefs, but as the central government came to administer them more directly they became closer to counties, which is how the term is usually translated. These four early xian were established in well-watered lowland sites along the Wei River that made excellent farmland. In contrast, when Qin later conquered sites in arid regions to the north, it did not create xian, but instead left the people there to rule themselves, presumably because they would not provide enough income to repay the cost of administering them directly. The textual records of Qin’s conquests make clear that political power was understood primarily in terms of human subjects rather than territory. The population was sparse enough that there was plenty of uncultivated land between many settlements, so Qin focused on the population centers.²⁰

In its early centuries, Qin’s longstanding rivals were a people known as Rong, which means “weapons” or “martial.” This is what Chinese speakers called them, not what they called themselves. The history of the Rong people has traditionally been seen through the lens of the later conflict between sedentary Chinese and nomadic pastoralists, anachronistically interpreting it as a conflict among Zhou and Qin farmers and Rong pastoralists. In fact, the sedentary agrarian states and nomadic pastoralists were separated at this time by an extensive zone where people combined farming and herding, and this was the subsistence strategy of the Zhou, Qin, and Rong people. The conquest of the Rong by the Zhou states, including Qin, played an important role in creating the rivalry between the steppe and the sown areas.

Nomadic pastoralism is often imagined as a kind of primitive lifestyle that came before the more advanced stage of sedentary agriculture, but this is exactly backward. It is actually a highly specialized subsistence strategy that arose only after people had had thousands of years of experience herding sheep, goats, and cattle. It developed on the Inner Asian steppe over the last two millennia BCE, the same period in which the agrarian societies of the Yellow River valley organized themselves into powerful political organizations. For most of this time there was no simple division between steppe and sown areas for the simple reason that it made more sense to combine these two subsistence strategies than to separate them. The only good reason anyone would choose to subsist fully from herding is that there is a huge area in the middle of Eurasia that is very well suited to pastoralism, but too cold or dry to support much farming. Once people tamed horses, and later camels, they were able to move with their herds into these forbidding lands but were forced to move regularly as their herds ate all the vegetation in a given area. Even so, pure pastoral nomadism (without any farming) has been very uncommon in human history. It was limited to the steppes of Inner Asia, and the nomads still relied on grains and other resources from farming peoples.²¹

Between the increasingly nomadic groups on the steppes and the sedentary farmers of the Yellow River lowlands lay a vast region in which people farmed the narrow river valleys and herded in the hills.²² These farmer-herders included not only the Rong, but also many of the Zhou and Qin people. Before moving into the Guanzhong, the Qin people lived in the upper Wei River valley, which is mostly composed of semiarid uplands that are divided by thin strips of arable valleys, an environment well suited to a mixed farming and herding lifestyle. The people of this region raised pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, and chickens, and studies of a few tombs excavated in this region suggest that they ate plenty of meat. We have no reason to think that there was any difference in subsistence strategies between the Rong and the Qin people; they both farmed crops and herded livestock.²³

At the beginning of the Eastern Zhou period in 771 BCE, the Yellow River valley was home to hundreds of more or less independent settlements that included various different cultural and linguistic groups. Over the next five centuries a handful of Zhou states conquered and assimilated all of them, a process of cultural hybridization in which the conquerors held the upper hand. This process of conquest and assimilation created the relatively homogeneous core population of the Qin and Han Empires. It was the three northernmost of the warring states, Qin, Zhao, and Yan, that occupied the semiarid farmer-herder zones of the north and then began to push farther into the nomadic zone. In particular, the northward conquests of the Qin Empire forced pastoral nomadic groups to unite for defense and was one factor that led them to form the world’s first nomadic empire, the Xiongnu. The boundary between steppe and sown is often interpreted as an ecological boundary, but it is an artifact of political events, namely, the growth of rival agrarian and nomadic empires. In fact, the people of the semiarid zone, which includes most of the Loess Plateau, continued to farm and herd. They paid their taxes to either the nomadic empires of the north or the agrarian ones to the south, depending on who was in control.²⁴

Qin’s early history involved a series of wars with the Rong. Once it had conquered their settlements in the Guanzhong, Qin traveled farther east to attack their settlement near modern Sanmenxia in 659 BCE. Qin decisively defeated the Rong in 623 BCE, extending its territory by hundreds of kilometers and taking twelve walled towns. Although we cannot be sure where these Rong settlements were located, some of them were probably north and west of the Guanzhong in the Wei and Jing River basins of the Loess Plateau (see map 2). We know that Qin colonized the Jing River valley because Qin graveyards began appearing there in the sixth century BCE.²⁵

Conquering the Rong not only removed Qin’s biggest threat but also gave it more prime horse pasture just as horses were becoming more important in warfare. In the early centuries of the Zhou period, people did not ride horses but used them to pull chariots, a rather clumsy way to travel in a world without good roads. Sometime in the Eastern Zhou period, people learned to ride horseback, making horses much more useful in warfare and further increasing their importance for state power. Riding horses also greatly increased the speed at which people could travel, which was essential for Qin’s expansion. Qin’s control over large tracts of good horse pasture gave it a significant advantage over the small states of the central Yellow River valley. As people across Eurasia came to use more and more of the wild horse’s range to raise domestic horses and other livestock, they eventually drove the wild horse to extinction.²⁶

The Rong people disappeared as a distinct group as their people were assimilated by Zhou kingdoms like Qin, and perhaps also by northern pastoralists. As they conquered the people and land that had once divided them, Qin people and the northern pastoral groups came into regular contact. Qin engaged in regular trade with the pastoralists, and Qin artisans even produced metalwork in the style of northern pastoralists, which they presumably exchanged for steppe products such as furs, leather, and horses. Just as the availability of northern horses played an important role in Qin’s political culture, control over the luxury goods coming from Qin became an important aspect of power for elites on the steppe. While it is often stated that the northern states of Qin and Yan had an advantage over other states because of their access to the equestrian skills of nomadic peoples, this is slightly misleading because it implies that the farmers and herders were otherwise separate. In fact, Qin was in an enviable position of being a full member of the Zhou culture group while also having many subjects with strong equestrian skills and longstanding relations with pastoral peoples of the Loess Plateau and beyond.²⁷

Because most historical records from this period were written in regions to the east, our most detailed records of Qin’s history in this period are narratives of Qin’s relations with its eastern neighbor Jin. It is not surprising that these two states were rivals because Jin was the closest of the Zhou powers to Qin. Jin was based in the Fen River valley, which is geologically the same basin as the Guanzhong, from which it is separated only by the Yellow River. The two states fought over the flat fertile strip of land that ran along the western bank of the Yellow River north of the Wei River, an area separated from other Qin settlements by the expansive seasonal wetlands to its west. Qin first won this area from Jin in 644 BCE, but soon lost it again. In the late fourth century BCE Jin’s three most powerful lineages overthrew its royal house and divided its territory between them (Zhao, Wei, and Han on map 7). Of these, Wei took over the contested land and built a wall to defend it from Qin. Qin only managed to wrest this land from Wei, and thus control the entire Guanzhong, in 330 BCE.²⁸

After its wars with Jin in the mid-sixth century, the Qin rulers tended to stay out of the constant warfare of the other Zhou states. Qin’s capital at Yong sat hundreds of kilometers from other Zhou states, to which it seemed secluded. Qin’s absence from routine Zhou inter-state affairs in the early Warring States period made it easy for its rivals to depict it as a barbaric state, insults that later historians accepted as facts. The truth is probably that Qin’s rulers wisely perceived the futility of fighting with other Zhou states and instead consolidated their hegemony over the Wei River valley and surrounding areas. Initially this consisted of settling more arable land in the Guanzhong and taking control of resources in the surrounding mountains, but Qin also looked to conquer fertile river valleys. The valleys to the east were occupied by powerful states, so Qin expanded southward. Although our records of Qin’s southward expansion are spotty at best, they do show that Qin was active south of the Qinling in the early fifth century, which means that Qin had firm control over some routes through the Qinling Mountains by this time. The Qinling would have provided Qin with an enormous supply of timber, furs, and other forest materials, as shown by records of laborers logging in this region in the last years of the empire. Much of this land was so rugged that only goods small enough to be carried on the backs of horses or humans were practical to carry out, but the Qin state eventually found itself with a lot of human and animal labor to exploit.²⁹

The Qinling Mountains were a valuable source of resources but were also an obstacle to Qin’s southward expansion. Qin had no incentive to conquer anything to the arid north or west because there was little arable land. Powerful states lay to the east and southeast. But southwest of the Qinling lay the fertile Hanzhong Basin and beyond it the Sichuan Basin, one of the largest tracts of arable flat land in all of East Asia. But to get there Qin’s armies had to travel through the towering Qinling on mountain paths that were narrow and dangerous in sections. Roads like the one shown in figure 9 were the easy parts. Sichuan was home to the state of Shu, which was probably relatively weak, depending on its remoteness rather than its strong armies for protection. Qin and Shu seem to have fought over the Hanzhong Basin, the only large stretch of arable land that lay between them. Unfortunately, we have only a few brief records of Qin’s southwestern expansion. The Historical Records states that Qin built walls around a town in the Hanzhong Basin in 451 BCE. This region rebelled ten years later, and Qin and Shu fought a war over it in 387 BCE. We can be sure that Qin took over this region because Qin conquered Shu and the Chengdu Plain in 316 BCE, an invasion that Qin could have launched only if it had already turned the Hanzhong region into a military colony. This is all we know about what must have been a complex history of diplomacy, warfare, and conquest in the upper Han River valley. Conquering Sichuan was a major event in Qin history. It vastly increased the resources Qin could mobilize in the south, though of course we should not underestimate the cost of colonization for the colonizers. We know almost nothing about the colonized.³⁰

Figure 9. An early twentieth-century road in the Qinling Mountains. The steep terrain is typical of the region.

The route through the southeastern Qinling was less arduous than the one to the southwest, but it brought Qin into conflict with the powerful state of Chu. From the central Guanzhong Qin troops could follow steep trails up the tributaries of the Ba River into the mountains. After a short but difficult hike they reached the upper valley of the Dan River, which they could fairly easily follow downstream into the Han River valley, the heartland of Chu (see map 8). Chu’s leaders were quite aware that keeping control of the Dan River valley was their best defense against Qin. Qin seems to have conquered the upper Dan River valley in the mid-fourth century BCE, around the time it moved its capital into the central Guanzhong. The two rivals fought over the region for the next few decades. Qin’s conquest of Sichuan must be understood in this context. Qin began to colonize Sichuan soon after conquering it to build up a productive base for an eastward attack on Chu. In the 270s BCE, Qin conquered the entire Han River valley, driving Chu from its capital in the central Yangzi valley (this was Ying, modern Jingzhou; see map 7). Qin now controlled the Sichuan Basin, the entire Han River valley, and the Yangzi valley that connected them. Between those regions lay a large expanse of wild and rugged mountains into which Qin’s administrative control probably never extended very deep. By defeating Chu, Qin established itself as the superpower of East Asia, and it began to gradually expand eastward into the Central Plains.³¹

The history of more recent empires shows that the innovation required to conquer and colonize new lands profoundly shapes how political power is exercised in the metropole. Techniques and technologies developed to administer conquered people and land often end up being deployed back home. The process of conquering and absorbing new territory must have played a part in Qin’s development of new administrative techniques. In order to provision its armies as they conquered on, Qin established a network of agricultural colonies in the prime farmland of the regions it conquered. In some cases, it displaced conquered people and gave their land to reliable subjects, probably including its own soldiers. But Qin’s population was small and its territory vast, so its ability to repopulate conquered territory with loyal subjects was limited. Instead, as its expansion continued, Qin began to force tens of thousands of conquered people to move far from home to other conquered regions. This was an attack on the solidarity of conquered peoples, many of whom had strong regional identities. It also helped Qin colonize strategically important areas, for example, by forcing families skilled in iron production to move to southern frontier regions, where they could enrich themselves while provisioning Qin’s armies. Over the long term, forced migration worked alongside Qin’s various other standardization projects to create a more culturally homogeneous population, which probably contributed to the stability of the subsequent Han Empire.³²

State-Strengthening

In the fourth century, Qin’s rulers enacted a series of reforms that transformed the nature of the state itself, greatly increasing its control over people and land across its domain. These reforms took more than a century to achieve but are firmly associated in the historical record with Shang Yang, a.k.a. Gongsun Yang (d. 338). His emphasis on warfare, law, and punishments came to epitomize Qin’s ruthlessness, and for the next two millennia his reforms served as a kind of paradigm of harsh governance. But Qin’s centralized, standardized, law-based bureaucratic governance methods were inherited and adapted by subsequent empires, becoming the unspoken paradigm of political thought in China. As Michael Loewe puts it: “While all successful imperial regimes claimed to govern on the basis of the ethical ideals of Confucius, few were able to last long without recourse to methods that originated with Shang Yang.” Because they greatly increased the power that states could exercise over their ecosystems, Shang Yang’s reforms marked a turning point in China’s environmental history.³³

Other Zhou states had long been carrying out state-strengthening reforms, as discussed in the previous chapter. In Qin they were initiated by Lords Xian 獻 (r. 384–62) and Xiao 孝 (r. 361–338). The decades before Lord Xian took the throne had seen Qin lose territory to Wei and palace insiders forcibly depose two Qin rulers. This was presumably the result of conflicts between noble families seeking to place their kin on the throne, a story familiar to monarchies everywhere. But from the reign of Lord Xian onward, Qin’s throne was often held by men who ruled for several decades. This was probably an important factor in Qin’s stability and power, as was its practice of appointing talented officials like Shang Yang to take the reins of government.³⁴

Shang Yang was a prince of the ancient, but by this time irrelevant, state of Wey 衞. He first became active in the politics of Wei 魏, where he learned the most modern ideas of statecraft and warfare. Wei’s effective civil and military administration made it perhaps the strongest state of the early fourth century, even though powerful rivals surrounded it on all sides. Shang Yang based his reforms on those of Wei and other Zhou states, and Qin officials continued to study Wei’s laws long after his death. Shang Yang was famous because he had achieved more power than most other political thinkers—at least until he was tied to chariots and torn apart—but his ideas may not have been particularly original. Other works of political theory proposed similar reforms, and the ideas of other thinkers were also implemented in Qin with little fanfare, such as those of Shen Buhai. According to third-century thinker Han Feizi, Shen emphasized practical administrative techniques such as creating offices with defined duties, matching job titles with their responsibilities, and making sure that officials had the right skills for their jobs. In contrast, he described Shang Yang as emphasizing written rules and a clear system of penalties, rewards, and punishments. Shen’s administrative methods played an important role in political organizations at this time but were not as visible as those of Shang Yang because they focused on internal administration.³⁵

Qin seems to have been able to carry out these reforms relatively quickly because its royal house was so powerful. It was also one of the oldest ruling families in the Zhou world, which probably gave it considerable legitimacy. Most of Qin’s rivals to the east carried out these types of reforms through experiments and negotiation over several centuries, which often involved bloody conflicts between aristocratic houses. The power of the Qin rulers was essential for the success of these reforms since they directly attacked the unearned privileges of the aristocracy. In other states similar attempts resulted in the ruling house’s being deposed by other elite families. Archaeological evidence reveals that the reforms had substantial effects. Qin elites dramatically changed the types of objects they placed in their tombs, suggesting that these reforms disrupted the ways aristocrats had traditionally demonstrated their status. It is not surprising that Qin’s reforms have been considered harsh by subsequent Chinese authors, since the authors of most books written in imperial China were men who had gained their positions as much from their families’ wealth and pedigrees as from their talents. Although we have no writings from Qin commoners, it is worth considering the possibility that they saw much to recommend these reforms. After all, they did provide economic opportunities for all and made governance more predictable by reducing the arbitrary rule of aristocratic elites.³⁶

The most important sources on Shang Yang are Sima Qian’s semifictional biography and the Book of Lord Shang, a collection of texts assembled by later editors based on what they considered representative of Shang Yang’s school of thought. Generally speaking, Sima’s description of Shang Yang’s reforms matches remarkably well with the system seen in excavated Qin documents, which are described in the next chapter. However, it should be emphasized that these reforms continued after his death and we have no way of discerning which elements were actually achieved in his lifetime. We know that Shang Yang did hold the positions mentioned in early texts because objects have been excavated with his edicts cast into them. These confirm that he standardized measures and supervised weapons production. Another clear indication of his importance is that political theorists of the late Warring States and early Han periods frequently referred to him, making clear that he was a famous, and polarizing, figure. The core chapters of the Book of Lord Shang date to around the time Shang Yang lived, and it is possible that he wrote some of them. Their rhetoric suggests that a government official wrote them to convince a ruler. Not only is there virtually no attempt to argue that the ideas proposed would benefit commoners, the texts are openly hostile toward classicists (a.k.a. Confucians) and toward the unearned privileges of aristocrats. In other words, they would have offended almost everyone, which suggests that they were written for high officials or a ruler. They may well have been written for Qin’s king.³⁷

State-strengthening is the goal of the Book of Lord Shang, and the text argues that agriculture is the key to achieving it. It espouses an agricultural fundamentalism that sees nonagricultural occupations as economically unproductive and essentially parasitic, a belief that was not uncommon at the time. It made some sense from a political perspective because fourth-century Qin derived little of its income from commercial taxes. Agricultural surpluses and corvée labor were the fuels of the state. The text argues that the state should discourage people from nonagricultural occupations and encourage the expansion of farmland. One way of doing this was to take direct control of nonagricultural landscapes and force their inhabitants to become farmers: “If mountains and wetlands are unified [under the control of the state] then those who hate farming, are lazy, or are greedy, will have no way to obtain food. With no way to obtain food they will have to farm, and when they farm, uncultivated land will be cleared for farming.” This expresses a disdain commonly found in agrarian states for those who live off the land in ways that are difficult to tax. It also reveals that states drove the transition from mixed subsistence toward heavy reliance on farming, a transition that is often incorrectly imagined as a natural process. People were encouraged to farm not only to increase the state’s tax income but to ensure that they stayed in one place so they could easily be mobilized to do statute labor and to serve in the army. Shang Yang also levied new taxes on top of the regular grain tax, though it is unclear what these consisted of.³⁸

The goal of the state-strengthening reforms was increasing military power, and the Book of Lord Shang contains several chapters on warfare. In order to expand the military, the state had to recruit, equip, and feed as many men as possible and, just as important, motivate them to fight. The key to motivating men was to make military service a real route to social and economic advancement. To this end, Qin established a system of ranks (perhaps more accurately described as “orders of merit”) and awarded them to men based on their military exploits. For each rank granted, men were entitled to a specific size of farm plot. Sons inherited lower ranks than their fathers in order to give them an incentive to fight well and gain ranks. People convicted of crimes could exchange their ranks for reduced sentences, a valuable option given that punishments included physical mutilation, heavy fines, and brutal hard labor. The fact that the state could treat land and people as two separate things suggests that it owned the land and the farmers did not, an example of the separation of workers from their means of subsistence discussed in chapter 1.

One of the most radical aspects of the rank system was that it also applied to aristocrats, replacing noble privilege with military meritocracy. Sima Qian’s biography states that “members of the royal family who did not win military merit would be punished by not entering them in the royal family’s lineage-register.” Similarly, it aimed to break down lineages, the broader kinship-based forms of social organization that had organized Zhou society, and make nuclear households the basic social units. This was intended to establish a personal relationship between the state and individual families that ensured that they paid taxes and provided labor. This was a radical change, and we can guess that the rank system would not have lasted if it had not given many people their promised rewards. According to Sima Qian, Shang Yang “clarified the positions of both honorable and base people in the order of official ranks, each being registered with farmland and residential plots according to official rank; male and female slaves and clothing were ordered sequentially according to the family. Those with achievements appeared glorious while those without achievements, even if wealthy, had no way to flourish.” The documents examined in the following chapter show that this system was indeed written into Qin laws. We can guess that some of these laws might have come from Wei based on a statute from the state of Wei that was excavated in a Qin tomb. It specified which categories of people should not be issued fields and houses.³⁹

Establishing a system of ranks for all adult males requires a high degree of control over the population. As the Book of Lord Shang instructed: “In registering the number of people, record the living and erase the dead. If the people do not abscond from producing grain, fields will not be covered by wild grasses. Then the state will be rich, and being rich it will be strong.”⁴⁰ A few lines later the author presents a more detailed argument for the importance of administrative knowledge, arguing that states should keep statistics of granaries, the population, able-bodied people, old and weak people, officials, servicemen, horses, oxen, hay, and straw. The fact that this needed to be argued shows that gathering such statistics was not common but was rather an innovation of this period. In earlier periods, Zhou states did surveys to determine taxable resources and the number of able-bodied men, but these seem to have been one-time affairs, not a regular administrative practice. Regular surveys require the kind of bureaucracy that was only just coming into existence in this period. Most of Qin’s population lived in the circumscribed area of the Guanzhong, and these reforms were first enacted on the people living there. But the later Qin population registers excavated at Liye in Hunan, over a thousand kilometers by road and boat from the capital, prove that the Qin Empire eventually extended many aspects of its rigorous administration across its massive empire. This could have been possible only if such a system had already been worked out in the capital region.⁴¹

Qin sought not only to break down larger family units and establish the nuclear family as the standard household but also to organize these families into groups of five that were mutually liable for each other’s crimes. This was a cheap way to get people to police one another. The organization of men into mutual liability units of five seems to have originated with the army and was only later extended to civilian use. The term wu 伍 (member of a group of five) came to be the official term for commoners, a hint of how officials viewed their subjects. The mutual liability system made up for the relative scarcity of officials on the ground by forcing people to police their neighbors, a classic example of how states try to make up for weak administrative capacity by using harsh punishments.⁴²

Because each rank came with land, the government had to reorganize the landscape in standard field sizes to make it easy to award plots to soldiers who had gained ranks. When a man died, officials took land away from his sons, unless they had earned the same rank as their father. According to Sima Qian, Qin “grouped small districts and settlements into counties and appointed magistrates and assistant magistrates. There were thirty-one counties in all. They made fields, creating roads and paths, and mounds indicating field boundaries, and equalized levies and land taxes.” Another goal of granting land to anyone willing to pay taxes and serve in the military was to attract colonists. Like the breakdown of larger family units, the reorganization of the agricultural landscape is a clear example of how states reorganize society to match with their own administrative logic, as discussed in chapter 1. The division of territory into counties, standardized administrative units, was another important innovation.⁴³

Qin’s field system is explained in a statute excavated in northern Sichuan that was issued in 309 BCE, thirty years after Shang Yang’s death, and was later copied almost verbatim into Han law. It reads, “Fields are one pace wide, in strips eight ze [332 meters] long. Make raised paths. Each field strip has two raised paths and one walking path. One hundred mu equals one qing. A lane should be two zhang wide [4.6 meters]. A border mound is four feet high; as tall as it is wide.”⁴⁴ The general idea was that raised paths were built 332 meters apart, forming fields of that width. Between these wider paths, narrow footpaths were laid out 1.39 meters apart, forming long, narrow fields perpendicular to the raised paths. Each of these long, skinny fields was one mu in area. One hundred mu added up to one qing, precisely the area of land granted to people without rank. Each ten qing a road was laid out perpendicular to the paths. This divided the landscape into a grid of standard units that made it easy to allot fields to men, redistribute land, and calculate taxes. Of course, not all land could be laid out so cleanly, and officials were trained to calculate the area of differently shaped fields.⁴⁵

A close look at maps or satellite images of the Guanzhong Plain reveals that many areas are arranged in strips that vary between 320 and 350 meters wide. This averages around 332 meters, which corresponds to the 240 paces of the standard field length in Qin and Han law. Of course, this is true only of some parts of the plain, and even in those areas the roads between fields are not altogether straight. Nonetheless, large areas are organized in this way, and this can only be the result of state efforts. There are several reasons to believe that this occurred in the Qin and Han periods. The first is that measures grew longer over the centuries, so the 240 bu measure of later times would have been considerably longer than 332 meters. Second, while the later Northern Wei and Tang empires also enacted land control systems, neither controlled the region for nearly as long as the five hundred years from Shang Yang’s reforms to the fall of the Han. The third, and most obvious, reason is that once a standardized field system existed, later states were more likely to use it than to rebuild whole landscapes. So it seems likely that these standardized field measures were established in the Guanzhong under the Qin and Han.⁴⁶

Despite Qin’s rationalization of landholding and taxation, there were still feudal elements insofar as high-ranking officials were granted large landholdings. We know this from records of large, populated areas granted to top Qin officials like Shang Yang, Lü Buwei, and Zhang Yi. There is also an inscribed ceramic tile dating to 334 BCE that records a plot of land permanently granted to a high-ranking official to build an ancestral temple.⁴⁷ But it seems that only the highest officials were given land.

Given that Qin’s rule lasted for well over a century after Shang Yang’s reforms and that the Guanzhong remained its economic core, it is very likely that these reforms were carried out quite rigorously there, at least. And they certainly made Qin stronger. As a Qin official said in the following century,

Qin’s territory occupies half the world and her troops are a match for the countries on all sides of her. She is backed by mountains, girt by rivers, and lies secure behind barriers in every direction. She has more than a million mettlesome troops, a thousand war chariots, ten thousand cavalry, and grain stores as high as hills. Since her laws and ordinances are clear, her soldiers are calm in adversity and happy to die.”⁴⁸

From the perspective of Qin rulers, the reforms were successful. From an ecological perspective, the reforms rebuilt the agricultural landscape and greatly augmented the power of the state over both people and land. These political reforms were accompanied by several other major changes. Most important, Qin moved its capital from the west of the Guanzhong into its center, which proved to be a permanent transition.

Qin Moves East

For reasons that remain mysterious, Qin moved its capital from the western Guanzhong to the center of the plain in the fourth century. Around the same time, people began to migrate into the basin’s flat center, which has remained the region’s population center ever since. This was a major change. Since the beginning of farming, people had congregated in the Zhouyuan and the land south of the Wei River. These areas had adequate water and had enough of a slope that excess water drained off. In contrast, much of the land in the central Guanzhong either had little surface water or had such poor drainage that it was waterlogged or saline. The significance of this change is clear in map 9, which shows how the population shifted from the Zhouyuan, the main center of population in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, to the center of the basin, where the Qin and Han Empires established their capitals. The timing of the shift is revealed by the archaeological record. Most tombs dating between roughly 700 and 350 BCE were excavated in the western Guanzhong. Qin burials after that period are mostly found in the central and eastern Guanzhong, closer to the new capital at Xianyang.⁴⁹

The center of the plain had little running water, but its water table was only a few meters deep in many places, so people could dig wells for water. Wells were a main source of irrigation water in later periods and may have played a central role in Qin’s move into the area, as suggested by the many wells excavated at Xianyang. Ditches were probably also important for draining summer rains off of flat areas that were prone to waterlogging. The spread of iron tools in this period may have facilitated all this digging. Given that iron-smelting technology arrived from Central Asia during this period, it is not surprising that the earliest evidence of iron in the Zhou region comes from western regions controlled by Qin. Iron-tipped tools such as picks may also have facilitated the large-scale earth modification projects of this period, including the Zheng Guo Canal project. Chinese scholars, influenced by the technological determinism of the Soviet Union, have often overemphasized the consequences of metal tools for the agricultural economy. Iron-edged tools should not be considered any more important to social history than factors such as how much time people spent working, how much land they had, and the incentives and pressures exerted on them to produce food. But iron undoubtedly facilitated these kinds of land modification projects and generally increased the human impact on the soil. The Qin state may well have provided some metal tools to facilitate this.⁵⁰

Map 9. The movement of population into the central Guanzhong Basin. The upper map depicts all of the sites known from the Yangshao culture to the Western Zhou period, while the lower one includes those from the Qin and Han periods, including some sites from the late Warring States period. The route of the Zheng Guo Canal is approximate.

Qin rulers informally moved to the central Guanzhong in the late fifth century, and in 383 BCE Lord Xian moved his administration to Yueyang 櫟陽, east of the Jing River. Yueyang became a major city with walls nine kilometers in circumference and remained an important city even after, in 350 BCE, the capital was officially moved back westward to Xianyang, where it remained until the end of the dynasty. By moving back westward from Yueyang to Xianyang, Qin again put the Jing River between its capital and its rivals to the east. Combined with the Wei River, this formed a natural moat against invaders from the east and south. Some believe that the move of Qin’s capital to the center of the valley was a state-led effort to open up the central Guanzhong to farming, but it is also possible that independent farmers began settling the area and the state followed. In any case, the state must have participated in the expansion of farmland around its new capitals. Qin’s subjects were required to do statute labor for the state, and agricultural improvement was the type of work the state often used their labor for.⁵¹

Let us now turn to the capital city itself. In general, the political and economic processes that have allowed humans to extend our control over the planet have been organized from urban areas, so that the urbanization of humanity is inseparable from the rise of civilization. Increases in social complexity are inseparable from expansions in the division of labor, and the central organization of this division has usually been based in cities. Resources tend to be centralized, processed, and redistributed in cities. Just as the division of tasks in the workshop is necessary for the production of more complex handicrafts, increasing the reach and power of the state requires increasing the division of labor within the military and the civil administration. Most relevant to our story, political institutions that extract surplus value from primary producers and decide how it is used are usually based in urban areas.

That being the case, it would be nice if we knew more about the economy and society of Xianyang. But we have very little information about the Qin capital beyond the general layout of city walls, roads, and palaces. Archaeologists have discovered the foundations of twenty-six large-scale building complexes in Xianyang, seven of them within the 875-by-500-meter walled central palace complex. This was where the court and central government officials lived and worked. Archaeologists suspect that commoners lived to the southwest of the palace quarters. Although there must have been housing areas for commoners and markets, it is quite possible that a significant percentage of the population lived and worked in the palaces. The large role of the state in commodity production would have reduced the nonstate economy that would otherwise have led to the growth of a city outside of the palace. At the height of the dynasty, there must have been tens of thousands of people living and working in the palaces of the capital and the surrounding areas.⁵²

The Xi’an area has been home to the largest and most important cities in the region for most of recorded history because its location south of the Wei River gives it an excellent supply of fresh water from the Qinling. It is therefore curious that Qin built Xianyang on the north side of the Wei River in an area with no significant waterway. The people of the city seem to have pulled water from wells, of which archaeologists discovered over a hundred. Archaeologists also excavated the remains of the Lan Pond, which was probably not merely ornamental but also served as a water reservoir and a fish pond. Waste water drained into the Wei River through a subterranean sewer system of ceramic pipes. Qin rulers eventually discovered the advantages of the area south of the river, since they later built several of their main palaces there, and these later became the core of the Han capital Chang’an. Archaeologists have yet to find city walls around Xianyang, and they have been surveying the site since the 1950s. All the other Zhou states had huge walls around their capitals, so Xianyang’s lack of them is a testament both to Qin’s power and to the advantage that its geographical position gave it. Xianyang was protected by the Jing and Wei Rivers and by the natural barriers surrounding the Guanzhong, which, it should be recalled, means “within the passes.”⁵³

Evidence from better-documented Chinese empires suggests that the central administration and imperial household consumed a considerable share of the state budget. Up to a quarter of the imperial tax revenues in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) were spent within the palace walls. This was probably less true in the Qin, which did not have a Grand Canal to bring grain to the capital, but we can at least guess that much of the Guanzhong’s surplus was consumed in the capital. A particularly useful source for imagining the economic life of the palaces is the Offices of Zhou, a text written around the same period that Qin’s capital flourished. It lays out in considerable detail what its authors considered an ideal bureaucracy, including the offices for provisioning the court. The text is imaginary, but not entirely unrealistic. Excavated Qin and Han documents and seal impressions prove the existence of many offices similar to those mentioned in the text, whose author(s) clearly had a deep knowledge of palace life and administration. We can expect that many of the other details mentioned in the text were also based on reality.⁵⁴

The scale of the bureaucracy described by the Offices is appropriate for a court that fed and clothed a few thousand people. For food, it includes offices of butchers and cooks and those in charge of meat preserves, vinegar preserves, alcohol, drinks, salt, rice, curing meat, and storing ice to preserve food. Many of the raw materials were provided by people in charge of catching or growing food for the court, such as hunters, fishers, turtle catchers, and people in charge of gardens and orchards. For clothing there were tailors, cobblers, hairdressers, and specialists in furs, skins, silk, hemp, and cloth-dying. There were also a variety of offices concerned with human and animal medicine, cleaning, building, maintenance, prisons, horses, and the emperor’s royal guard, which was itself a small army. Many of these produced food and clothes for both sacrificial offerings and human use, and the Offices also includes a whole bureaucracy of ritual specialists, which Qin must also have had. Qin’s Guanzhong was administered by standard Qin administrative units such as counties and districts, but also contained imperial parks and mausoleums of previous Qin rulers. The tomb complexes included large grounds and villages whose taxes supported their upkeep and provided animals to sacrifice. By this time Qin maintained the tombs of five hundred years of Qin rulers, which probably consumed a significant amount of land and resources.⁵⁵

Control over the labor of artisans had been a source of economic power for elites in the region for many centuries. So it is not surprising that the Qin state produced commodities not only for the palace and the army but probably also for sale. The Offices of Zhou lists a variety of artisans working for some Warring States court, including chariot builders, weapons manufacturers, potters, and fabric makers. Qin certainly had all of these. There is plenty of evidence of pottery production in Xianyang, including hundreds of pottery fragments inscribed with the names of the workshops that produced them. There were both private and state-run kilns. There were also state-owned bronze and iron foundries that produced a variety of products. Excavators consider a site where metal arrowheads were cast to have been a state arsenal. Large-scale metalwork and ceramics production would have produced plenty of smoke—early air pollution. This would have consumed a lot of firewood, but probably only a small fraction of that consumed by the entire city, though we have no idea where all this wood came from. Some of it was surely brought in by boat from the upper Wei River valley.⁵⁶

The Guanzhong outside of the capital was administered by the Metropolitan Superintendent, and the whole region was referred to by the name of that office, which literally translates as “scribe of the interior” (neishi 內史). The Guanzhong was kept administratively separate from Qin’s other territory until the end of the dynasty. People had to present the appropriate documents to pass through the passes that surrounded it. Its population in 2 CE was probably over 2.3 million, with a population density of up to 150 people per square kilometer. We can assume that it would have been somewhat lower under Qin. The area south of the Wei River from Xianyang, much of which is now the city of Xi’an, seems to have been within Xianyang’s jurisdiction, which included several districts and guard posts as well as many villages. There were also cemeteries there. At least one bridge connected the palaces on each side of the river. This bridge, whose southern end was recently excavated, was built by driving large numbers of sturdy timbers into the riverbed and building a wooden surface on top. The location of this and later bridges at the site reveal that the Wei River in this area shifted northward as late as the eighth century CE, destroying parts of Qin Xianyang.⁵⁷

Qin had various imperial parks that were directly owned by the king, not the government. Han Feizi refers to a time of famine in Qin when a noble pleaded with the king, saying “the grasses, vegetables, nuts, dates and chestnuts in the five parks are enough for the people to live on, please open the parks to the people,” a request that the king refused on the grounds that it would subvert his policy of rewarding people based on their service. This shows that at least some of these parks contained gardens and orchards. The monopolization of certain areas for rulers to hunt and relax in continued into the early twentieth century and represents one of the only examples of Chinese states’ preserving land from agricultural encroachment for the benefit of wild animals. Qin’s largest imperial park was Shanglin 上林, located in what are now the western suburbs of Xi’an. Han-era Shanglin was traditionally believed to stretch tens of kilometers between the Wei River and the foothills of the Qinling, though we do not know how big it was under Qin. It included ponds, rivers, and Qin’s massive unfinished Epang palace. In the Han era there were farms in Shanglin, and this may well have been true in Qin as well. We have evidence that it was off limits to commoners from a story in which the second Qin emperor, while hunting in Shanglin, encountered a commoner, whom he promptly killed.⁵⁸

We know even less about Qin’s other parks; our only detailed information comes from much later sources. The First Emperor had a palace built in Liangshan Park, in the mountains about fifty kilometers northwest of Xianyang. In the foothills of the Qinling about forty kilometers east of Xianyang was Mount Li Park, near the First Emperor’s mausoleum. Mount Li is still a scenic area famous for its hot springs, and archaeologists have excavated a system of ceramic pipes there that was probably used to pipe hot water into baths. Both Shanglin and Li Mountain were imperial hunting grounds. There was also Yichun Park in what is now southeastern Xi’an. Qin also took control of the hunting grounds of other rulers as it conquered their kingdoms. Although we know little about these parks, they were clearly large areas that provided considerable income to the emperor and may have protected animals for the rulers to hunt.⁵⁹

Just east of Xianyang, across the Jing River, Qin built a large water control project that transformed the eastern Guanzhong, bringing the last wild areas of the plain under cultivation for the first time. This was the Zheng Guo Canal project, one of the most famous hydraulic engineering projects in Chinese history.

Rebuilding the Waterscape

As states grow in power, they become capable of transforming the earth in more ambitious ways. This is exemplified in Qin’s megaprojects, which required the coordinated labor of many thousands of people. The Zheng Guo Canal project was one of two major irrigation works built by Qin in the late Warring States period and one of the largest water control projects that had ever been built in East Asia (see map 8). The other was Dujiangyan, which Qin built after conquering Sichuan’s Chengdu Plain, permanently transforming it into a fertile farming area. The construction of the Zheng Guo project completed the agricultural colonization of the Guanzhong Basin and greatly improved the agricultural productivity of the Qin (and Han) capital area. Unfortunately, there is still much we do not know about the Zheng Guo Canal project. Early texts celebrate its success, but the history of more recent centuries reveals that it was difficult to maintain an irrigation system in that location using premodern technology.

Until recently, most histories of early Chinese water control were based on the water control chapters of the Historical Records and the Han History, but archaeological materials are revealing a much longer and more complex history. For example, archaeologists have discovered an extensive water control system in South China from the third millennium BCE. And, as discussed above, we now know that the Western Zhou and Qin both modified the hydrology of their capital sites. The earliest textual records we have of a state-sponsored water control project dates to 563 BCE, when a minister of the state of Zheng ordered ditches dug that caused powerful families to lose land, so they had him assassinated. In the 430s the state of Wei dug a ten-kilometer irrigation canal that created some of its best farmland. The states of Wu and Chu also dug transportation canals in this period.⁶⁰

But historical texts discuss only the largest water projects. We know that smaller-scale water works were common because many texts mention officials charged with maintaining water control systems. For example, Xunzi wrote that “the official duties of the director of public works comprise repairing dikes and bridges, keeping open irrigation channels and ditches, draining off overflow waters, and storing up water in reservoirs to maintain the water level according to the season so that even in bad weather, in times of flood or drought, the people will have something to plant and weed.” Similarly, a passage from the Annals of Lü Buwei suggests that digging irrigation ditches was a common practice.⁶¹

The story of the Zheng Guo Canal, as described by Sima Qian, is that the state of Han sent a water control expert named Zheng Guo to convince Qin to expend its energies on building large-scale public works instead of invading Han.⁶² The king of Qin discovered the plot halfway through construction and was going to execute Zheng, but he managed to convince the king that this project would actually benefit Qin. This belongs to the genre of romantic stories about clever advisors and their wily plots collected in the Intrigues of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce) and cannot be taken as fact. But the canal was indeed built, and this is how Sima Qian concludes its story: “When it was finished, it was used to spread muddy, silt-laden water over more than 40,000 qing of land in the area, which up until this time had been very brackish, bringing the yield of the land up to one zhang per mu. As a result the Guanzhong was converted into fertile fields and no longer suffered from lean years; Qin became rich and powerful and eventually was able to conquer all the other feudal lords.”⁶³ According to Sima Qian’s account, the canal flowed from the Jing to the Luo River. As can been seen in map 9, this was an area that had always been sparsely populated. Not only did it lack running water, it is so flat that when summer rains fell it became waterlogged, and then natural salts accumulated as the water evaporated. For this reason, it had remained in a semi-wild state, the last remaining uncultivated lowland in the region. The Zheng Guo project converted some of this region to agriculture, digging ditches to drain the lowlands and using the water from the Jing River to irrigate and desalinize the area. It was completed in 246 BCE, the year King Zheng, the future First Emperor, became king.⁶⁴

The general plan of the canal is clear. The canal flowed parallel to the Wei River, but at a higher elevation, making it possible to tap it at various points to irrigate areas to the south. It also cut across numerous smaller waterways and springs that also fed into it, allowing the canal to function at a limited capacity even when the intake from the Jing River was not working, a situation that has often been the case in subsequent periods. Sima Qian states that the canal flowed from the Jing River to the Luo River along the Northern Mountains. Because of where the Northern Mountains are, and the lay of the land east of them, the path of any canal flowing between those two points cannot have varied greatly, and is shown in maps 8 and 9 (bottom).⁶⁵

The 40,000 qing described by Sima Qian equals 1844 square kilometers, which would form a square over forty kilometers on each side. This is not far off the total area between the canal route and the Wei River. Although it has conventionally read as the area irrigated by the project, Sima Qian’s 40,000 qing is probably just an exaggeration, but it may indicate the total area within which the irrigation water could potentially have been used. Even now, when the system has been rebuilt with a concrete dam, the Jing River rarely has enough water to irrigate such a large area and it extends less than half the distance to the Luo River. The Jing River’s water could have been diverted all the way to the Luo or used for irrigation, but not both. This was probably true even when the upstream vegetation was not as overgrazed as it is now, which would have made the river’s flow more consistent.⁶⁶

The most difficult technical problem in the construction of the Zheng Guo Canal was finding a way to channel water out of a river whose volume fluctuates enormously. When the landscape is frozen in the winter the Jing river’s average discharge is only 5–28 cubic meters per second (cms), low enough that one could probably jump across it in some places. But during summer floods its flow has been measured at 8,000 cms. Moreover, a 1911 flood may have exceeded 14,000 cms, and 4000-year-old sediments have been estimated to have been produced by floods that exceeded 20,000 cms. And the floods come quickly: during summer rains in 1931 the river was seen to rise seven meters in under ten minutes. These floods are extremely muddy because they cause so much erosion in the loess regions upstream. Qin’s engineers had to build a dam to create a reservoir that could channel water into the canal without being destroyed by summer floods. Even if they succeeded perfectly, the silty water would eventually fill in the canal, forcing them to dig it out. The difficulty of building a dam at this site was only solved in the twentieth century with concrete.⁶⁷

The key was to build a dam whose reservoir held water to feed the canal in dry periods and allowed some of the sediment to settle out before entering the canal. In theory, a well-built dam would have caught so much sediment that it would eventually have filled in the reservoir, but the problem for premodern engineers was more likely keeping the dam intact. Qin Jianming and his colleagues from the Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology have discovered and mapped the rammed-earth dam, as seen in map 10. We know that it was Qin’s because it had tombs from the early to mid Han dug into it. Sima Qian spent most of his life in this region and would have mentioned if a massive dam had been built in the early Han, so the dam must have been built by Qin. The dam was 2600 meters long, enormous for an ancient dam. In contrast to both the current dam and intake canals built over the past millennium, which were located in narrow gorges farther upstream, Qin’s dam was built across a particularly wide section of the valley, which is probably the only way to dam a river using a material as weak as rammed earth. Remaining segments are around 130–160 meters wide at the base and stand 2–8 meters above the soil on which they were built, though the cross section of the dam shown in map 10 shows that the tallest part of the dam was probably the section that has since been destroyed by the river (between A and B).⁶⁸

The dam was eventually destroyed, and we can assume it was flood waters that did it. The reservoir behind the excavated dam was far too small to be able to hold the amount of water flowing in the river during a summer flood. Therefore, the dam had to have an overflow mechanism. But how could they have built an overflow mechanism that could withstand the torrent? The late Ming scholar Yuan Huazhong suggested that the Qin dam was built with tubes of bamboo filled with rocks, as was done at Dujiangyan in his time. This is quite possible, though such dams had to be rebuilt frequently, often annually. In later periods they also dismantled the diversion structure before the flood season to prevent damage, using the dam only during low-water seasons. This is a very labor-intensive solution to the problem, but one which Qin and Han Empires could have managed with their enormous supplies of unpaid labor. The Zheng Guo Canal may have been an early example of a high-level equilibrium trap, a project whose initial benefits were outweighed in the long run by the constant effort required to maintain it. The construction of the dam may also have permanently transformed the shape of the valley. Before the dam was built, floodwaters could spread out across the floodplain, weakening the flow. However, Qin built a dam across a wide section of the floodplain, and when the water eventually cut through it, the remaining sections of the dam forced the entire river into the single channel, increasing the flow rate and forcing it to cut downwards. This downcutting can be seen in the cross section of map 10. This forced later engineers to cut intake canals higher up the valley, which required them to carve channels out of the rock on the side of the valley.⁶⁹

Map 10. Archaeologically surveyed remains of the dam at the head of the Zheng Guo Canal. The location depicted here is indicated by the small rectangle near the center of map 8, above. The Jing River flowed in from the northwest, filling the dam. The canal began in the outflow canal, which led water to the east. Excess water in the outflow canal was released in the overflow channel at the bottom right. Excess water from the dam probably flowed out near section A, where the spillway sediments are identified. The cross section at the top shows the relative height of remaining sections of the dam (in meters).

The canal could not have irrigated anything close to 40,000 qing, but it is unclear how much it could have irrigated. Our best indication to what was irrigated is the distribution of archaeological sites from the Qin-Han period shown in map 9. That map contrasts the distribution of Neolithic and early Bronze Age archaeological sites (top), with those of the Qin-Han period. The map reveals that the area whose population grew the most during the Qin and Han periods was not the area irrigated by the Zheng Guo Canal but was just to the west, in and around the Qin capital, Xianyang (north of the Wei River), and the Western Han capital, Chang’an (south of the river). The one area that was very likely irrigated by the Zheng Guo Canal is just north of Xi’an’s eastern suburbs, directly below the word “Canal” on map 9. This is precisely the area currently irrigated by the system. While it is far less than 40,000 qing, we should not underestimate the value of an area of this size being reliably irrigated. Having an extensive tract of irrigated land directly across the river from its capital meant that Qin had a reliable source of food even during the worst droughts. Some areas farther east may also have been irrigated.

Irrigation may have helped make wheat more popular. Wheat had been around for millennia by this time, and we might have expected winter wheat to be more popular since it offered the substantial benefit of being harvested in the spring, when food stores often ran low. However, wheat requires more water than millets, so it was too risky to grow extensively without irrigation. Its spread in the Guanzhong may have been a result of increased irrigation. It was also due to the invention of the stone grinding mill which allowed people to grind it into flour. The earliest stone mill excavated in China was found in Qin’s city of Yueyang and dates to the late Warring States period. But grinding mills became common only after the period we are discussing, in the Han dynasty, which is when wheat-based foods like breads, noodles, and dumplings first started to become staples of North Chinese cuisine.⁷⁰

Another benefit of irrigation is that it can be used to flush out excess salts by repeatedly flooding fields and then draining out the salt-laden water using ditches. The Zheng Guo Canal may have been used not only to irrigate but also to desalinize land. Apart from Sima Qian’s claim that the canal made saline land arable, the agriculture chapters of the Annals of Lü Buwei also contain an ambiguous reference to using ditch water to clean soil. We cannot even guess whether this was widespread or successful, but it was surely attempted. Nonetheless, plenty of low-lying land remained saline and is still marginal farmland.⁷¹

On the whole, it seems that the Zheng Guo system really did work, at least in some areas, as Sima Qian claimed when he said that it “eliminated bad years.” Not only did it provide Qin with a drought-free breadbasket very close to the capital; it also opened up a huge region that had previously been “wasteland” to colonists. The system was expanded in the Han and was apparently still working three centuries later when Ban Gu wrote, “At the base of the mountains are the fertile lands watered by the Zheng and Bo canals, sources of food and clothing. The entire area totals fifty thousand, with borders and plots arranged like silk squares. The ditches and ridges were etched and carved out, with plateaus and bogs dotting the area like dragon scales. Dredging canals, they made rain fall; shouldering spades, they formed clouds. The five grains hang heavy with spikes; mulberry and hemp spread and flourish.”⁷²

Qin arose as a small polity on the edge of the Zhou world and went on to conquer it all. The changes required for this transformation were so profound that it seems almost meaningless to consider Qin the same entity from beginning to end. But the continuity of the state and the dynasty were real, and they gave Qin’s leaders the legitimacy to remold their society and its ecology.

Qin must have already been quite formidable to be able to take control of the Guanzhong in the seventh century BCE, and its power only grew as it conquered more territory and people. Once it had established itself on the west of the Zhou world in the Guanzhong Basin, Qin faced relatively few external threats. Its royal house was unusually strong, and its military power was the equal of any state in East Asia. By the fourth century, Qin faced the powerful state of Wei and its leaders realized that their administration was relatively primitive. Shang Yang’s reforms provided administrative strength to a state situated in an ideal geographical position for long-term warfare. The reforms emphasized control over people and land. By surveying its resources and counting its population, the Qin state attempted to find all available resources and laborers in its domain and use them efficiently. The Zheng Guo project completed the agricultural colonization of the region by opening the northeast of the plain to farming. From that time on, the only large wild animals in the lowlands were those in the king’s hunting parks.

Qin’s state-strengthening reforms constituted a profound and permanent change in the relationship between human society and the environment. Its system of land redistribution made the state an important player in how land was organized and used, as did its control over nonagricultural resources. Its ability to mobilize large numbers of workers vastly increased its ability to transform the environment. The new powers that the central government gained through these reforms made it capable of systematically encouraging the spread of agriculture. With its armies of laborers, it could expand the infrastructure that allowed it to extract resources from new areas as it conquered them, and eventually these made it strong enough to conquer the other Zhou states and found an empire. The following chapter will examine the ecology of the Qin state at its height, during the reign of the First Emperor.

CHAPTER FIVE

Watching Over the Granaries

The Ecology of the Qin Empire

A strong country knows thirteen numbers: those of granaries and people within its borders, of able-bodied men and women, of old and weak people, of officials and servicemen, of sophists and useful people, and of horses, oxen, hay, and straw.

—The Book of Lord Shang, fourth century BCE

IN 221 BCE QIN’S last rival surrendered and its king declared himself the “First Emperor.” Qin had been large enough to be considered an empire for several decades by then, but this official declaration is still taken as the official founding of China’s imperial system. At the time of the announcement, Qin had conquered an area the size of Western Europe that included tens of millions of people and most of the good farmland in East Asia. Instead of giving his subjects a break from war, the king continued to conquer, sending armies south as far as the ocean and into the arid north, where they built the first “Great Wall of China.” Qin collapsed only fourteen years after declaring itself an empire, but its system was soon revived by the Han dynasty, which endured for four centuries (c. 200 BCE–200 CE) and made Qin’s centralized bureaucracy the standard model of political organization in China, which it remains to this day. Qin’s successors have played a key role in replacing natural ecosystems across East Asia with farmland.¹

The goal of this chapter is to analyze the ecology of Qin’s political system at the pinnacle of its power, the reign of King Zheng/the First Emperor (r. 246–210 BCE). He is known around the world for the terracotta army that guards his tomb, but in East Asia he is famous as the founder of the Chinese imperial system and as the archetypal harsh ruler. This chapter is not about him but about how his empire worked. Just as animals obtain energy and materials by eating food, agrarian states fund themselves by extracting labor and agricultural products from the population. Since the keys to Qin’s power were its ability to mobilize resources and labor, its officials worked to build social organizations that could easily be controlled and taxed. They also encouraged people to clear more land for agriculture. Grain was too bulky to transport very far over land, so most of the state’s grain income was kept in granaries close to where it was grown from which local officials distributed it to feed laborers, officials, and livestock. If we think of this process in terms of energy, common people captured solar energy in the grain they grew, paid some of that grain to the state in tax, and then consumed the energy in it as they performed corvée or military labor for the state. Because the grain stayed in place, central government officials had to gather information about what resources were available to each government office across the empire and then decide how those offices should use them. The empire’s financial administration was the brain that controlled the metabolism of the state, and it had unprecedented power to shape environments across the subcontinent.

As in most of the pre-industrial world, ancient China’s agriculture produced relatively small amounts of surplus. Because each farmer could produce only a small amount of grain, the state could not afford to employ huge numbers of officials to collect it. They had to find a balance between small administrations that were cheap to run but did not collect enough income and large, expensive ones that collected more surplus but used most of it to fund their own operations. As discussed in previous chapters, it was probably the enormous expenses of warfare that pushed Qin and its rivals to improve their extractive capabilities. The expenses of war tend to force states to find ways to extract surpluses from every aspect of economic production from which they can profitably do so. The Qin state went beyond this, reorganizing, standardizing, and simplifying society for the purpose of making it easier to monitor and extract resources from. Officials discouraged people from itinerant or mobile subsistence strategies that could not be taxed. As discussed in the previous chapter, they organized the male population into a system of ranks based on military service and reorganized farmland to provide them with land as a reward for earning higher ranks. This, of course required a whole system of land-mapping and population registration.²

The state described in this chapter exercised a degree of bureaucratic control, at least in some of its territories, that was probably unprecedented in human history up to that time. It established standardized writing, weights, and measures that long outlasted it. It produced such enormous quantities of bureaucratic documents that even the tiny fraction that have survived provide us with far more information on how its government worked than we have on any previous East Asian state. Legal statutes written on wood and bamboo have been excavated (and stolen) from the tombs of Qin and Han officials in the central Yangzi valley, most famously those at Shuihudi and Zhangjiashan. Legal statutes were the rulebooks of local administrators across the empire, allowing us to see how the central government wanted officials to behave. The huge cache of routine administrative documents excavated from a well at Liye, in the mountains of western Hunan, allow us to see how the government actually worked—and did not work—in a remote corner of its empire. This chapter takes advantage of this rich body of data, as well as the two classic histories written by officials of the Han central government, Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shi ji) and Ban Gu’s Han History (Han shu), to analyze how the Qin state functioned. It also uses archaeological research on megaprojects like the Great Wall and the terracotta army, which demonstrate the enormous amount of human labor that Qin had at its disposal.³

The state’s supply of labor came primarily from the military and corvée service that most adult men had to serve. The state also had plenty of convict labor since most crimes were punished either with sentences of hard labor or with fines that most people had to pay off by working for the state. Access to such large amounts of labor allowed Qin to engage in a variety of massive labor projects, such as palaces, an empire-wide road system, the First Emperor’s famous mausoleum, and the Long Wall, the first “Great Wall of China.” Less dramatic but much more widespread corvée tasks involved routine maintenance of roads, bridges, field boundaries, walls, dikes, and buildings. These had substantial environmental impacts. Water control works reorganized local water systems to make them more productive. Roads and bridges enabled officials and merchants to extract resources from previously inaccessible areas and transport them farther than they could have before. They also enabled colonists to move into newly conquered regions.

While this chapter focuses on continuities over the thirty-six years of King Zheng’s reign, it should be emphasized that officials were constantly adapting to the difficulties posed by the rapid expansion of the empire. Qin’s intensive administration was designed within the capital region and its southern colonies. After Qin conquered its former enemies in the densely populated east, some officials recognized how difficult it would be to maintain control over them. They argued that Qin should copy the decentralized governance model of the Western Zhou and enfeoff trusted relatives in conquered regions. But the emperor opted to extend the existing system of intensive centralized governance over his entire domain, surely the wrong approach for administering huge territories that were home to millions of resentful people. Nonetheless, Qin’s model might have worked had it not been combined with never-ending wars and colossal vanity projects.

The biggest change to Qin’s fiscal system in these decades was the increasing use of markets. While Qin’s economy in earlier times had been strongly controlled by the state, its conquest of highly commercialized regions allowed officials to take advantage of the flexibility offered by commerce. Without markets, states could only collect taxes in kind and make subjects work for them. Markets make it easier for states to extract surpluses from the economy by facilitating exchange. The easier it was for government offices to convert commodities, coins, and labor into one another, the more flexibly they could extract resources from local economies. Buying and selling goods on local markets saved the expense of transporting goods over long distances and could even allow for profits to be made. While the Qin Empire’s economy was always based on grain and labor, the government increasingly took advantage of the portability of items such as coins, cloth, metals, and products made by its own craftsmen. These had the advantage of being durable and portable, so they could be carried to areas where the state needed other resources and exchanged for them. Qin even told local governments to take advantage of changing prices to increase their revenues. These reforms were still being worked out when Qin collapsed, and many of the same trends continued under the Han.⁴

Qin’s central government had varying degrees of control across the empire, which was administratively divided into the “old” and “new” territories. These are shown in map 11, though it should be emphasized that we do not know exactly which areas were included in the old and new territories. The old territories were roughly those that Qin controlled around 230 BCE before it began its final campaign to conquer its rivals. This area included much of the central Yellow River valley, Sichuan, and the Han River valley. The new territories included the North China Plain and the extensive areas south of the Yangzi valley. While most maps of the Qin Empire depict the south as solidly Qin territory, in fact Qin only had administrative control over a few areas south of the Yangzi River, most notably the lowlands of the central Yangzi valley that it had conquered from Chu. Across the vast regions south of the Yangzi—most of which were hilly and densely forested—Qin controlled nothing more than a scattered network of garrisons connected by river and land routes. In retrospect, Qin’s penetration of the far south was a key event in the Chinese colonization of what is now South China, but it was a minor concern of the Qin rulers.⁵

Map 11. The Qin Empire and its commanderies. The core of the empire was the “Old Territories,” which lay south of the Long Wall (dashed lines) and west of the dotted line. The location of the two southwesternmost commanderies is entirely a guess.

It was the recently conquered North China Plain that kept Qin officials awake at night. The plain was the demographic, economic, and cultural center of the Chinese-speaking world and it had been governed by independent states for eight centuries. Its people had very strong regional identities and tended to consider Qin a powerful but backwards country, perhaps reminiscent of European stereotypes of Russia. Many strongly resented Qin’s occupation of their land and it is not surprising that the uprising that overthrew the empire began there. The emperor’s advisors argued that he should enfeoff his relatives and allies in these regions, but he rejected their advice, which was probably a fatal mistake. Enfeoffment was the strategy successfully adopted by the founder of the subsequent Han dynasty. He enfeoffed his relatives in these regions, and over the subsequent century the Han central government gradually conquered and subjugated them.⁶

Given that later Chinese empires contented themselves with considerably less local administration than Qin seems to have had, it is worth asking how effective Qin’s administration was. Late imperial Chinese empires (c. 1400–1900 CE) were rarely capable of maintaining accurate population or land records, and officials systematically enriched themselves from their posts. We can infer that corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence were also issues in Qin because many of its laws were written to prevent just these problems. Central officials were quite aware how easily lower-level officials could fake data and embezzle state assets. Despite these issues, the documents from Liye, Hunan, reveal that the state bureaucracy in distant peripheral regions was expected to function according to the same laws and practices as those in the core regions. Although it did not work particularly well in Liye, Qin would never have attempted to expand it so widely if it had not been effective in the capital region. It should also be emphasized that Liye was a military garrison, not a randomly selected village under Qin control. The Qin administration had very little presence across large areas that were nominally part of the empire.⁷

A key question in thinking about the ecological effects of a powerful state like Qin is this: How were land, labor, and resources used differently under a centralized state than they had been in earlier periods when there were weaker states, or no state at all? Without having to pay taxes or provide labor service, people could have produced less food to begin with. They could also have produced surpluses but used them to work on things they and their neighbors found useful rather than the projects of a distant central government. Or just relaxed and enjoyed themselves. Of course, governments did organize people’s labor to build useful infrastructure that small communities could never have achieved, among other benefits.

This chapter is divided into seven sections. The first section outlines the central government, especially its management of land and people. The second does the same for local administration. The third section explains the various kinds of taxes that were collected. The fourth discusses the system for state allocation of land, in which nonhereditary plots of land were granted to households based on their positions in the state system of ranks. The fifth section outlines the state’s use of human labor, while the sixth discusses horses, cattle, and other animals. The final section reviews how the state managed nonagricultural resources such as mines and forests.

The Central Government

In theory, the Qin state was an autocracy in which the supreme executive power of the ruler derived from his ancestors to whom he offered sacrifices. There was no notion of the state in a modern sense. The polity was the dynasty, and the cults of the soil, grain, and royal ancestors were its symbolic and spiritual heart. Sacrifices at the altars of these cults were considered essential for maintaining the dynasty. Although the king was understood to be operating within a cosmological system in which certain behaviors were proper—such as treating his subjects well—he was bound by no laws either celestial or terrestrial. This is a notable difference from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim kings, who were supposed to follow God’s law; from Medieval European kings bound in contractual relationships with their vassals; and from rulers whose power was constrained by bodies of landed elites such as senates, estates, or parliaments. Whereas the early Roman emperors had to pretend that they were not monarchs in order to avoid Julius Caesar’s fate of being assassinated by the oligarchy, Chinese emperors could call themselves gods. The term huangdi, conventionally translated “emperor,” literally means “majestic deity.”⁸

In practice, kings were constrained by the other powerful people who surrounded them, not least their mothers. As in courts everywhere, those with access to the ruler could wield significant power by virtue of their proximity to him. In China there is a long tradition of officials resenting the seemingly unearned power of these people. Powerful eunuchs and women were particularly resented and are usually portrayed negatively in histories and other writings. But we can be sure that such people could also be sources of good advice. The First Emperor was among the most powerful monarchs in Chinese history, but he had to work with his family members and high officials to exercise power. And, of course, the vast majority of decisions were made by officials who had achieved their positions by demonstrating competence.⁹

The bureaucracy constituted the core of the state and did most of the actual administering. Thankfully for historians, officials did a lot of writing. We have a lot more information on Qin’s administration than we have on that of any earlier Chinese state or on those of most other ancient states. Any analysis of the Qin and Han central governments begins with chapter 19 of the Han History, which lays out the offices of the Former Han central government. It states that the Han central government followed Qin’s organization without changing it and mentions which positions were inherited from Qin. Most were. That chapter was written three centuries after the fall of Qin, but we know it is fairly accurate because we can compare it with excavated documents and with the impressions on dried clay of the seals used by Qin officials to seal documents. Over three thousand such seal impressions were discovered in Qin palace sites. Hundreds of them were illegally excavated in the mid-1990s and sold on the antiquities market, after which archaeologists discovered the site and excavated many more. Luckily, some scientifically excavated fragments could be matched with looted ones to form wholes, and it is clear from the way they briefly flooded the market that they are genuine. The seal impressions not only confirm the general picture of the Qin government in the Han History; they also provide the titles of officials too menial to have been mentioned in that text.¹⁰

The top positions in the Qin government were two Chancellors, below which were the Imperial Counselor and the Supreme Commander. Each of these positions came with offices and staff. Qin copied the position of chancellor from other Zhou states but established two of them, the higher-ranking of whom was often a foreigner. Chancellors had overall responsibility for the government, as well as foreign affairs and general military matters. The Supreme Commander had direct control over military affairs. Chancellors often had enormous influence in shaping the Qin state. The most famous was Li Si, who held the position from 219 to 213 BCE after a stint as Minister of Trials. Imperial Counselors were in charge of supervising officials, maintaining official records, and transmitting important documents.¹¹

These high-ranking officials get the most attention in many history books, but it was the ministries below them that constituted the main body of the central government. According to the Han History, there were Ministries of (1) Ceremonies, (2) the Palace, (3) the Palace Guards, (4) Transport, (5) Trials, (6) State Visits, (7) the Imperial Clan, (8) Finance, (9) the Lesser Treasury, and (10) the Capital. The Han History states that all of these were established by Qin, a claim proven in many cases by the discovery of impressions of their seals, or those of their subordinates, in the Qin palaces. The central government of the empire retained many characteristics of a regional state. Several of the ministries were concerned with affairs that did not extend far beyond the capital, while some departments that administered affairs across the empire occupied relatively obscure positions in the government structure.¹²

Before we get into the empire’s financial bureaucracy, it is worth mentioning ritual sacrifices, which consumed a lot of resources. Qin maintained the tombs of five centuries of royal ancestors and altars to many other deities. Most of these were maintained by the Ministry of Ceremonies, but various branches of government sacrificed animals and other things to ancestors, rivers, mountains, and celestial bodies. Royal tombs were located across the Guanzhong. The older ones were around the old capital of Yong in the west, while most of the newer ones were built to the east around Lintong, near where the First Emperor’s mausoleum was being built at this time. Some temples had entire villages dedicated to supporting them and providing the grain and livestock used in sacrifices to them. Sacrifices of livestock and grain were also performed to a variety of rivers and mountains several times through the year. Two jades presumably looted in the Guanzhong are inscribed with a prayer in which Qin royals promise to sacrifice cattle, pigs, sheep, and a chariot with horses to Mount Hua, supplicating the sacred mountain to cure their small child. And documents excavated at Liye reveal local officials making sacrifices to the god of agriculture.¹³

The financial affairs of the empire were managed by the ministries of the Lesser Treasury and Finance. Qin’s Ministry of Finance seems to have been called neishi 內史, “interior scribe,” a title that dated back many centuries, though there is some confusion because later on in the Han government this term was used in the titles of two different offices. The Han neishi managed the capital’s markets, kitchens, granaries, and iron offices and also provided grain and livestock for imperial sacrifices. We therefore render it in English as “Metropolitan Superintendent.” The Han’s zhisu neishi 治粟內史 (literally, “interior scribe for managing grain”) managed the finances of the whole empire and can be rendered “Ministry of Finance.” Qin’s original neishi combined both of these functions, which makes sense since the metropolitan region originally comprised most of its territory. At some unknown time, the office must have been divided in two, with one branch focused on the capital and the other on the whole empire. In any case, the Han History’s description of the Han Ministry of Finance matches with what we know of Qin’s. It says that the ministry was in charge of grain and commodities in general and that “all of the offices of granaries and agriculture, and the chiefs and assistants of the sixty-five Offices of Waters in the commanderies and kingdoms are subordinate to it.” A later commentary specifies that the ministry was “in charge of coins, grain, precious metals, cloth and of all commodities and money.” The Han History also records that the ministry was in charge of the Great Granary and the Main Treasury. Qin’s Great Granary managed granaries and related things such as standardizing official measures to collect grain taxes. The Main Treasury was a warehouse or treasury that held items such as clothing and scrap metal.¹⁴

While the Ministry of Finance was in charge of the main sources of revenue, the Lesser Treasury collected income from other sources, such as forests, wetlands, and oceans. The ministry also collected income from Qin’s imperial parks, most notably the Shanglin, discussed in the previous chapter. The Shanglin probably included farms and orchards, which means that the Lesser Treasury may have directly managed agricultural production. The income provided by all of these sources could be substantial. Two centuries later, in the Han, the annual income of the Lesser Treasury was 8.3 billion coins, more than double the central government’s 4 billion. This is plausible because most income from grain and market taxes was scattered in granaries and warehouses across the empire and was not considered central government income. In the Han, the revenues of this department sometimes went directly to the emperor’s household, but there is no clear evidence that this separation existed in Qin. I suspect that the Qin emperor had such firm control over the state that there was no reason to specify which branches of government income belonged to his household. There was no division between the dynasty and the state.¹⁵

Because the empire was too large to move most resources very far, the only way the central government could control them was through an empire-wide communication system. Central officials needed to receive data on the people and resources under their control, to send orders to lower administrative levels, and to maintain internal communication with and between those lower levels. Local officials devoted a lot of time to collecting, processing, and transmitting data. This focus on information was not a reaction to the growth of the empire but had in fact been a core part of Qin’s system since Shang Yang’s reforms and was one of the main reasons the empire was able to expand as it did. The emphasis on knowledge is clear in this chapter’s epigraph, taken from the fourth chapter of the Book of Lord Shang. As Qin expanded, it had to improve its infrastructure for information-gathering. Its road network was built not only to move armies, but also to send important news via the empire-wide courier system which employed both horses and human runners. The central government kept careful track of the speeds at which people and goods moved along various travel routes.¹⁶

One way officials kept spatial information was with maps. A fragmentary edict or ordinance ordering local governments to make maps of the territory under their control was found at Liye. We know that people recognized the administrative value of mapping resources from a passage in the Offices of Zhou, which was probably written sometime around the third century BCE. It describes the duties of a central government official as “to make the maps of the state’s land and figures of its population in order to help the king pacify the kingdoms. Using maps of the land of the world, he knows the width and length of the territories of the nine regions and distinguishes the names and products of their mountains, forests, rivers, wetlands, hills, mounds, riverbanks, plains, plateaus and lowlands.” Qin probably had these kinds of maps, as we will discuss below.¹⁷

Sima Qian tells a story that encapsulates the power of centralized information. He tells how the leaders of the armies that looted Qin’s palaces mostly sought treasures, but Liu Bang’s advisor Xiao He instead took Qin’s documents and maps. These allowed them to “know about the narrow and blocked passes in the world, how many households and people there were, the strong and weak places, and the suffering of the people,” which helped them defeat their rivals and make Liu the first emperor of the Han dynasty. This shows the importance of data for governance and provides yet another example of the continuity between Qin and Han.¹⁸

Local Administration

The empire was divided into more than thirty commanderies (jun 郡) and hundreds of counties (xian 縣). Commanderies were mainly military units, though they were gradually taking on civilian administrative functions and would become key administrative units—essentially provinces—in the Han. Counties were the main units of civilian administration and were in charge of penal and corvée labor, finances, taxes, livestock, equipment, granaries, and courts. Counties were headed by Magistrates, under whom were Overseers of fields, granaries, stables, corrals, armories, crossbows, handcrafts, food preparation, and other things. Each county had a financial office, and most also included various Bureaus (cao 曹). The Liye documents mention Bureaus of trials, households, granaries, finance, vehicles, court officials, and the commandant (i.e., policing). Beneath these were offices (guan 官) of things such as fields and livestock.¹⁹

Counties were divided into multiple districts (xiang 鄉). Below them, at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy, were villages (li 里), whose citizens could become chiefs (dian 典) or elders (lao 老) and perform some official functions. We do not know how they were rewarded for their service. They could be punished if crimes were committed or if there were errors in population registration. They also seem to have been responsible for state-owned oxen. The state kept control over rural society by arranging families in groups of five families that were mutually responsible for each other’s crimes, as discussed in the previous chapter. The male head of one of those families was chosen as the head of each group of five.²⁰

Commandants (wei 尉) were in charge of maintaining order and enforcing the commands of the Magistrate. Policing also seems to have been a main function of the guard posts (ting 亭) that were established throughout the empire and did things such as monitoring markets, manning postal stations, and catching thieves. Liu Bang, the man who founded the Han dynasty, began his career as the chief of a Qin guard post, perhaps something like a sheriff, and his duties included transporting convict laborers from his county to build the First Emperor’s mausoleum. There were also administrative units called dao 道 whose populations were non-Zhou ethnic groups. We know little about these but can assume that they were areas over which Qin had limited control.²¹

Counties had to send detailed records of their assets and financial activities to various parts of the central government, a system poorly adapted to an empire that spanned the subcontinent. Counties sent information on grain and hay taxes and on harvests to the Ministry of Finance. To the Great Granary they sent annual reports and registers of the people receiving rations. After they issued clothes to convict laborers they sent those that remained to the Main Treasury. They sent broken metal goods to the Main Treasury unless they were too far from the capital, in which case they sold the metal and reported the sales to the Ministry of Finance. Central government offices also established subordinate offices in the counties to take direct control of valuable materials like salt and iron. The government kept careful track of local resources to prevent local officials from neglecting or embezzling state assets. There were detailed regulations as to how officials should carry out inventories, which assigned responsibility and punishment for missing items. From the perspective of the central government, controlling its own officials was an essential precondition for controlling its subjects.²²

The documents from Liye reveal what each bureau kept records of. Not only did officials make registers (i.e., lists) of their holdings; they also made registers of the registers. This seems like a parody of bureaucracy, but it gives historians an incredibly detailed picture of what each bureau was doing. The Bureau of Households kept registers of households (population records), conscript labor, equipment, taxes, debt pledges, lacquer, and the embankments and boundary markers around fields. The Bureau of Works kept registers of boats, tools, redemptions (punishments commuted to fines), fines, and debts. The Bureau of Granaries kept registers of grain, loans, livestock, animal feed, tools, coins, cattle, horses, and sheep, and of the Office of Fields. And just as county offices composed these registers based on information collected by districts, county officials also tallied up their figures and sent totals to relevant offices of the central government. The Qianling County Bureau of Finance submitted registers of the following things to the central government: lacquer, work done in workshops, bamboo, ponds, chestnut groves, mined iron, markets, convict laborers working in workshops who died or fled, cast metal, arrows, orchards, things lost to water or fire damage, and so on. The central government received an enormous amount of information on the assets of local governments across the empire.²³

The state’s most important assets were its human subjects, and it kept careful track of them. The household records were quite detailed. For each household they list the status, rank, and name of each person, beginning with the (usually male) head of household followed by other adult males, their wives, other adults (parents, concubines, or slaves), and children, including whose children they were. They also record which men were the heads of their five-household units. Women could be heads of families, presumably when their husbands or fathers died. Recording the names and ages of children made it easier to keep track of where future taxpayers, laborers, and soldiers were to be found when they came of age.²⁴

In addition to recording its assets and its population, the bureaucracy was especially concerned with the state of harvests. The Zhangjiashan laws stipulated that by the fifth month information on how many fields had been cleared, along with the number of associated households, should be sent to the Commandery Governor. As will be discussed in more detail below, statutes required local officials to report the state of crops in considerable detail, most notably damage to crops, as quickly as possible after they occurred. These estimates were probably important for planning the season’s warfare and public works, in addition to the main purpose of adjusting taxation rates.²⁵

Taxation

Qin maintained a remarkable degree of control over land and people. Agrarian empires have historically tended to maintain existing structures of resource extraction in the places they conquer. Not only was this usually less expensive than developing new administrative structures, but it also tended to leave some surpluses for local elites, giving them a reason to accept their new overlords. Very few premodern empires attempted to create a uniform administration across their domains. Similarly, few premodern states could support a bureaucracy large enough to keep track of individual taxpayers. Most delegated the actual work of collecting taxes to people who were not salaried officials. For example, early modern European states often auctioned off the rights to collect taxes from each part of their domains to tax farmers. China’s Ming and Qing Empires (1368–1911) also lacked direct taxation. But they were as large as most contemporary European states combined, so their level of centralization is still impressive. But the Qin Empire was even more centralized than most of its successors. Its officials collected taxes directly from farmers. Qin’s collapse suggests that such an intensive form of governance was simply too expensive to be supported by the small surpluses of its agrarian economy.²⁶

Granaries played a central role in Qin’s system. As discussed in previous chapters, grain can be produced in large quantities, dried, and stored for several years. Its domestication allowed humans to grow in population and develop much more complex societies. Granaries stored the energy extracted from the population at harvest time and then fed laborers as they carried out the projects of the empire. Millets were the key crops across much of Qin’s domain, but people also grew rice, wheat, barley, and beans. Some areas paid taxes in hemp, which was the main fiber used for making clothes, others in silk cocoons. Many areas also contributed their own specialty products, of which there were probably hundreds of different kinds.²⁷

There were two basic taxes on farming families in Qin. The first was the land tax (zu 租), paid according to the area planted. The second was a household levy (hu fu 戸賦) collected from each household, which included a tax on hay and straw. Qin also levied taxes on commerce. In contrast to most later dynasties, which charged farmers the same tax rate every year, Qin ambitiously adjusted the quotas every year to maximize yields. The extent of information required for this kind of taxation is suggested by early Han statutes, which record that districts had to send the following five documents up to the county office every year: (1) residence, yard, and household registers; (2) detailed annual registers; (3) adjacent field registers; (4) combined field registers; and (5) land tax registers.²⁸ We do not know exactly what each of these was or if all of these document types originated with Qin, though I expect that they did. They make clear that the government intended to record every plot of taxable land, its estimated production, and how much it should contribute in taxes. District officials sent this information up to the county office, and it was used to decide on the year’s required taxes. Village officials were informed of the year’s tax quotas and were charged with preventing tax fraud and probably other aspects of the taxation process. We do not know if taxpayers had to deliver their taxes to the district granaries or to local leaders like the village head.²⁹

Local officials had to inform administrators at higher levels about the state of crops:

Whenever the rain waters it and the grain ripens, a written report is to be made immediately on the favored crop and the grain in ear, as well as the area of cultivated fields and land without crops. If it rains when the crop is already fully grown, the quantity of rain and the area affected are to be reported in writing. Likewise, in cases of drought and violent wind or rain, floods, hordes of grasshoppers or other creatures which damage the crops, the area concerned is always to be reported immediately in writing. Counties near the capital shall have light-footed runners deliver the letter, while distant counties have the courier service deliver it.

The purpose of this was to help officials decide how much tax they could collect from each region. This was a flexible system because it took poor harvests into consideration but also an aggressive one because it collected a high percentage of the yield, in contrast to having fixed taxation rates, which have to be set relatively low to be practical every year.³⁰

Each crop was taxed at a different rate, and there were established rates that allowed officials to convert each type and grade of grain or beans into one another or into other commodities such as coins and cloth. This not only facilitated the administration of the empire but also allowed local officials to take advantage of the differences between official rates and local prices. Maxim Korolkov has argued that Qin’s command economy played a central role in the empire’s economy, at least that of the areas firmly under Qin’s control. Not only did Qin’s coins help monetize the economy; its system for calculating the exchange rates between commodities and labor also greatly facilitated exchanges of goods and the commodification of labor. Qin’s innovations probably continued to facilitate commercialization long after its fall.³¹

The main goal of the hay and straw tax was presumably to provision the horses and oxen of governments and armies. It was collected based on the amount of land granted to a farmer regardless of whether he cultivated it or not. Officials could require payment in coins if they did not need hay. This was the earliest taxation in coin in imperial China and would have forced farmers to participate in the cash economy. Records of other levies, such as those on feathers (used for arrows) and silkworm cocoons (the raw material of silk) at Liye, may have been a form of household levy or separate tax.³²

Various taxes were collected in markets and on the movement of goods. For example, a problem in an excavated mathematical text reveals that there were taxes on transporting furs: “A fox, raccoon-dog, and hound go out through a tollhouse, and together pay 111 coins in tax. The hound says to the raccoon-dog, and the raccoon-dog says to the fox: ‘since your fur is worth twice as much as mine, then the tax you pay should be twice as much!’ How much should each one pay?” This is a joke, of course, referring to the tax on the pelts of dead animals. The same texts also refer to a tax on doctors, which means that there were probably taxes on a variety of nonagricultural workers. Nonetheless, it was agricultural taxes that provided the state’s main income, so it was particularly concerned with farmland.³³

Farmland

Since photosynthesis was the source of all energy, political power was based on controlling the land that plants grew on and the people who cultivated them. A lot of land barely produced enough to keep its inhabitants alive, let alone produce a taxable harvest. Because of this, administrators focused on good farmland and worked to ensure that it was farmed well enough to produce surpluses. This is one reason the state took direct control of good land and awarded it to farmers based on their rank, as discussed in the previous chapter. It ensured that farming families had enough land to produce a surplus and that they paid their taxes. It also aimed to prevent other elites from collecting those surpluses, surely one reason elite writers throughout Chinese history have considered Qin’s system so odious and why communist leader Mao Zedong did not. As Qin expanded, it took control of fertile land in strategically important areas in order to produce resources to fund state activities in those areas and facilitate further expansion. We can be sure that there were various other systems of land control, ownership, and management in areas conquered by Qin, perhaps even within Qin’s core territory. But they were not a main concern of the state and are not recorded in our sources.

By the Warring States period there were many millions of people in the Yellow River valley lowlands. Nonetheless, one of the main concerns of rulers and political theorists was how to increase their populations, which shows that there was still plenty of unfarmed arable land around. The Book of Lord Shang provides the following instructions to a ruler seeking to strengthen his state: “If the population exceeds the territory, devote yourself to opening up new land; if the territory exceeds the population, devote yourself to calling in colonists. By opening up new land, one achieves growth. If the population exceeds the territory, then the achievements of the state will be few and the military strength small; if the territory exceeds the population, then the resources of mountains and moors will not be utilized.” The more farmers, the more taxpayers and soldiers.³⁴

As noted above, early Han statutes make clear that local governments kept detailed records of individual landholdings. But Qin conquered so much land that it could not survey it. Its solution was to require people to report their landholdings to local governments, which is presumably how they made the land records discussed above. We now have a few records from Liye of how this worked. A widow petitioned to have a tract of land that was registered as “cleared grassy fields” instead registered as a mulberry orchard. Another man registered six mu of grassy fields. This is some of the clearest evidence that land could be privately owned, but there is no evidence from Qin documents that people could buy or sell it. Landowners had an incentive to register their land and pay taxes on it, because it gave them legal recognition of ownership. If they did not register it, the state encouraged others to denounce them, in which case the informers received the land themselves while the offenders lost their property and were sentenced to hard labor.³⁵

We know little about private land, but we have good records of Qin’s system of awarding land to rank-holders. The system had several benefits to the state. It created strong incentives for men to fight. It made it easier to collect taxes from commoners and to get them to do labor service. It gave commoners an avenue for advancing in life while reducing the power of aristocratic lineages that were potential rivals for agricultural surpluses. In order to do this, the system established the nuclear family as the standard landholding and tax-paying unit. This system was probably concentrated in areas of high-quality farmland and in regions of strategic military importance. It is difficult to believe that Qin was ever able to reward every man the amount of land he was entitled by his rank, a system that resembles twentieth-century authoritarian planned economies in its degree of state control. In later periods, such systems often existed in law books but not in reality. But Qin had the reputation of being a state whose “ordinances are strict and policies are carried out,” and it seems that this system actually worked in core regions under state control. Moreover, Qin was constantly conquering new areas and probably had plenty of land to distribute. Officials also used convict labor to directly farm some land.³⁶

The legal statutes excavated at Zhangjiashan date to the early Han but are clearly Qin laws, even if the Han changed some of the details. Men were granted both farmland and residential plots. The agricultural plots granted to people without rank were one qing (45,700 square meters; 11.3 acres), while those in the higher ranks, who were usually high officials, were given up to ninety-five qing (4.3 square kilometers; 1,073 acres). These laws were designed not only to reward rank-holders but probably also to limit the landholdings of the powerful. A law stipulating that those of high ranks did not pay taxes on land that they worked themselves seems to indicate that their tenants were required to pay taxes to the state. These were not fiefs from which grantees received the tax revenue for themselves, as they had been in earlier centuries. In later periods of Chinese history, aristocratic estates often managed to prevent the government from collecting taxes from their tenants, building up their own power and depriving the state of substantial tax revenue.³⁷

Ranks were not hereditary. When the head of a household died, the eldest son became the new household head, and unless he had managed to attain a rank equal to or higher than his father, he would lose some land and be forced to choose which part of his father’s land he would inherit. If sons other than the eldest had formed separate households, they could choose land from what remained. If there were no sons, a widow or daughter could inherit without losing rank. This may seem progressive but probably reflects the fact that women could not hold rank independent of male relatives. Slaves could also be freed to inherit the land. The higher a man’s rank, the more points of rank his sons would lose upon his death, which meant that the children of high-ranking officials could not inherit their fathers’ massive estates. This aimed to prevent the families of high-ranking officials from becoming a hereditary elite, one of many ideas from Shang Yang’s school that remains relevant in the modern world.³⁸

A farmer in modern China would be surprised that the minimum land grant in ancient times was eleven acres (one qing). According to studies carried out in the North China Plain in the mid-twentieth century, no more than 3 percent of the population owned this much land, while two-thirds owned less than two acres. Of course, agricultural productivity was much higher in the 1940s. According to a rhetorical passage in the Han History, written in the first century CE, each mu of land produced 1.5 shi 石 (45 kilograms) of grain, which means that a qing could produce 150 shi of unhusked grain per year. The passage states that a family of five would eat 90 of these 150 shi themselves, spend 50 on clothing, pay 15 in taxes, and donate 10 to the local altars, leaving a deficit of 15 shi even in years without funerals and extra taxes. This was a passage written to emphasize people’s poverty, so it cannot be considered a statement of fact, but it gives us a useful idea of how commoners might have spent their income. It also reveals that one qing was considered a standard plot size for centuries.³⁹

Given the centrality of the individual landholding taxpayer to Qin’s system, it is worth noting Keith Hopkins’s argument that it was precisely the monopolization of land by aristocrats and the efficiency of their large estates that increased agricultural productivity in the Roman Empire. In other words, Qin’s success in maintaining the predominance of smallholder farming may have prevented economies of scale and the division of labor that would have resulted from the formation of larger estates under the control of local elites. It therefore reduced agricultural surpluses. The fact that large plots of land granted to high-ranking men were not inherited by their sons would have had the same effect, discouraging them from establishing complex production systems. This contrasts with later periods, when central governments were weak and powerful families built large hereditary estates, such as the period between roughly 0 and 600 CE, which is often cited as the high point of agriculture in North China. Qin’s system of lending tools and oxen to farmers was a way to mitigate this.⁴⁰

Those of us accustomed to liberal capitalism and its reverence for private property are unlikely to think highly of a system in which the state constantly redistributes land based on military service. But it is important to note that this system was intended to replace privilege with meritocracy, providing a way for common farmers to gain wealth and social status. And even if it was not as productive as the Roman economy, at least it was not powered by slavery (only a small fraction of Qin’s population was enslaved). We have virtually no information on how the common people felt about the Qin state, but I suspect that the meritocratic aspects of the system may have given considerable popular legitimacy to the Qin state. At the very least, it would have created a substantial class of people who had benefitted from the system and were invested in its success.

From an environmental standpoint, the establishment of nonhereditary field systems may have reduced the connection of farmers to the land, diminishing their incentive to care for the soil. However, family members and slaves were allowed to inherit whatever portion of the land their rank entitled them to, so the system did not entirely separate people from their connection to the land. As shown in the previous chapter, satellite imagery suggests that large areas of the Guanzhong were reorganized to create standard field sizes, a classic example of a state reorganizing the environment to make it easier to administer. This system of state redistribution broke down as soon as there was a lack of available land in the Han and was revived by later dynasties, but never lasted very long. The field layout, on the other hand, has often survived to the present day.⁴¹

Human Labor

The collapse of the Qin Empire was traditionally attributed to its overexploitation of people’s labor. Evidence from excavated texts and infrastructure projects does little to dispel that impression. The power of the Qin Empire was based on its control over the labor of millions of people: it required most adult males to serve in the military and do regular labor service, and it also employed armies of convicts. These were the imperial beasts of burden. In 1860 a British officer in China wrote, “A single coolie was actually of more general value than any three baggage animals; they were easily fed, and when properly treated, most manageable.” This equation of human laborers with livestock is also clear in Qin texts, which often list humans and animals together. The ability of China’s early empires to make people work without pay stands in contrast to that of later Chinese empires, which usually paid people for their labor, though the tradition of unpaid labor was briefly revived after 1949. Qin also forced hundreds of thousands of conquered people, perhaps more, to move into regions that it wanted to become more productive.⁴²

Qin had far more control over how surplus food and labor were used throughout its domain than had earlier Chinese states. Granaries played a central role in this system because grain was collected in them and distributed from them. Granary officials also lent seed grain to farmers in the planting season. As in the other warring states, Qin’s rulers also wanted to increase their populations and would have used granaries to feed people in times of famine, though we have little evidence of this before the Han. We can guess at the important place of granaries in people’s lives by the fact that they wanted to own them in the afterlife and often buried their dead with ceramic granaries (fig. 10).⁴³

Given that the grain tax was the main source of state income and grain was required to feed statute laborers, convicts, officials, and soldiers, there must have been state granaries in most towns of any size. Some of them were enormous. During the wars that followed the fall of Qin, crucial battles were fought for the control of the Ao granary in the central Yellow River region, which suggests how much grain it must have held. The laws from Shuihudi state that 100,000 shi made one “pile” (a unit of storage) at Xianyang, while at the second capital at Yueyang one pile was 20,000 shi, and one pile was 10,000 shi elsewhere. The piles were put in separate rooms in granaries that could be sealed in order to ensure that officials were accountable for their contents. All inputs and outputs of grain were to be recorded in the granary register. Since the proper rations for each category of person and animal was fixed by law, an official was responsible for ensuring that the amount of grain entered into the granary matched the quantity of rations dispensed from it. This was possible only due to the standardization of measures across the empire.⁴⁴

Figure 10. Miniature pottery granary excavated at the First Emperor’s mausoleum.

The “Statutes on Granaries” are mostly concerned with how much grain should be distributed to different categories of workers and livestock. The following example gives an idea of the detail involved, specifying how much grain should be given to bond servants, wall builders, and grain pounders, three categories of convicts: “A male bond servant receives a ration of two bushels of grain per month, a bond-woman one and a half bushels. No rations are given to those not engaged in work. Working non-adult wall builders and bond servants receive one and a half bushels of grain per month; those not yet able to work receive one bushel of grain per month. Working non-adult bond-women and grain-pounders get one bushel and two and a half dou per month; those not yet able to work get one bushel of grain per month.” This is just an example of the distinctions made between different categories and different ages of workers. There were also rules for feeding different kinds of livestock as well as different ranks of officials and so on. In the cases of both humans and horses, extra grain was issued for particularly hard work. Local governments spent most of their income on various kinds of work projects. Of course, these granaries were also used to feed officials, as well as armies on the move, which surely required careful planning of granary stocks before campaigns. And the granaries of the capital would have issued grain to huge numbers of laborers, soldiers, livestock, and officials. As discussed in the previous chapter, the capital had a whole bureaucracy for supplying it with food.⁴⁵

Men were supposed to register once they turned eighteen and were legally required to do a month of corvée labor per year, which could be extended, but was not required every year. It was illegal in Qin for officials to conscript more than one male from a household in a given year. Corvée projects included digging ditches, canals, and irrigation works; building roads, dikes, walls, and buildings; as well as doing routine maintenance or emergency repairs on all of the above. Apart from a few records of laborers working for the office of fields at Liye, there is no evidence that Qin employed corvée laborers to do farm work, though it would not be surprising if they did, since this was done in the Han. Just as the state had detailed systems for converting different commodities into one another, it also had a system for standardizing human labor. This system graded different types of laborers and different types of work and equated units of labor to specific quantities of grain, coins, or cloth. This system allowed the administration to treat workers as interchangeable units, giving it great flexibility in how it exploited their labor.⁴⁶

The fact that adult males left to do their corvée labor service during the agricultural off-season left more work for those who remained at home. The more men were called to work on Qin’s imperial projects, such as wars of conquest, mausoleums, palaces, and the Great Wall, the more women, children, and elderly people had to do the fundamental labor upon which the whole economy was based. Not only did this cause stress and resentment, but the fact that it was so common for workers to be injured or killed while working for Qin surely also made it easier for commoners to decide to risk their lives in the uprisings that overthrew the empire.

While the Qin state enjoyed the occasional labor of most adult males, it also had the year-round labor of many convicts. Many crimes were punished with sentences of hard labor, which ranged in both duration and intensity. Moreover, central government officials seem to have realized that they gained little from cutting off people’s body parts and increasingly commuted the old mutilating punishments to fines. People who could not pay these fines had to work them off by laboring for the state at very low wages. The fines for redeeming various crimes ranged from five thousand coins for cutting off a nose to twenty-five thousand for a death sentence, but each day of work counted for only eight coins. Although this would have amounted to a life sentence for many, it was still far better than convict status. Convicts were prisoners whom the state could send where it liked, while those working off debt could get twenty days off to return home, which suggests that they did their labor near home.⁴⁷

The most important direct environmental effects of the empire were probably its local infrastructure projects. Much of the labor available to the state was used at the local level to carry out routine construction and maintenance of roads, bridges, walls, dikes, dams, and canals. For example, the Qin “Statute on Agriculture” from 309 BCE, discussed in the previous chapter, reads: “In the eighth month repair the marker mounds and partitions, fix the boundaries and field-limits, and cut the tall plants on the paths and lanes. In the ninth month do a great clearing of roads and dangerous sloping passages. In the tenth month, build bridges, repair dikes and dams, and ensure the smooth flow of water through fords and ditches.” The autumn was the time for repairs because it followed the rainy season. The eighth month’s duties concern the maintenance of the system of standard fields, paths, and lanes of the official field system. Roads and waterways were maintained in the next two months. The subsequent passage commands that roads be repaired whenever necessary, and the same was done with walls when necessary. These statutes were incorporated into early Han law.⁴⁸

The improvement of transportation networks usually has substantial environmental effects, especially on areas that were previously inaccessible. Improved road networks shrink space, allowing the movement of commodities and people at lower cost over longer distances. Large bridges are precisely the kind of infrastructure that states can build and smaller-level societies cannot. This is also true of canals, of which Qin conquered several and built at least one. The Honggou and Luyangguan Canals linked the Yangzi and Yellow River systems, facilitating the north-south movement of goods. In the south, Qin had the Ling Canal built to connect the Xiang River, a tributary of the Yangzi, to a tributary of the Pearl River system. These canals made it possible, at least in theory, to navigate a boat on inland waterways all the way from the Yellow River to the ocean at Guangzhou.⁴⁹

Maintaining canals was just one of the routine infrastructure works related to water. Qin built and maintained irrigation systems to provide water to farmland and constructed dikes to keep water out of low-lying land. In addition to the routine annual works mentioned in the passage above, the early Han statutes from Zhangjiashan refer to annual chores of dredging artificial ponds and managing ditches and canals. Small-scale irrigation was probably in widespread use at this time, and it is clear that Qin and other early states built and maintained many smaller-scale water control works that are rarely mentioned in early texts. The Han Empire had Offices of Waters in various branches of government that managed canals, dikes, sluice gates, and bridges. The Han-era Ministry of Finance was responsible for the Offices of Waters throughout the empire, which suggests that they collected taxes on fish and other products of lakes, rivers, and wetlands. Qin would also have had officials with expertise in water control, but we do not know if it had its own Offices of Waters. Qin’s water projects not only altered the hydrology of the landscape; they also helped establish a culture of water control that has remained important in Chinese political culture ever since.⁵⁰

While the small-scale works probably had a much greater environmental impact, megaprojects were more complicated because they required that huge numbers of laborers be concentrated together. These projects, like the Zheng Guo Canal we discussed in the previous chapter, are classic examples of environmental transformations that could be achieved only by a powerful state. The most infamous megaprojects were the huge palaces and the First Emperor’s mausoleum, all of which were built in the Guanzhong and were intended to impress the beholder. The foundations of the unfinished Epang Palace are still enormous, even though nothing remains but dirt. The First Emperor’s tomb is large enough to be mistaken for a natural hill (fig. 11). It is just one part of the mausoleum complex that measures fifty square kilometers and also includes the six thousand warriors and five hundred horses of the life-sized terracotta army. It is easily the largest tomb ever built in East Asia and is “probably the largest burial complex of a single ruler ever to have been constructed anywhere in the world.” Sima Qian states that Qin assigned seven hundred thousand convicts to build these palaces and his mausoleum. He also writes that the Qin First Emperor moved the ruling families of the kingdoms he conquered into the capital region and built palaces for them.⁵¹

Figure 11. The Qin First Emperor’s tomb mound.

After Qin conquered all the other Zhou states, it continued its aggression by attacking the pastoral peoples in the Ordos region to the north and then building a wall across the northern edges of its domain to delineate territory and defend itself from revenge attacks. This was the first “Great Wall,” and although it included sections that already existed, much of it was new and was built remarkably quickly. The extension of a wall across the ecotone dividing the cold, arid interior from the wetter areas to the south must have been a disaster for wild animals such as gazelles, aurochs, deer, and horses, for whom the ability to move in search of grazing land and away from deep snow could mean the difference between life and death. This is one of the earliest examples of the division of animals’ ranges by large-scale anthropogenic structures that now plague many species.⁵²

Those who had lived through the fall of Qin believed that these megaprojects had been a major cause of the uprisings that toppled Qin because they turned the people against the state. This view has been questioned by Western scholars, who suspected that this depiction of Qin brutality was merely Han dynasty propaganda or that the accounts of the First Emperor were actually veiled critiques of later rulers. However, the more evidence we have on Qin, the more the traditional view seems correct. For example, research on Qin’s Straight Road has shown that it was vastly larger than was needed for transportation. Archaeology seems to verify Sima Qian’s description: “In my travels I saw the Long Wall and fortifications that Meng Tian built for Qin, cutting through mountains and filling up valleys to open up the Straight Road. He indeed treated the people’s labor lightly.”⁵³

Animals

Historians traditionally analyzed human societies as though they were composed only of people, but it has recently become apparent that we have always lived in communities composed of many species. Our bodies contain huge numbers of archaea, bacteria, fungi, and viruses, and most human communities also include arthropods such as lice, dust mites, fleas, and agricultural pests. Agricultural communities are often home to animals such as sparrows, pigeons, mice, rats, and many other beneficiaries of the concentrated energy of farm fields. One reason people keep dogs and cats it to fight off these animals. Our relationships with other species range from those of mutual benefit to those in which one side is parasitic to the other. The few species that people keep on purpose tend to occupy a central place in their diets, economies, and social lives. Only a few of the many species in agricultural communities were of interest to the state. The most important were horses and cattle.

There was a general trend in the lowlands of North China toward increasing population density, which reduced people’s ability to keep livestock and to eat meat. Grazers such as cattle, sheep, and horses require open land for food, so they tended to get crowded out over time. In contrast, dogs, chickens, and pigs could live in villages by foraging for their own food and eating human rubbish, so they tended to become the main domesticated animals. We know that some granary officials raised pigs and chickens because of a statute specifying that granaries could keep funds raised when its employees sold them. But the state does not seem to have found a way to tax these animals, which remained outside of the political economy. An instructional legal text unearthed at Shuihudi includes a variety of examples about the theft of cattle and sheep or goats (both yang 羊), which suggests that this was not uncommon. There is only one record of horse theft.⁵⁴

In the arid North, pastoralists kept large herds of sheep, cattle, and horses, and Qin probably found ways to tax them. Sima Qian cited the herds of northern pastoralists as among the riches of the Han Empire and described parts of modern Shanxi and Hebei as particularly rich in horses, cattle, and sheep. Qin territory included large areas of the Loess Plateau that were ideal for herding, and we can assume that people there paid taxes or tribute in livestock. The tombs of people presumed to have been nomadic pastoralists have also been discovered in that region, and these people may well have been Qin subjects who provided the empire with livestock and possibly served in its armies. However, most of our evidence concerns oxen and horses owned by government offices across the empire.⁵⁵

Cattle were kept for plowing and pulling carts, while horses seem to have been used mainly for nonagricultural work such as pulling vehicles and carrying messengers. An official of a rival state cited the availability of oxen as one of the things that made Qin powerful. Various types of officials were granted cattle and carriages, which explains why taking care of cattle seems to have been a common responsibility of local officials. Statute laborers had to build and repair the walls of the state-owned horse and cattle parks. The straw and hay tax mentioned above probably provided for the horses and oxen of the military and government offices. Government offices provided hay and even grain to carriage horses and draft oxen based on their ages and what kinds of work they did. Hay and straw were enough for most livestock, but horses of the courier service and others doing hard work were also fed grain and beans, and cows were given grain rations for fifteen days after giving birth.⁵⁶

According to the “Statutes on Stables and Parks,” oxen were evaluated four times a year. If they had lost girth, those responsible were punished. If they were healthy, the overseer of fields was awarded a jar of wine and a bundle of dried meat, and the corral keepers and cattle men were also rewarded. Officials were fined if too few of their cows and sheep or goats gave birth. They were allowed to lend their cattle and vehicles out to people for their private use, but the lender was responsible for their condition when they were returned. We have no idea how widespread this was. Government officials were also permitted to use state cattle and carts to transport monthly rations for themselves and their livestock, a rule that may have been intended to clarify that they should not use them for other purposes.⁵⁷

In contrast to valuable but unexciting cattle, horses were symbols of wealth and power, the tanks and sports cars of the premodern world. As described in the previous chapter, Qin’s horses were a source of its strength throughout its history. Because they were essential for warfare and transportation, various branches of government raised them. The Ministry of Transport required many horses and must have had plenty of stables. It must also have managed large areas of pasture for breeding and feeding horses, much of it presumably in the Loess Plateau to the north and northwest of the Guanzhong. There were strict controls on the movement of horses into and out of the capital region. Impressions of the seals of Qin officials discovered in Qin palaces included those of various officials with duties related to horses and stables. The Han History lists some of these as officials who worked with the horses of the Ministries of the Palace Guards and Transport. Early Han statutes list the Office of Cavalry and Chariots at the same rank as ministers, something they may have inherited from Qin. Horses were important.⁵⁸

The “Statutes on Stables and Parks” lay out the standards for accepting new horses, but we do not know where these horses came from. A county’s Controller of Horses as well as the Magistrate and his assistant were all fined if they sent horses that were unacceptable for military use, and we can surmise that certain counties specialized in raising horses for the state. Northern pastoralists may also have been taxed in horses, and perhaps also sold them to the state. There were also laws on the evaluation of horses that were already in use. The officials fined for unacceptable horses were the Overseers of Stables and Corrals. We can be sure that horses and oxen were also used in state-owned workshops and for extracting resources such as timber and metals.⁵⁹

Timber and Metal

As described in chapter 3, the Warring States period saw rival powers build up their strength by taking control of forests, wetlands, and mines and appointing officials to manage and tax them. At that time, the smaller states in the middle Yellow River valley had an advantage in their dense populations, from which they were able to mobilize a lot of grain and labor, but they did not necessarily have many other resources. Larger states like Qin and Chu may not have had such dense populations to draw on, but they had more forests and minerals. Qin officials focused their attention on land and people not only because they were at the core of political power but also because they did not lack other resources. Qin controlled extensive mountainous regions and directly operated mining, logging, and salt production operations.

Discourses of resource scarcity in this period were often connected to governance. Our earliest written evidence of the overexploitation of resources in China comes from the arguments of Warring States philosophers on the need for the protection of wild resources. This is interesting both because it is a clear example of the positive benefit of a strong state and because these ideas were originally proposed by philosophers as something that a good state should do. This moral argument reminds us that state regulation was both a way of controlling and extracting valuable resources and a way of conserving them for the long-term benefit of the state and its subjects, early examples of environmental protection legislation.⁶⁰

Early Chinese texts contain many references to officials who managed and collected taxes on forests and wetlands. The utopian Offices of Zhou describes officers in charge of mountains, forests, rivers, and wetlands who were responsible for regulating hunting and fishing and providing animals and fish for sacrifices. Likewise, the Annals of Lü Buwei record that in the spring “the foresters enter the mountains and make a tour of inspection to see that the trees have not been felled or trimmed.” Xunzi explains that “the duties of the master of forests and game are to prepare rules for burning, to care for the resources of the mountain forests, the lakes, and the marshes, such as the grasses and the trees, the fish and the turtles, and the hundred other edibles, opening and closing them according to the season so the state will have enough to satisfy its needs and raw materials and resources will not be depleted.” Qin’s Chancellor Li Si was probably quite familiar with these arguments, having studied with Xunzi, and we can be sure that Qin had these kinds of officials.⁶¹

Qin eventually enacted a statute to preserve natural resources that was clearly influenced by earlier arguments about preserving resources:

In the second month of spring one should not venture to cut timber in mountain forests or dike water courses. Except in the months of summer one should not venture to burn weeds to make ashes, to collect [indigo], young animals, eggs or fledglings. One should not . . . poison fish or tortoises or arrange pitfalls and nets. By the seventh month these prohibitions are lifted. . . . In settlements close to corrals and other forbidden parks, in the season of young animals one should not venture to take dogs to go hunting.

This reveals that Qin had officials in charge of managing forests and wetlands whose biggest issues were fires, illegal tree felling, and the indiscriminate exploitation of wild animal populations. Firewood collection and charcoal production surely had a significant impact on forests. It is unclear how successful Qin was at implementing its forest and wetland protection laws. I suspect that these laws were enforced in the forests and wetlands in the core regions of Qin power but had little influence in most parts of the empire. The forbidden parks referred to in the last sentence were imperial parks, and fragmentary statutes have been excavated from other tombs that concern their regulation.⁶²

Industries like ceramic and metal production burned a lot of wood. As we discussed in the previous chapter, Qin’s capital at Xianyang had workshops. The state must have operated others around the empire, especially for producing military equipment. Given that private merchants also operated kilns and forges and dealt in forest products like timber and bamboo, we can be sure that state regulations were also aimed at managing commercial use. Unfortunately, we have little written information on the production of ceramics and metals in Qin. Excavated texts discuss coinage and metal goods but very rarely mention mining or smelting. Metals were strategically important to the state because they were needed for the military. The main metals in this period were bronze (an alloy of copper, tin, and lead) and iron or steel. Metalsmiths at this time were skilled with both bronze and iron, but many key innovations in iron production occurred only in the Han period, so bronze remained a key metal. We do not know where Qin obtained most of its metals. There were sources of copper, tin, and lead in the north, but much more in the south, and Qin’s conquest of Chu territory in the middle Yangzi probably gave it control over copper mines. Qin also had private entrepreneurs produce metals in conquered territories such as Sichuan, and it had mines worked by convict and corvée laborers.⁶³

Iron ore is so widespread that the limitation on premodern iron production was the large amount of wood required to smelt it. By the third century BCE, the iron works in the various Zhou kingdoms were among the most advanced in the world in terms of technology and organization, and it was in that period that iron tools began to be widely available. These were mostly metal tips or blades that were mounted on the ends of wooden tools such as picks, plows, spades, hoes, rakes, and harvesting knives. Although iron tools dating to the Warring States period have been excavated across North China, few iron workshops have been found, while almost sixty such facilities from the Han have been excavated, which suggests that the large-scale production of metal farm implements began after the fall of Qin. One could argue that it was only then that China’s Bronze Age ended. Although state control of salt and iron has traditionally been considered an innovation of the Han dynasty, excavated documents and seal impressions reveal that it originated with Qin. Salt was evaporated from salt water in several places. One of these was along the coast, another was a large salt lake in southern Shanxi, and it was also produced from underground brine in Sichuan.⁶⁴

Wood was not only the main source of fuel but also the main material for making daily-use goods from hoes to wagons to buildings. It was therefore even more important to the Qin state than metal, though easier to obtain. The mountains to the south and west of the Guanzhong were forested, so we can be sure that Qin people had always cut timber there. As Qin expanded south of the Qinling, it found itself in areas with abundant forests. However, wood from the mountains was far too expensive to transport north except for the high-quality timber used to build Qin palaces. A recently discovered statute reveals that Qin used convict laborers to log the forests of the upper Han River valley. It is not surprising that Qin managed such operations directly, but this is the first clear evidence of it.⁶⁵

The most interesting evidence of Qin’s logging comes from maps drawn on wood that were excavated from a tomb at Fangmatan, Gansu, in the mountains of the upper Wei River valley (fig. 12). These maps seem to have been made by the state to survey forest resources in the early–middle third century BCE. Appropriately enough, they were discovered at a modern logging station in a mountainous and forested region of Gansu that has been logged on and off for over two millennia. Because it is upstream of the Guanzhong, logs could be floated down the Wei River into the Qin capital region, making it a more practical source of timber than the high Qinling Mountains south of the capital, though these were probably also logged. We know from at least two early texts that floating logs downstream from the mountains was a common practice. The fact that the logging frontier had arrived in this relatively remote area suggests that the good timber had already been cut in more accessible regions. Forests closer to settlements were also less likely to produce good timber because people cut trees for firewood before they grew large, and browsing livestock prevented forest regrowth.⁶⁶

Figure 12. A map on pine wood excavated from a tomb at Fangmatan, Gansu. Most of the lines depict waterways. The straighter line running down the middle probably depicts a road, and the two black marks indicate a mountain pass.

The maps are structured around the network of waterways. Given the mountainous terrain of the region, the mapped waterways also provide a general idea of the layout of the mountain ridges. The maps include the names of larger towns and villages, streams and gullies, and mountain passes; various descriptions of stands of trees and distances to reach them. One of them depicts a road. There are several mentions of pine, one of paulownia, and also a place called “poplar gorge,” but several other wood-related words are either unknown or ambiguous. For example, one reads, “large pine poles” (da song kan 大松刊) and two or three others have variations on the phrase “pine poles for 20 li” (a li was roughly five hundred meters). But the word kan 刊, which seems to be a noun and probably means “poles” or “tree trunks” (gan 竿), could also mean “cut down.” So these maps could have recorded timber already cut or timber yet to be cut. In any case, we can be sure that Qin used a lot of timber, and there is nothing surprising about either the scale of the logging done or the location of these operations upstream from the Guanzhong.⁶⁷

Scholars generally assume that the Fangmatan maps were produced by and for the state since maps were commonly used by administrators in the period and were associated with political power, so it is unlikely that anyone outside of government service would have been allowed to produce such maps. I would guess that Qin had offices devoted specifically to logging this region and providing timber to the state. It is equally likely that these were private logging operations that officials monitored and taxed. As noted above, states in this period kept maps and other records of resources, of which forests with quality timber would have been among the most valuable. We can be sure that these maps are a chance discovery of a resource extraction operation that probably had parallels throughout the empire, and we can hope that more such documents will come to light and tell us more about the state management of forests and wetlands.

After the First Emperor died in 210 BCE, palace insiders enthroned a prince whom they knew they could manipulate, and a few years later an uprising toppled the dynasty. It arose in Chu territory, was mostly led by Chu men, and after a few years of large-scale war saw the rise of the Han dynasty, which was in many ways a rebirth of Qin with an aristocracy from Chu. Its patriarch, Liu Bang, had formerly worked for Qin, and when he founded his own empire, he largely rebuilt its administration. He did not return to the east but rather established his capital in Qin’s royal palace area south of the Wei River. The capital was called Chang’an, “long-lasting peace,” and the four centuries of the Han Empire were indeed relatively peaceful for the people of its core regions, especially when compared with preceding centuries. The Han abandoned some aspects of Qin’s system, especially its tight control over land and human labor, but kept many of its administrative structures and practices. Since Qin had been the closest of the Zhou kingdoms to Inner Asia for many centuries and the people of Shaanxi continued to be called “Qin” people long after the fall of the Qin Empire, Inner Asians used that word to refer to China. From their languages it spread across Eurasia and eventually became the standard word for China across much the world.

The traditional explanation of Qin’s collapse is that its heavy taxation and labor requirements caused dissatisfaction so profound that the people were easily convinced to rebel. The Qin Empire was formed through constant warfare, but when peace arrived it did not reduce the empire’s extraction efforts but remained a war economy. People across the subcontinent had feared Qin for generations but could have accustomed themselves to Qin rule if it had brought peace and prosperity instead of continued exploitation. By continuing to use people’s labor to conquer land and build megaprojects, Qin made clear that its empire would not end war and make life better, and thus prompted its people to revolt. The contrast with the Roman Empire, which reduced taxes in some conquered regions, supports this argument.⁶⁸

Although some scholars have questioned the idea that Qin exploited its subjects to the point of rebellion, I see no reason to doubt it. It is quite possible that the uprisings that overthrew the empire would have failed if a competent ruler had sat on the throne. Nonetheless, the fact that a seemingly all-powerful empire that had recently defeated several mighty rivals was overthrown by rebels tells us a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the empire. Given the ecological focus of this chapter, I must emphasize that Qin’s collapse was not due to overexploitation of the environment but was due only to its harsh treatment of its people. Qin tried to build a political system that required too much of the economy’s surpluses. The more resources that were devoted to expanding the size of the bureaucracy to improve taxation, the more of the surplus was used just to collect it. This is why most premodern states maintained a low level of extraction and a relatively small state structure instead of trying to collect as much as they could. Qin’s collapse proves the wisdom of this strategy.⁶⁹

But Qin did not really fail. Its political system was quickly resurrected and allowed the Chinese-speaking peoples to conquer and colonize much of the subcontinent. By providing a stable, long-lasting structure promoting the expansion of agriculture and the increase of population, it played an enormous role in the replacement of most natural ecosystems of lowland East Asia with farms. This history will be explored in chapter 6.

CHAPTER SIX

A Hundred Generations

How China’s Empires Shaped Their Environments

Qin’s ancestral dragon gave up his ghost, but Qin is still here.

Confucianism is just worthless chaff, despite its good reputation.

While a hundred generations have all used Qin’s governance methods.

—MAO ZEDONG, 1973

THE QIN EMPIRE COLLAPSED in 207 BCE, but its centralized bureaucratic model of governance has been passed down to the present, helping societies across East Asia domesticate their landscapes. Over the subsequent twenty-two centuries China has been ruled by many dynasties and various ethnic groups, but all of them shared Qin’s commitment to the expansion of taxable agriculture at the expense of natural ecosystems. Across East Asia, states drew on the political tradition of the Qin and Han Empires to homogenize the ecology of the regions under their control. They also worked to homogenize their populations, preferring their subjects to be farmers and herders who produced reliable tax income and shared the values promoted by the state. Ruling elites have tended to proclaim their allegiance to the respectable ideology of Confucianism but, as Mao suggested in the poem quoted above, they employed administrative methods that originated with the notorious Qin Empire. In this chapter I will briefly review how states and empires first formed in China, and then discuss the ways in which Qin’s successors have transformed their environments.

The roots of political organizations can be traced to the Stone Age. By domesticating plants and animals, people became capable of building their own ecosystems. These produced far more food and resources than foraging could and allowed humans to live at higher densities. As agricultural systems improved, so did the amount of surplus each farming family was capable of producing, and this made possible the growth of increasingly complex sociopolitical organizations. As states grew and administrative methods improved, political elites gained more control over how land and labor were used. Because agrarian states depended almost entirely on surplus agricultural production and labor, they had a fundamental interest in replacing natural ecosystems with agricultural ones.

Agriculture began in East Asia at least eight thousand years ago with the gradual domestication of millets, rice, dogs, and pigs. A few millennia later, domesticated sheep, cattle, and horses arrived from Central Asia, allowing people to exploit grasslands and arid places. Farther north, these domesticated animals made possible mobile lifestyles based around pastoralism. Pastoral nomadism turned Inner Asian herders into the most powerful military force in Eurasia, which they remained for two millennia. Meanwhile, settled farmers in the Yellow and Yangzi valleys domesticated a variety of fruit trees, vegetables and textile plants, and continuously worked to improve the productivity and hardiness of their crops and animals. Just as it took thousands of years for farmers to breed manageable plants and animals, state structures also evolved gradually. Administrative and ideological systems were gradually developed to the point at which the majority of the people acknowledged the dominance of a few and provided them with their surplus production and labor. In both cases, being domesticated allowed the species concerned to expand enormously.

This was not a simple trajectory. Neolithic people had many subsistence options and could vary them depending on the availability of wild food and the state of the harvests. But over the millennia there was a clear trend toward increased reliance on domesticated plants and animals. There was also a trend toward increasing social complexity, most famously in the development of cities and states in the middle Yellow River valley during the third and second millennia BCE. These Bronze Age states were made possible partly by the arrival of horses, chariots, and bronze weapons, which gave the elite new advantages over commoners. The Erligang state, which flourished around 1500 BCE, was vastly more powerful than any previous polity in East Asian history. Its influence extended hundreds of kilometers in every direction. The subsequent Shang dynasty, the first from which we have written evidence, received resources from various allied or conquered polities across a large swath of the Yellow River valley. In 1046 BCE, the Zhou alliance conquered the Shang and adopted many of their technologies, such as writing. The Zhou installed their kin and allies in a network of garrison towns that stretched across the middle and lower Yellow River valley. They maintained peace for almost three centuries, greatly facilitating the expansion of agricultural societies.

In 771 BCE, the Zhou ruling house was defeated and fled eastward to Luoyang, where it hung on, weakened, for five more centuries. The fall of the Zhou kings left a power vacuum in which dozens of polities competed for subjects and territory. Larger states gradually swallowed up smaller ones, and eventually a stable international system developed with established protocols of diplomacy. As they conquered more land and people, states had to develop administrative mechanisms to control them. The threat from rival states forced them to find new ways to extract revenue and labor from their subjects to support their growing war machines. Not only did they extract more from common farmers; they also took over forests and wetlands that had previously been communal resources. By the third century BCE, central governments had developed bureaucracies sophisticated enough to administer large territories that were home to millions of people. Their centralized political systems gave them the ability to manage the ecologies of their domains much more intensively than earlier states could.

Of all these states, it was Qin that prevailed. The Qin state was characterized from early times by its military strength and by its powerful royal house. It rarely played a central role in the affairs of the Zhou states during its early centuries, focusing instead on consolidating its control over the Guanzhong Basin and surrounding regions. But in the fourth century, under a succession of aggressive rulers, Qin moved its capital eastward to face the other warring states and enacted state-strengthening reforms. The radical reforms, most famously those undertaken by Shang Yang, aimed to make agriculture and war the two main routes to socioeconomic success, replacing aristocratic pedigree. Qin’s government did this by establishing a ranking system based on military service and awarding men with plots of land commensurate in size with their rank. This required reorganizing agricultural landscapes to facilitate land redistribution. Shang Yang also standardized governance through the use of laws and regulations. At the height of its power in the mid-third century BCE, the Qin state had a remarkable degree of control over people and land for an ancient state. It collected large amounts of grain taxes and used them to feed the armies of unpaid laborers and convicts who built and maintained its infrastructure. Qin squandered a lot of these surpluses on megaprojects and wars of conquest, but many others were used to expand transportation and agriculture infrastructure. It built a network of roads and bridges, facilitating the movement of colonists into conquered regions and resources out of them. It modified water systems to expand and improve agriculture, bringing water to crops in drier areas and keeping it out of flood-prone ones. But the Qin Empire overextended itself and was overthrown in a bloody uprising.

Although Qin collapsed, its system was quickly rebuilt by the Han Empire, which was founded in 202 BCE. Over four centuries, the Han Empire reconquered the territory once controlled by the Qin Empire, consolidated its grip over it, and conquered further. In contrast to Qin’s command economy, which had extracted as much as it could from a network of strategically important areas, the Han Empire fixed its tax rates at low levels. This does not mean that farmers actually paid lower taxes but that the central government left more of the surplus to be taken by local elites, giving them a strong incentive to support the imperial system. This alliance between central and local power structures relinquished some of the central control of Qin’s system but made the system politically sustainable. Qin-style command economies have been resurrected several times in Chinese history, most recently under Mao Zedong, but the Han model of low central government taxation was the improvement on the Qin model that allowed the imperial system to endure for two millennia. Qin’s centralized bureaucratic model was not only adopted by subsequent states within China; it also influenced most surrounding states in East and Inner Asia. This centralized bureaucratic system has been so vital to the creation of the cultural and political entity that we call China that it is fitting that the word “China” derives from “Qin.”¹

It is important not to overemphasize the power of Chinese empires. Like most large agrarian states, they tended to be very weak at the local level, with very little influence over people’s lives. Most of the time local officials did very little to modify the environments of the areas they administered. But over the long term they played an important role in maintaining and expanding the agricultural ecosystems that supported them. They maintained peace over large areas for centuries at a time, permitting the population to multiply. They conquered neighboring regions and encouraged migration into them. They helped build and maintain water control infrastructure. And they encouraged any kind of economic activity that they could tax. What distinguishes the Chinese empires from others in world history is not so much their power as their continuity. Their governing techniques were passed down over two millennia, allowing rulers to repeatedly rebuild similar administrative systems after previous ones had failed. It was their ability to reincarnate themselves and adapt to changing circumstances that allowed China’s empires to play a key role in reorganizing the ecology of the subcontinent.

Peace was the most environmentally destructive achievement of the Chinese empires. We tend to think of war as being unusually destructive, but once people stop fighting each other they often focus their attention on attacking the nonhuman world. As this book has shown, military competition played an important role in forcing states to improve their administrative machinery. But when the wars ended and the empires were established, they maintained peace over large areas for centuries. This allowed people to multiply and to clear more land for farming. While smaller political units, such as those of the Warring States, often exploited their territory more intensively than did large empires, the latter opened huge areas to enterprising farmers, often encouraging them to clear land with tax incentives. As good land became scarce in core agricultural regions, people cleared marginal mountainous or waterlogged land. Others moved into conquered regions far from home in search of land. Peace even encouraged people to colonize land illegally, though it was precisely state-enforced stability that made it safe for them to do so. Peace also facilitated commerce, allowing the invisible hand of the market to reach out across the subcontinent and grab anything it could sell for a profit elsewhere.²

Agricultural ecosystems tend to be much simpler than wild ones. They often rely on a small number of species that are vulnerable to droughts, pests, and other disasters. States served to manage these simplified ecosystems, buffering against bad harvests and working to keep the population sufficiently productive to pay taxes. Granaries were key organs in the metabolism of the Qin Empire, which used them to feed their armies and to help hungry farmers. This tradition continued throughout the imperial period and played an important role in helping the Chinese population become one of the densest in the world.³

States maintained the stability not only of agricultural systems but also of most other aspects of the economy. They thus played an important role in stimulating economic growth, which means increasing the human impact on the environment. In Richard von Glahn’s words, “The Chinese imperial state galvanized economic growth by providing domestic peace, international security and investment in public goods—education, welfare, transport systems, water control, and standardized market institutions—as well as creating an institutional infrastructure that enabled Smithian growth in agriculture and commerce. The state’s role in creating demand (including war-making) also figured significantly in stimulating economic development.” This institutional infrastructure included minting coins, regulating markets, and lending farmers seed grain to help them pay their taxes and undercut merchants who sought to exploit their desperation. Even in recent centuries, when the commitment of the Ming and Qing Empires to low taxation left them with a much weaker ability to foster economic growth than their more proactive contemporaries in Europe, states remained a key factor in the economy.⁴

Another key result of the continuity of empires over two millennia, something that would never have occurred without them, was the creation across the subcontinent of a single cultural-linguistic group. When the imperial system was founded, the Yangzi valley and regions farther south were home to a wide variety of languages and cultures. The spread of people speaking Sinitic languages was backed by the military power of the empires, which conquered new territories and held them for centuries, crushing the occasional uprising and promoting policies that led gradually toward assimilation. Chinese settlers tended to prefer fertile lowland areas, leaving the mountains to the natives, who were usually governed lightly if at all. Fully two millennia after the Qin Empire conquered the Pearl River Delta, the surrounding mountains were still home to non-Chinese ethnic groups. Like colonization elsewhere, Chinese expansion was a process of cultural hybridization in which colonizers intermarried with local people and adopted many of their customs. But the empires tended to promote the classical Chinese cultural heritage and the adoption of Chinese names. This created a classic colonial dynamic in which it was more prestigious to be associated with the metropolitan culture, so people tended to underplay their indigenous roots. The result was that most of the people in mainland East Asia became Chinese-speaking farmers, a fact not diminished by the subsequent diversification of Chinese languages in the southeast. The spread of the Chinese-speaking peoples tended to involve the intensification of agriculture, not least because it was accompanied by a state that required farmers to produce surpluses to pay their taxes with.⁵

The military homogenization of East Asia’s cultural groups began at least as early as 1500 BCE, when the Erligang culture expanded outward from the Central Plains. It continued under the Shang. In the eleventh century BCE, the Western Zhou conquered a multiethnic Yellow River valley, founding an alliance that lasted for eight centuries and played an important role in homogenizing the population. By the time of Confucius (d. 479 BCE) the Zhou states had destroyed most of the polities of non-Zhou peoples (whom they referred to as Rong, Di, and Yi), and by the time of the Han Empire these peoples had mostly been assimilated, making the Yellow River valley among the most culturally homogeneous regions in the ancient world. In the south, the state of Chu conquered and colonized the lowlands of the central Yangzi River valley, and Qin did the same in the Sichuan Basin. After Qin founded the empire, its armies followed the river valleys south of the Yangzi and established garrisons in the distant deltas of the Min and Pearl Rivers, locations of the modern cities of Fuzhou and Guangzhou. Qin developed some conquered regions by moving tens of thousands of people into them.

The Han Empire established firm control over most of the areas previously occupied by the Qin Empire. It also conquered southward into Yunnan and the fertile Red River Delta (northern Vietnam), eastward into the Korean peninsula, and westward far into Central Asia. Despite this reach, its population was concentrated in the fertile plains of North China and Sichuan. During and after the Han, states and empires extended roads and administrative control into remote areas and encouraged subjects from core regions of the empire to migrate there. Following Qin precedent, they sometimes moved large numbers of people into areas where they wanted reliable taxpaying subjects. They used soldiers to farm newly conquered areas or those depopulated by war. Even when other groups conquered China, they tended to further the expansion of the Chinese agrarian order. For example, Kublai Khan’s conquest of Yunnan in 1253 CE was merely a flanking maneuver to conquer the Song dynasty, but it permanently opened upland Southeast Asia to Chinese colonization. In the eighteenth century the Manchu Qing Empire accelerated the assimilationist project in this region by encouraging the children of indigenous elites to study Chinese, not Manchu. Perhaps the best example of the power of the imperial governance system can be seen in Korea and Vietnam, provinces of the early Chinese empires that managed to gain independence. Like many former colonies, they adopted governance methods of their former rulers and used them to avoid becoming provinces of subsequent Chinese empires. Japan’s early states were also modeled explicitly on China’s. The adoption of Chinese governance models usually involved increased state control over environments.⁶

While rulers like the Qin First Emperor conquered to satisfy their megalomania, most empires conquered to achieve economic and strategic goals that were quite rational from the perspective of central government officials. They tended to focus their conquests on good farmland since populated arable land was the best source of tax revenue. Over time, states gradually extended their control into the mountains, not least by regulating and taxing silviculture, which slowly replaced most of the natural forests of South China over the last millennium. Metals were another draw. Rulers wanted conquered territories to cover the costs of administering themselves as soon as possible, often by importing farmers who spoke their language and were accustomed to paying taxes and serving in the army. These loyal subjects often received the best land in the fertile river valleys, leaving the conquered to take what was left or flee into mountainous terrain outside state control. States have now conquered these areas and have often forced once-mobile peoples to settle down in fixed locations where they are easier to control.⁷

Arable land was the main prize in the conquest of the south, but to the north and west Chinese empires often found themselves on the defensive against nomadic pastoralists. While they did extract resources such as furs and livestock from these areas when they could, the main reason to conquer such areas was to keep control over the dangerous nomadic peoples there. This is why the Han, Tang, and Qing Empires conquered Xinjiang and why the Qing conquered Tibet. Even when agrarian empires managed to conquer these vast regions, they found them mostly too dry to be farmed, which made it impossible to settle enough taxpaying subjects there to repay the cost of administering them. Because of this, empires held onto these regions as long as they could afford the military expenses of doing so, and then lost control of them when they could not. The failure of premodern Chinese empires to permanently assimilate Inner Asia makes clear that agriculture was the key to the long-term expansion of the Chinese-language political order. The current government’s emphasis on Chinese immigration and cultural assimilation in these regions is based on its understanding of this dynamic and is intended to ensure that these areas remain culturally Chinese even if Beijing loses control of them. Incidentally, the geopolitical importance of the steppe also explains why rulers of various ethnicities repeatedly chose Beijing—on the boundary between steppe and sown—as an imperial capital.⁸

In both old population centers and newly conquered lands, states consistently promoted agricultural expansion and intensification. Passive incentives for expanding farmland, such as tax cuts for newly cleared land, were occasionally combined with significant state expenditures on other projects intended to create stable agriculture and promote more intensive agriculture. Water control was often a key factor. In places where waterways would naturally move around, such as seasonal wetlands or alluvial plains, states built dikes to keep them in one place so the rest could be farmed. In areas where water was scarce or unreliable, they built irrigation systems to water crops. Since water transport is far more efficient than transport over land, they also built canals and reworked natural waterways to facilitate transport. There are now no waterways of any size in China that have not been dammed, and the hydraulic systems in core agricultural regions have been totally reorganized.

The most famous water control projects in Chinese history have been the large dikes built to keep the Yellow River in a single channel. The North China Plain is the enormous alluvial plain of the Yellow and Huai Rivers, which under natural conditions would migrate freely across it, regularly changing course during floods. States spent heavily to keep the Yellow River in a predictable course because the North China Plain was the most populated and productive region for much of China’s history. It would have been impossible for people to convert the entire plain into farmland without the enormous concentration of labor and resources that successive states were able to mobilize to contain the river. States also built and maintained huge dikes on the Yangzi, which was essential for the colonization of the fertile lowlands of the Yangzi River valley. States have therefore played a key role in replacing the diverse wetlands of that region with rice paddies. This effort was considered worthwhile because rice produces more surplus per area than other crops. The rice surpluses of the lower Yangzi led subsequent empires to build the Grand Canal to ship them northward. This required the re-engineering of the hydrology of large areas of the North China Plain. The importance of states in maintaining these systems is clear from the cycles in which water systems broke down during times of turmoil and were then rebuilt by newly established empires.⁹

While most historical records concern larger water works, the smaller ones were at least as significant because they were much more widespread. As we discussed in the previous chapter, the Qin Empire employed the unpaid labor and tax grain of its subjects to build and maintain waterways of various kinds across the empire. The Han dynasty and its successors continued to maintain water control infrastructure at the local level. Excavated documents fortuitously preserved at two different sites in the Central Yangzi region reveal how state officials surveyed damaged dikes and irrigation reservoirs with the aim of repairing them. In later times, these smaller-scale water projects were more often undertaken by wealthy families or religious institutions, often with state backing, while the government focused on large-scale infrastructure.¹⁰

Apart from water control, states also occasionally encouraged farmers to increase their productivity by providing them with new crops or by publishing agricultural knowledge. There is a long tradition in China of agricultural manuals written to teach people improved methods of producing food and textiles. Some of these were written at the behest of the government, while others were privately written by officials for the same ends and were thus indirectly state-supported. The same is true of the voluminous literature on water control. After printing was invented, states occasionally printed agricultural manuals and distributed them widely. The Mongols printed and distributed several such manuals, encouraged the popularization of underappreciated crops, and imported some new ones from Iran.¹¹

In 1840 the British Empire attacked the Qing Empire and forced it to open itself to European commerce. For the following century, foreign powers found ways to extract wealth from a China racked by wars and rebellions. This ended with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The People’s Republic has overseen one of the most successful state-strengthening efforts in human history, which—not coincidentally—has been a disaster for its natural ecosystems. Not only has the human population increased by almost a billion but the amount of resources and energy consumed by each person has also multiplied several times. All of the processes of environmental change described above have accelerated over this period, but by the 1950s the only environments remaining to be colonized were marginal ones whose clearance had profound ecological consequences with negligible economic benefits. The government’s ambitious environmental policies offer some hope, but there is a fundamental contradiction between its goals of protecting the environment and increasing consumption.¹²

The environmental effects of European empires on their colonies have long been recognized, but this book has emphasized that all states have a fundamental incentive to transform environments, and China’s have been among the most successful. While China’s empires were often weak by modern standards, they played important roles in the long-term conversion of East Asia’s natural ecosystems to farmland and areas for other human uses. Their formation required the empires to transform environments, and each increase in power improved their ability to rebuild environments for their own purposes. Because of this, state formation should be considered an important process in the earth’s environmental history and the founding of the Chinese imperial system a momentous event in the history of East Asia’s environments.

Epilogue

States of the Anthropocene

OVER THE MONTHS THAT I have been finishing this book the COVID-19 pandemic has killed two million people and rav- aged the world’s economies. It has also demonstrated the importance of good governance. Western countries—some with elected leaders scornful of administrative expertise—quickly became the center of the global pandemic, while East Asia’s states have been far more successful in quashing it. This is not a coincidence. East Asia’s political systems draw on a shared tradition that emphasizes centralized bureaucratic governance and have not been strongly influenced by the liberal “phobia of the state.” The different results provide us with a useful lesson for the future, because the pandemic is unfortunately a relatively minor problem compared to the potential consequences of the human impact on the climate and the biosphere. While strong states are not guaranteed to be able to solve our problems, weakened ones are certainly incapable of solving them. This book has shown that states have played important roles in developing and maintaining the complex societies that have created our environmental problems, but there should be no doubt that they are also essential for making a transition toward more sustainable ones.¹

Agrarian states ran on the energy provided by photosynthesis, so they had a fundamental incentive to replace biodiverse natural ecosystems with agricultural ones. This has also been true of industrial states. Fossil and nuclear power have vastly increased the energy available to us, but photosynthesis still feeds us and provides us with most of our raw materials. Just as agrarian states had a fundamental drive to expand agriculture, industrial states encourage every productive activity that they can tax, from farming to fracking. Environmentalists often lament that the world’s leaders lack the will, or the knowledge, to solve environmental problems. But it is a mistake to blame individuals: the problem is structural. The economic activities that lie at the heart of our environmental problems are the very basis of political power. Our planet’s resources are finite, but economic growth is based on increased resource use. At some point we must reduce, or at least stabilize, economic production. But reducing production means reduced income for the state. And who would choose a leader who promised to reduce production? Neither the ruling classes nor the voting masses.

The lesson of China’s Warring States period, and many other times of intense inter-state competition, is that the government that most successfully mobilizes resources has an advantage over its rivals. Geopolitics are always environmental politics. While states without rivals can afford to emphasize stability rather than growth, those with competitors must prioritize economic growth over long-term sustainability because economic power can be converted to military power. The current division of the world into armed rival states is therefore a major impediment to building sustainable economies. Strengthening global institutions that reduce competition between states is a necessary step toward building political systems that use resources sustainably.²

The most seductive environmental fantasy is that technological innovation will one day allow our economies to grow without using more resources, a fiction encapsulated by the slogan “sustainable development.” This is impossible. Economic growth always entails increased resource use. And since never-ending growth seems to be a core feature of capitalism, our current system, it stands to reason that capitalism itself is fundamentally unsustainable. But the history of twentieth-century communism makes clear that noncapitalist systems can be equally dedicated to growth, even if they are not as good at achieving it. This is not surprising since, as this book has shown, all states have incentives to increase productivity. Nonetheless, American-led capitalism arguably defeated Soviet-style communism precisely because it was more effective at mobilizing resources. Capitalism is a highly innovative system. Not only does it constantly improve its techniques for exploiting the earth’s people and resources; it also tends toward increasingly efficient resource use, though it usually makes up for increased efficiencies through growth in total production. A centrally planned economy could easily exploit resources more sustainably than capitalism by simply not allowing anyone to accumulate far more than they need (no more private yachts). But it could never outcompete capitalist states in economic productivity and thus could not afford to rival them militarily. This is a main reason China’s Communist Party chose to turn toward capitalism. Because of this logic, it is hard to imagine one state building a sustainable system while its rivals did not. International cooperation is required.³

The tragedy of international politics is that it incentivizes states to increase productivity for increased military power. This problem is closely related to the question of who wields political power within states. History books are full of thuggish men who seem to lust for power for its own sake, not because they are burning to do administrative work. These kinds of leaders are still with us. Humans have utterly failed to build political systems that reliably place competent and responsible people in positions of power. Building a sustainable system would require finding ways of ensuring that those in high office have demonstrated administrative skills. It must also limit the ability of the rich and powerful to use the political order to enrich themselves, which would work only by placing limits on the private accumulation of wealth. Male dominance may also be a core part of the problem because, as suggested in chapter 1, it is closely related to militarism. Unfortunately, it is quite possible that humans are incapable of building the global feminist ecotopia that I am describing, so we should consider what our future will look like if we fail to improve our political systems.

Catastrophism is so common in environmental discourse that one might be forgiven for believing that everyone will suddenly die when the world’s average temperature increases by two degrees Celsius. But only nuclear war could kill us all at once. The most likely future of human societies on earth is suggested by China’s environmental history, which Mark Elvin described as “three thousand years of unsustainable growth.” People in China once lived at relatively low densities in diverse ecosystems that allowed them to eat healthy diets and forage for wild resources if their crops failed. Over time, the growth of agricultural populations turned much of the landscape into farms, leaving fewer opportunities for foraging. This forced people to work harder to stay alive and reduced the quality of their diets. It also left them vulnerable to starvation since these simplified agricultural ecosystems left little else to eat in times of droughts, pests, and floods. Nonetheless, people are resourceful. They repeatedly adapted to degraded environments and became accustomed to living in conditions that their ancestors would have found unbearable. This cycle of repeated adaptation to degradation is already happening in many other parts of the world and represents a very plausible future for humans on earth. But it should be emphasized that we are not all in this together. Our planet will always have places that are perfectly hospitable to humans, and up to now the rich and powerful have tended to escape the effects of environmental destruction. Business as usual will not benefit the majority of the human population, but elites may well be right to suppose that they will not have to suffer the consequences.⁴

The question, then, is not about saving the planet or about saving our species but rather about whether humans are capable of creating political systems that can avert such a miserable future. Ideally, such systems would distribute resources equitably and leave significant areas of the earth for natural ecosystems. Minimally they would prevent our societies from destroying the biological and climatic systems that our societies depend on. I cannot offer a clear picture of how we can build such systems. But a historical look at how humans transform their environments makes clear that our environmental problems are also political problems and that any hope of solving them requires transforming our political systems. Luckily, this is something that younger generations seem to appreciate, so there is hope for the future.

Notes

The book’s epigraph is “Zai shan,” ode 290. This has traditionally been considered a hymn of the Zhou royal family, but dozens of aristocratic families in North China traced their descent from ancient Zhou kings and could have sung this at their own ancestral temples. I have translated bangjia as “dynasty” because patrilineal descent was central to early Chinese political rituals; it could refer to the ruling family of any Zhou polity along with its associated households. The song is full of repeated words and phrases that would have rhymed when sung, but my translation attempts to convey the meaning rather than the sonority. My translation draws on Legge’s, and I also consulted the versions of Waley and Karlgren. Cheng and Jiang, Shijing zhuxi, 980; Legge, The Book of Poetry, 600; Waley, The Book of Songs, 162; Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 250; Karlgren, Glosses on the Book of Odes, 163; Kern, “Bronze Inscriptions”; Lewis, The Construction of Space, 80.

Introduction

1. The Mencius quote is my translation; see Legge, Mencius 6A.407; Lau, Mencius, 250–51. Much later I discovered Yi-fu Tuan’s 1969 book China, which does in fact discuss the human impact on China’s environments, though one would not know it from the title.

2. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” For a thoughtful overview of the field of environmental history, see Radkau, Nature and Power.

3. The phrase “reorganization of nature” comes from Worster, The Wealth of Nature, 57.

4. Qin was the closest Chinese-speaking state to Inner Asia for five centuries, and Shaanxi people were referred to as “Qin people” long after the fall of the Qin state, so it came to be the word used for China in Inner Asian languages, from which it spread across Eurasia. Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, sec. 12.2; Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, 1:268–78. The other regional Neolithic cultures I am thinking of are Shimao, Hongshan, Shijiahe, and Liangzhu, though there were others.

5. Peterson and Shelach, “Jiangzhai.”

6. On this comparison, see Nylan and Vankeerberghen, Chang’an 26 BCE; Scheidel, Rome and China. Just as Qin was already effectively an empire decades before it declared itself one, Rome’s pan-Mediterranean empire was already in place by the mid-second century BCE.

7. Wittfogel’s early work on the material basis of Chinese society deeply influenced a generation of scholars in Europe and Asia, but after he denounced Owen Lattimore and others to anticommunist hawks and published his paranoid Oriental Despotism (1957), sinologists shunned him and downplayed his influence on their ideas. For Wittfogel’s early work, see Wittfogel, “The Foundations and Stages of Chinese Economic History”; Vogel, “K. A. Wittfogel’s Marxist Studies on China (1926–1939)”; Brook and Blue, China and Historical Capitalism, 104, 143–147; Smith, “Rehabilitating a Renegade?” In East Asian languages there is a substantial body of work on early China’s environmental history, including Shi, He shan ji (9 vols.); Hara, Kodai Chūgoku no kaihatsu to kankyō, “Nōhon” shugi to “ōdo” no hassei; Wang, Qin Han shiqi shengtai huanjing yanjiu; Muramatsu, Chūgoku kodai kankyōshi no kenkyū. Two great surveys also cover this period, namely Anderson’s Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China and Marks’s China: An Environmental History. For my earlier work, see “Environmental Change and the Rise of the Qin Empire.” Ruth Mostern’s book The Yellow River analyzes the kinds of issues I had originally hoped to study, though it is considerably more ambitious. Great books on ancient Mediterranean environments include Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea; Grove and Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe; and Harper, The Fate of Rome.

8. For an idea of how much new information has been unearthed in the past five decades, compare this book with Ho, The Cradle of the East. On the archaeology of the historical period in China, the following article is still relevant: Falkenhausen, “On the Historiographical Orientation of Chinese Archaeology.”

9. On Chinese ideas of nature, see Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants; Vogel and Dux, Concepts of Nature.

10. On scholarship that blames China for global environmental problems, see Lord, “The New Peril.” On European imperialism, see Richards, The Unending Frontier; Belich, Replenishing the Earth; and Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire.

Chapter One. The Nature of Political Power

The epigraph is the opening passage of “On Herding the People,” one of the most famous essays of the Warring States period and the first work in the Guanzi collection. Like most early essays, it had an author who is unknown. The first word, Mu 牧, implies both nurturing and disciplining livestock, but I translate it as “herd” rather than “tend” because the graph depicts a hand hitting a bull with a stick. “Heed the four seasons” means that a ruler should make his subjects perform corvée or military labor only during the agricultural off-season lest it reduce their harvests and his tax income. Li, Guanzi jiaozhu, 1.2; Rickett, Guanzi, vol. 1, 52.

1. The total dry biomass of all living humans is estimated at 0.06 gigatons (sixty million metric tons) of carbon (Gt C) and that of livestock at 0.1 Gt C. The total biomass of all wild mammals has been reduced to a mere 0.007 Gt C. Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth”; Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere, 226–29; Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo, “Biological Annihilation.”

2. The quote is from Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. The term “Anthropocene” is powerful because it succinctly encapsulates the idea that the human transformation of the earth is a scientific fact and a global phenomenon that affects everyone. But it also seems to assign environmental blame equally across our species when some people deserve far more of it than others: Haraway, “Anthropocene”; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 169–73. I will employ the word “natural” according to its most common usage and will consider environments natural insofar as they are not created by or dependent on humans, a spectrum of “naturalness” ranging from ecosystems without any human influence to totally anthropogenic ones. Those who would argue that everything is equally natural—or reject the use of the term altogether—are stuck in the paradigm of the Anthropocene, and should remember that humans have only become a dominant force in the earth’s ecosystems in very recent geological time. More practically, “natural” is as good a concept as any for discussing degrees of human influence on ecosystems. Williams, “Ideas of Nature”; Worster, The Wealth of Nature, 171–83.

3. On human energetics, see Smil, Energy in Nature and Society, 119–202. As discussed in chapter 5, the Qin and early Han Empires issued one qing (45,700 square meters; 11.3 acres) of land to families without rank. Families averaged around five people in this period, so this is about nine thousand square meters per person. On the distribution of the population in the Han period, see Bielenstein, “Chinese Historical Demography A.D. 2–1982,” 12, 193.

4. Increasing populations can be inferred from the density of archaeological sites: Hosner et al., “Spatiotemporal Distribution Patterns of Archaeological Sites,” 1583; Wolfe, Dunavan, and Diamond, “Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases.”

5. Political: “Of, belonging to, or concerned with the form, organization, and administration of a state.” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed February 5, 2015. The definition of “ecology” is from Begon, Townsend, and Harper, Ecology, xi. The established field of political ecology is not as focused on states as this book is but is similarly concerned with the intersections between environmental questions and relations of power. Robbins, Political Ecology.

6. My translation. Jiang, Shang jun shu zhuizhi, 6.42; Pines, The Book of Lord Shang, 158.

7. Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, 129. On shepherding as a political metaphor, see Wiseman, “Interpreting Ancient Social Organization”; and Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.

8. Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”; Scott, Against the Grain; Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution, 208–22; Scheidel, “Studying the State”; D’Altroy, “Empires Reconsidered”; Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 146–54. My definition of a state is based on that in Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 195.

9. Halstead and O’Shea, Bad Year Economics; Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution, 208–22; Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 146–54.

10. The classic overestimation of the power of premodern states is Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism, which projected his own suffering under Nazi totalitarianism in his native Germany onto premodern states in an imagined “orient.” On the comparative weakness of premodern states, see Scheidel, “Studying the State,” 16–18; on taxation, see Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael; and on illegal agricultural colonization, see Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy, Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers, and Perdue, Exhausting the Earth.

11. On India’s elephants, see Trautmann, Elephants and Kings.

12. Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State.

13. Underhill, Craft Production and Social Change in Northern China; Sterckx, Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China.

14. Like the French/English word “levée/levy” and the Chinese fu 賦 discussed in chapter 3, the Mesopotamian term ilku first referred to labor service and was later used for taxes, evidence of how easily labor service obligations could be converted to tax payments. Liverani, Uruk, 20–25; Jursa and Moreno García, “The Ancient Near East and Egypt.”

15. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 26; Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political.’”

16. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 375–94; D’Altroy, “The Inka Empire”; Smith, “The Aztec Empire”; D’Altroy and Earle, “Staple Finance, Wealth Finance and Storage”; Ardant, “Financial Policy and Economic Infrastructure,” 166; Korolkov, “Empire-Building.”

17. Monson and Scheidel, “Studying Fiscal Regimes,” 19; Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires.

18. Earle, Bronze Age Economics. For a useful explanation of life as a warlord, see de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa.

19. Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires, 20–21; Hall, “The Muromachi Bakufu,” 193–202; Richards, The Mughal Empire, 77–93; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 104–8. A more recent example of such a decentralized system is Britain and its settler colonies in the first half of the twentieth century.

20. The Roman Empire developed a bureaucracy only in response to a revenue shortage after the crisis of the third century CE. See Finer, The History of Government, 532–604. For the Bible references, see Matthew 9:10, 11:19, 21:31; Mark 2:15; Luke 5:30, 7:34, 15:1.

21. Weber, Economy and Society, 956–75; Kamenka, Bureaucracy; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 107–17.

22. Morehart and De Lucia, Surplus; Pines, The Book of Lord Shang. Quote from Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 388, citing Max Weber’s The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations.

23. On the fact of male dominance, see Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 71; Millett, Sexual Politics, 25. Of course humans cannot be simply divided into two sexes; there is something of a biological continuum between the two, but the ability to inseminate and the ability to become pregnant have always been mutually exclusive, a duality generally recognized in human societies. For evidence that patriarchy is not a characteristic of all human societies, see Whyte, The Status of Women; Leacock, “Women’s Status in Egalitarian Society”; Schlegel, Sexual Stratification. Understanding patriarchy requires a global approach, not a focus on European traditions like those in Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, and Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.

24. Betzig, Despotism and Differential Reproduction; Scheidel, “Sex and Empire”; Lippold, “Human Paternal and Maternal Demographic Histories”; Blackburn, Lust, chap. 13; Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, 137–40, 231–46; Clutton-Brock, Mammal Societies; Wilkinson, Chinese History, sec. 38.15.3. Quote from Fabre-Serris and Keith, Women and War in Antiquity, 3.

25. For example, virtually every story in Liu and Kinney, Exemplary Women of Early China, begins by connecting the woman in question with a man.

26. Kim and Kissel, Emergent Warfare; Clastres, Society against the State; Trigger, “Maintaining Economic Equality”; Lewis, Sanctioned Violence; Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome; Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, chap. 5.

27. Haas, Evolution of the Prehistoric State; Carneiro, “The Role of Warfare in Political Evolution”; Finer, “State- and Nation-Building in Europe”; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan; Wong and Rosenthal, Before and Beyond Divergence; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 139; Perdue, China Marches West.

28. Smythe, “Forms of Political Authority.”

29. This description of Rome is based on Monson and Scheidel, Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, 208–81.

30. The quote is from Tilly and Ardant, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 42; Monson, “Hellenistic Empires”; Hui, War and State Formation; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire.

31. Quote from Scott, Seeing Like a State, 2; Schwartz, “The Primacy of the Political Order.” On the relationship between the state and taxpayers in later periods of Chinese history, see Twitchett, Financial Administration; Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance; Hsiao, Rural China. On the bureaucratization of the afterlife, see Harper, “Resurrection in Warring States Popular Religion.”

Chapter Two. Seeds of Life

The epigraph comes from chapter 10 of the Xunzi. I have translated it rather loosely for readability, simplifying the list of aquatic animals since some of them are impossible to identify, and leaving out gu (“drum”), which is not found in many editions of the text. “The five grains” is a standard phrase referring to foxtail and broomcorn millet, wheat, beans, and rice (in the south) or hemp seeds (in the north). The six kinds of livestock were pigs, dogs, chickens, horses, cattle, and sheep/goats. Wang, Xunzi jijie, 10.184–85; Knoblock, Xunzi, vol. 2, 127–28; Hutton, Xunzi, 88–89; Zhang and Fan, Zhongguo nongye tongshi, 20.

1. Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth.” In gigatons of carbon biomass, cattle weigh in at 0.061, swine at 0.021, and the two of them constitute 48 percent of the whole world’s mammalian biomass of 0.167.

2. The following section summarizes Lander, “Birds and Beasts Were Many,” which was originally written as a chapter of this book; see also Lander and Brunson, “Wild Mammals of Ancient North China,” and Shi, “Gudai de Guanzhong.”

3. Kidder and Zhuang, “Anthropocene Archaeology of the Yellow River”; Needham, Wang, and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.3; Mostern, The Yellow River. In China the Guanzhong Basin is generally considered a part of the Loess Plateau, but I consider it separate because of its low elevation.

4. Li, Zhang, and Xue, “The Composition of Three Mammal Faunas”; Qi, “Zhongguo beifang disiji buru dongwuqun,” 333–34; Tong, “Occurrences of Warm-Adapted Mammals in North China”; Fu et al., “DNA Analysis of an Early Modern Human.”

5. In 2013, Chun Chang Huang told me that he and his colleagues estimate that the mid-Holocene was 1.5 degrees warmer, with 200 mm more precipitation, but that these figures are difficult to prove because they are based on several lines of evidence. In addition to Huang’s work, see Lu et al., “Phytoliths as Quantitative Indicators,” and Feng et al., “Stratigraphic Evidence of a Megahumid Climate between 10,000 and 4000 Years B.P.” On ancient climates and faunas, see Peters et al., “Holocene Cultural History of Red Jungle Fowl”; Lander and Brunson, “Wild Mammals of Ancient North China”; Turvey and Fritz, “The Ghosts of Mammals Past.”

6. Willis and McElwain, The Evolution of Plants, 225–64; Lander, “Birds and Beasts Were Many”; Shen et al., “Forest Cover and Composition on the Loess Plateau.”

7. The most common trees in the Guanzhong Plain now are poplars (Populus cathayana, P. nigra, P. simonii, and P. tomentosa); paulownia (Paulownia tomentosa); catalpa (Catalpa bungee); pagoda tree (Styphnolobium japonicum); white elm (Ulmus pumila); tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima); willows (Salix sp.); Chinese arborvitae (Platycladus orientalis); juniper (Juniperus chinensis); and red pine (Pinus tabuliformis). See Shaanxi sheng, Shaanxi sheng zhibei zhi, 538.

8. For more details on these topics, see Lander, “Birds and Beasts Were Many”; Lander and Brunson, “Wild Mammals of Ancient North China”; and Turvey et al., “Long-Term Archives Reveal Shifting Extinction Selectivity.” On salamanders, see Wang et al., “The Decline of the Chinese Giant Salamander.” The scientific name of the snails is Cipangopaludina chinensis, and that of the mussels is Unio (or Nodularia) douglasiae. Li et al., “Mid-Neolithic Exploitation of Mollusks in the Guanzhong.” On the fish of the Yellow River system, see Huanghe shuixi yuye ziyuan diaochaban zuozu, Huanghe shuixi yuye ziyuan; Watts, “30% of Yellow River Fish Species Extinct.”

9. Smith, “Low-Level Food Production”; Crawford, “Early Rice Exploitation in the Lower Yangzi Valley”; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics; Sagart et al., “Dated Language Phylogenies”; Bellwood, “Asian Farming Diasporas?”

10. Liu et al., “The Earliest Unequivocally Modern Humans in Southern China”; Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 42–74; Zhongguo and Shaanxi, “Shaanxi Yichuanxian Longwangdi”; Liu et al., “Plant Exploitation of the Last Foragers at Shizitan.”

11. This paragraph is based on Smith, “A Cultural Niche Construction Theory,” and on advice from Gary Crawford.

12. Zeder, “The Domestication of Animals.”

13. I would like to thank Sasha and Otis for providing me with many insights into dog behavior. Frantz et al., “Genomic and Archaeological Evidence”; Thalmann et al., “Complete Mitochondrial Genomes of Ancient Canids”; Zeder, “Pathways to Animal Domestication”; Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 96–98; Larson et al., “Rethinking Dog Domestication.”

14. Bestel et al., “The Evolution of Millet Domestication”; Yang et al., “Early Millet Use in Northern China”; Spengler, “Anthropogenic Seed Dispersal”; Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture, 20.

15. Chen et al., Flora of China, vol. 22: Poaceae, 22:508, 535–36; Kajuna, Millet, 40; Lu et al., “Earliest Domestication of Common Millet”; Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 83–84; Zhao, “New Archaeobotanic Data”; Liu, Hunt, and Jones, “River Valleys and Foothills”; Anderson, Food and Environment, 37.

16. Halstead and O’Shea, Bad Year Economics; Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, chap. 7; McGovern, Uncorking the Past; Liu et al., “The Origins of Specialized Pottery”; Hayden, “Were Luxury Foods the First Domesticates?”; Zhang et al., “Phytolith Evidence for Rice Cultivation”; Zong et al., “Selection for Oil Content during Soybean Domestication”; Scott, Against the Grain. Bestel et al., in “Wild Plant Use and Multi-Cropping,” reveal that people were gathering brassicas, cannabis, and wild jujube.

17. The latest pre-Laoguantai site in the Guanzhong is probably the one published in Liu, “Shaanxi Hancheng Yumenkou jiushiqi shidai dongxue yizhi.” On charcoal evidence, see Huang et al., “High-Resolution Studies of the Oldest Cultivated Soils,” 38–39; Tan et al., “Holocene Wildfires”; Huang et al., “Charcoal Records of Fire History,” 34; Huang et al., “Holocene Colluviation,” 844; Li et al., “Holocene Agriculture in the Guanzhong Basin.” On fire more generally, see Pyne, Fire: A Brief History, 48–84, and Roberts, “Prehistoric Landscape Management.” On erosion caused by Neolithic people, see Rosen, “The Impact of Environmental Change,” and Rosen et al., “The Anthropocene and the Landscape of Confucius.”

18. On Dadiwan, see Barton et al., “Agricultural Origins,” and Gansu sheng, Qin’an Dadiwan, 21–76. On tools from sites in the Guanzhong, see Beijing Daxue, “Huaxian, Weinan gudai yizhi diaocha yu shijue”; Xi’an Banpo bowuguan, “Weinan Beiliu xinshiqi shidai zaoqi yizhi”; Zhongguo shehuikexueyuan, Lintong Baijiacun, 21–26. On diets, see Atahan et al., “Early Neolithic Diets at Baijia,” 2815; Pechenkina et al., “Reconstructing Northern Chinese Neolithic Subsistence Practices”; Wang, “Fishing, Farming, and Animal Husbandry,” 157–63.

19. The Guantaoyuan report dates phase 2 to before 5350 and the culturally similar phase 3 to 5350–4950 BCE. In this period that site had a much wider variety of fauna than contemporary sites in the plain, such as Baijia. Shaanxi and Baoji, Baoji Guantaoyuan, 282–325, 358–63.

20. Gansu sheng, Qin’an Dadiwan, 895; Barton et al., “Agricultural Origins”; Zeder, “The Domestication of Animals.”

21. Liu, Yang, and Chen, “Zhongguo jiayang shuiniu qiyuan chutan”; Yang et al., “Wild or Domesticated”; Lefeuvre, “Rhinoceros and Wild Buffaloes North of the Yellow River”; Lander and Brunson, “The Sumatran Rhinoceros.” On the remains of wild sheep and goats, see Beijing Daxue, “Huaxian, Weinan gudai yizhi diaocha yu shijue,” 304. On the other animals, see Zhongguo shehuikexueyuan, Lintong Baijiacun, 123–27; Shaanxi sheng, Lintong Lingkoucun, 525–33.

22. Although its results are preliminary, this paper convincingly argues that the Neolithic was the first period of sustained population growth in China: Wang et al., “Prehistoric Demographic Fluctuations in China.” On the human impact, see Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 210–19, and Wagner et al., “Mapping of the Spatial and Temporal Distribution.”

23. Li, Bower, and He, Chinese Ceramics, 47–58.

24. Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 133–34.

25. On the maps of archaeological sites, see Jaffe et al., “Mismatches of Scale.” On fallow times, see Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth.

26. Other villages with similar layouts were excavated at Beishouling and Dadiwan, and the Shijia site had similar material remains. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 112–28; Zhou, Zhongguo nongju fazhan shi, 64–71; Xi’an Banpo bowuguan, “Shaanxi Weinan Shijia xinshiqi shidai yizhi”; Zhongguo and Xi’an, Xi’an Banpo, 75–80, 166–68, plate 75.

27. Peterson and Shelach, “Jiangzhai”; Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 82.

28. Shaanxi sheng, Lintong Lingkoucun, 445–50; Xi’an, Shaanxi, and Lintong, Jiangzhai, 539–42.

29. Pechenkina et al., “Reconstructing Northern Chinese Neolithic Subsistence Practices”; Pechenkina, Benfer, and Wang, “Diet and Health Changes at the End of the Chinese Neolithic”; Xi’an Banpo bowuguan, Xi’an Banpo, 30. The wild walnuts are Juglans mandshurica; the domesticated form (J. regia) arrived from western Asia in the Han era or later. See Hebei and Handan, “Hebei Wuan Cishan yizhi,” 336; and Beer et al., “Vegetation History of the Walnut Forests in Kyrgyzstan”; Liu, Li, and Hou, “Making Beer.”

30. Wang et al., “Pig Domestication and Husbandry Practices”; Wang et al., “Morphometric Analysis of Sus Remains”; Pechenkina et al., “Reconstructing Northern Chinese Neolithic Subsistence Practices,” 1186; Larson et al., “Patterns of East Asian Pig Domestication”; Lander, Schneider, and Brunson, “A History of Pigs in China”; Wu et al., “Zhongguo xinshiqi shidai”; Coppinger and Coppinger, What Is a Dog?

31. Zhongguo and Xi’an, Xi’an Banpo, 255–69; Xi’an, Shaanxi, and Lintong, Jiangzhai, 504–38; Zhongguo shehuikexueyuan, Baoji Beishouling, 146; Flad, Yuan, and Li, “Zooarchaeological Evidence,” 182–84; Gansu sheng, Qin’an Dadiwan, 861–910. Beishouling was occupied from the late Laoguantai well into the Yangshao period, but the zooarchaeology report does not distinguish between strata. The freshwater snail is the Chinese apple snail Cipangopaludina cathayensis.

32. Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 85–89; Ma, Emergent Social Complexity, 45–50; Underhill and Habu, “Early Communities in East Asia,” 131–32; Xibei Daxue, Fufeng Anban yizhi fajue baogao; Gansu sheng, Qin’an Dadiwan, 131–32.

33. Beijing Daxue and Zhongguo, Huaxian Quanhucun, 31–47; Xi’an, Shaanxi, and Lintong, Jiangzhai, 285–98, 350; Shaanxi, Xi’an Mijiaya, 159, 170; Shaanxi and Xibei Daxue, Gaoling Dongying, 58.

34. Sheng et al., “North-South Patterning of Millet Agriculture,” 1558; Li et al., “Early Cultivated Wheat”; Jia et al., “The Development of Agriculture”; Zhou et al., “Early Agricultural Development”; He et al., “Prehistoric Evolution of the Dualistic Structure”; Song, Wang, and Fuller, “A Regional Case in the Development of Agriculture”; Lee et al., “Archaeological Soybean in East Asia”; Zhang et al., “Phytolith Evidence for Rice Cultivation”; Zong et al., “Selection for Oil Content during Soybean Domestication”; Ma, “The Prehistoric Flora of Yangguangzhai.” The latter, an unpublished study, lists the following numbers of grains of each species: foxtail grass type, 1563; foxtail millet, 1184; bean family, 806; grass family, 470; broomcorn millet, 179; purslane, 117; chenopod, 19; salsola, 13; perilla, 10; polygonum, 3; foxnut (Euryale ferox), 2.

35. Pechenkina, Benfer, and Ma, “Diet and Health in the Neolithic”; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Sorghum and Millets.

36. The poems in the Book of Odes mention tao 桃, li 李, changdi 常棣, and mei 梅, which are usually identified with peaches (Prunus persica), plums (P. salicina), cherries (P. pseudocerasus), and “Japanese apricot” (P. mume), respectively, though we cannot be sure about these identifications. Plants like yu 鬱 and tangdi 唐棣 probably also refer to varieties of Prunus. Gantang 甘棠, du 杜, and sui 檖 are usually identified as varieties of pears (Pyrus sp.) or possibly crab apples (Malus sp.), not necessarily domesticated. Jujubes were called zao 棗 and ji 棘. Mugua 木瓜 probably referred to Chinese quince (Pseudocydonia sinensis). Bretschneider, “Botanicon Sinicum”; Spengler, Fruit from the Sands; Zhang et al., “Genetic Diversity and Domestication Footprints of Chinese Cherry”; Zheng, Crawford, and Chen, “Archaeological Evidence for Peach”; Zhang, “Pinpoguo kao”; Lu and Zhao, Mao shi caomu niaoshou (unpaginated; 59th page after the index).

37. Over 80 percent of faunal remains (both in numbers of specimens and by weight) identified at Xipo belonged to domesticated pigs, most of which were killed before two years of age. Deer constituted less than a tenth of the total faunal remains. There were also remains of bears, pheasants/chickens, porcupines, gazelles, wild horses, aurochs, macaques, hares, mussels, clams, and frogs. Ma, Emergent Social Complexity, 64–81; Shaanxi and Xibei Daxue, Gaoling Dongying, 199; Baoji and Zhongguo, Baoji Fulinbao, 221–24; Xibei Daxue, Fufeng Anban yizhi fajue baogao; Dodson et al., “Oldest Directly Dated Remains of Sheep in China.” The latter study uses isotope data to argue that bones excavated from Yangshao-era sites belonged to domesticated sheep, but this argument is based on the dubious assumption that wild sheep ate few C4 plants.

38. The mammals that have adapted best to agricultural landscapes include brown and Oriental house rats (Rattus norvegicus and R. tanezumi), white-bellied rats (Niniventer confucianus), striped field mice (Apodemus agrarius), greater long-tailed hamsters (Tscherskia triton), Amur hedgehogs (Erinaceus amurensis), Tolai hares (Lepus tolai), and at least three species of bats: common serotines (Eptesicus serotinus), gray long-eared bats (Plecotus austriacus), and Japanese pipistrelles (Pipistrellus abramus). The birds in question are pigeons (Columba livia), Eurasian tree sparrows (Passer montanus), barn swallows (Hirundo rustica), red-rumped swallows (Hirundo daurica), and Asian house martins (Delichon dasypus). Smith and Xie, Guide to the Mammals of China; Vigne et al., “Earliest ‘Domestic’ Cats in China Identified as Leopard Cat.” On weeds, see Beijing Daxue and Henan, Dengfeng Wangchenggang kaogu faxian, 916–58, and An, Kirleis, and Jin, “Changing of Crop Species and Agricultural Practices.”

39. On site abandonment, see Ma, Emergent Social Complexity, 19, 25; Xu, “Naturally and Anthropogenically Accelerated Sedimentation.” On the evidence for additions to soil, see Zhuang, “Geoarchaeological Investigation,” 190.

40. Zhongguo, “Shaanxi Lantian Xiehu yizhi,” 435–37; Zhongguo, Wugong fajue baogao, 14, 98; Liang and Li, “Shaanxi Wugong Zhaojialai yuanluo juzhi chubu fuyuan”; Li, Bower, and He, Chinese Ceramics, 72–102; Flad, “Divination and Power,” 408; Mei, “Early Metallurgy and Socio-cultural Complexity.”

41. Remains of the Erlitou culture were found at only one site in the Guanzhong, namely, the eastern site of Nanshacun. Ceramics across the eastern Guanzhong had some similarities to those of the Erlitou culture, which, after all, was also a regional outgrowth of Longshan culture. Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 215–16; Beijing Daxue, “Huaxian, Weinan gudai yizhi diaocha yu shijue,” 315–20; Liu and Chen, State Formation in Early China, 74; Zhang, Guanzhong Shangdai wenhua yanjiu; Sebillaud, “La distribution spatiale de l’habitat,” vol. 1, 307, vol. 2, 223–31.

42. Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 47, 60–63, 101, 209–10; Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 215, 257; Dong et al., “Response of Geochemical Records in Lacustrine Sediments.” Archaeological surveys have revealed some sites that may be quite large, such as Shijia 史家 in Wugong, but they have yet to be excavated. Zhongguo wenwuju, Zhongguo wenwu dituji Shaanxi fence, 476.

43. Sites with tools include Zhongguo, Wugong fajue baogao, 61–69, 98; Xi’an Banpo bowuguan, “Shaanxi Qishan Shuang’an”; Shaanxi and Xibei Daxue, Gaoling Dongying, 125–33; Shaanxi, Xi’an Mijiaya; Zhongguo, Fengxi fajue baogao, 49–69; Xi’an, Shaanxi, and Lintong, Jiangzhai, 322; Zhongguo, “Shaanxi Huayin Hengchen yizhi fajue baogao,” 20–32; Shaanxi, “Shaanxi Lintong Kangjia yizhi fajue jianbao”; Shaanxi, “Shaanxi sheng Lintong xian Kangjia yizhi.” On sizeable sites in Henan, see Sebillaud, “La distribution spatiale de l’habitat,” 309–11.

44. Wang et al., “Temporal Changes of Mixed Millet and Rice Agriculture,” 747 (on the increasing popularity of foxtail millet); Lee et al., “Plants and People,” 1089; Lee and Bestel, “Contextual Analysis of Plant Remains”; Zhao and Xu, “Zhouyuan yizhi (Wangjiazui di dian)”; Jia et al., “The Development of Agriculture” (which mentions 1,200 chenopod seeds excavated from the Buziping site, Gansu, suggesting that people ate the seeds); Zhou et al., “Early Agricultural Development”; Lee et al., “Archaeological Soybean in East Asia”; Flad et al., “Early Wheat in China”; Li et al., “Ancient DNA Analysis of Desiccated Wheat Grains”; Li et al., “Early Cultivated Wheat”; Wang et al., “Shaanxi Baishuihe.” On the advantages of millets over wheat, see Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State, 224–28; on East Asian fruit arriving in Central Asia, see Stevens et al., “Between China and South Asia,” and Spengler, Fruit from the Sands; on yellowhorn (Xanthoceras sorbifolium) and mountain apricot (Armeniaca vulgaris), see Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 55; on peach and apricot charcoal, see Shen et al., “Forest Cover and Composition on the Loess Plateau”; on fire and erosion, see Huang et al., “Charcoal Records of Fire History”; Huang et al., “Holocene Colluviation”; and Li et al., “Holocene Agriculture in the Guanzhong Basin.”

45. On excavated impressions of fabric, see Zhongguo, “Gansu Yongjing Dahezhuang yizhi,” plate 6, tomb 75:1; Kuhn, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.9, 23, 272–79; Yang, Xi Zhou shi, 307. For hemp seeds dated around 2000 BCE, see Jia et al., “The Development of Agriculture.” Information on the Shuanghuaishu site has yet to be formally published.

46. Shaanxi and Xibei Daxue, Gaoling Dongying, 199; Pechenkina, Benfer, and Wang, “Diet and Health Changes at the End of the Chinese Neolithic.” On Kangjia, see Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 261. According to Pechenkina, Benfer, and Ma (“Diet and Health in the Neolithic,” 260), anemia “can develop in response to a prolonged energy deficiency in combination with inadequate mineral composition of food or chronic parasitic loads.”

47. Roberts, “What Did Agriculture Do for Us?”; Wolfe, Dunavan, and Diamond, “Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases”; Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 195–214; Yeh, Zhan, and Qi, “A Comparison of Ancient Parasites”; Comas et al., “Out-of-Africa Migration” (on tuberculosis); Leung, “Diseases of the Premodern Period in China.”

48. Fitzgerald-Huber, “The Qijia Culture”; Flad, Yuan, and Li, “Zooarchaeological Evidence”; Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road; Jeong et al., “Bronze Age Population Dynamics”; Yuan, Han, and Blench, “Livestock in Ancient China,” 86; Cai et al., “The Origins of Chinese Domestic Cattle”; Cai et al., “Early History of Chinese Domestic Sheep”; Lu et al., “Zooarchaeological and Genetic Evidence”; Eda et al., “Reevaluation of Early Holocene Chicken Domestication”; Peters et al., “Holocene Cultural History of Red Jungle Fowl.”

49. Bray, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.2, 138–66; You, Zhongguo nongye tongshi: Yuanshi shehui juan, 279; Lin et al., “Pathological Evidence Reveals Cattle Traction”; Postgate, Early Mesopotamia, 163–64; Lu et al., “Zooarchaeological and Genetic Evidence,” 108.

50. Stol, “Milk, Butter and Cheese”; Jeong et al., “Bronze Age Population Dynamics”; Wilkin et al., “Dairy Pastoralism”; Curry, “The Milk Revolution”; Huang, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.5, 248–57; Yang et al., “Proteomics Evidence for Kefir Dairy.”

51. Wang et al., “The Holocene Asian Monsoon”; Cai et al., “The Variation of Summer Monsoon”; An, Cheng, and Barton, “Dry or Humid?”; Wu et al., “A High Resolution Record of Vegetation”; Feng et al., “Holocene Vegetation Variations”; Huang et al., “Holocene Palaeoflood Events”; Huang et al., “Extraordinary Floods of 4100–4000 a BP”; Huang et al., “Extraordinary Floods Related to the Climatic Event”; Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 203–10; Roberts, The Holocene, 220–21; Wu and Liu, “Possible Role of the ‘Holocene Event 3’”; Liu et al., “The Impacts of Climate Change on the Neolithic Cultures”; Rascovan et al., “Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis.”

52. Cai et al., “The Variation of Summer Monsoon” (the cave south of Xi’an); Huang et al., “Sedimentary Records of Extraordinary Floods”; Huang et al., “Holocene Palaeoflood Events”; Li and Huang, “Holocene Palaeoflood Events”; Huang et al., “Abruptly Increased Climatic Aridity”; Huang et al., “Climatic Aridity”; Huang et al., “Extraordinary Floods of 4100–4000 a BP,” 6; Huang et al., “Charcoal Records of Fire History,” 31; Huang et al., “Holocene Dust Accumulation”; Long et al., “Holocene Climate Variations from Zhuyeze.”

53. Liu, Xi’an Laoniupo. Pre-Zhou sites in the Guanzhong include those described in Beijing Daxue and Shaanxi sheng, “Shaanxi Huixian Beicun yizhi”; Beijing Daxue, “Shaanxi Fufengxian Yijiabao yizhi”; and Baoji, “Shaanxi Wugong Zhengjiapo xian Zhou yizhi faju jianbao.” For bronze images of fish and turtles, see Shaanxi et al., Shaanxi chutu Shang Zhou qingtongqi, vol. 1, 66–72; Zhongguo shehuikexueyuan, Nan Binzhou, 490–92. Of 11,484 identified specimens from over two hundred waste pits at Nianzipo, half were cattle, a third were pigs, 7 percent were dogs, and there were also some sheep/goats and horses.

54. Huang et al., “Holocene Colluviation.”

55. The most common terms for millets in the Odes are ji 稷 and shu 黍; less common are liang 梁 and su 粟. Shu 菽 was the common term for beans. It was probably usually used to refer to soybeans but could also refer to adzuki and mung beans (Vigna angularis and V. radiata), on which see Crawford, “East Asian Plant Domestication,” and Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 223 (note that peas and broad beans arrived in China only in the Han). Zhang and Fan, in Zhongguo nongye tongshi, argue plausibly, but with little evidence, that soy became popular as fallow times decreased. On soy in the Guanzhong, see Hsu, Han Agriculture, 102; on food preservation and the history of soy, see Huang, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.5. On increased wheat consumption, see Zhou et al., “Human Diets during the Social Transition,” and Li et al., “Dietary Shift and Social Hierarchy.”

56. Genetic research suggests that cherries were first domesticated around the Sichuan Basin no later than 1000 BCE. Zhang et al., “Genetic Diversity and Domestication Footprints of Chinese Cherry”; Shaanxi, Zhouyuan 2000 niandu Qijia zhijue zuofang, 717–23 (the Prunus seeds were P. armeniaca or P. mandshurica); Luo and Wang, “Persimmon in China.”

57. Chestnuts are li 栗 (Castanea mollissima), and hazelnuts are zhen 榛 (Corylus sp.). These wild walnuts are Juglans mandshurica. Gourds were referred to in the Odes as gua 瓜, die 瓞, pao 瓟, and hu 瓠/壺. On walnuts, see Laufer, Sino-Iranica, 254–75; Pollegioni et al., “Ancient Humans Influenced the Current Spatial Genetic Structure.” On bottle gourds, see Kistler et al., “Transoceanic Drift and the Domestication of African Bottle Gourds.” On muskmelons, see Shaanxi, Zhouyuan 2000 niandu Qijia zhijue zuofang, 717–23; Sebastian et al., “Cucumber (Cucumis sativus) and Melon (C. melo)”; Akashi et al., “Genetic Variation and Phylogenetic Relationships in East and South Asian Melons.”

58. Feng 葑 probably refers to one or more varieties of Brassica rapa. Chinese cabbage is Brassica chinensis, canola is B. campestris, and mallow is Malva verticillata (kui 葵). The term Jiu 韭 referred to species such as Allium chinense or A. tuberosum. The jiao 椒 referred to in the Odes was probably Sichuan pepper. Bray, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.2, 345–46, 521; Bretschneider, “Botanicon Sinicum,” 169–73, 195–203.

59. Odes that mention the gathering of plants that are not clearly agricultural include odes 1, 3, 8, 13, 15, 35, 54, 72, 108, 125, 155, 167, 169, 188, 205, 226, and 299. Keng, “Economic Plants of Ancient North China,” 401–2. On the medical uses of plants, see Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, and Métailié, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.4.

60. Hemp fabric is called ma yi 麻衣 in ode 150 and he 褐 in ode 154. Soaking hemp is mentioned in ode 139. Kudzu vine is ge 葛 (Pueraria sp.) in ode 2, and ramie is zhu 紵/苧 (Boehmeria nivea) in ode 139. On hemp textiles, see Kuhn, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.9, 15–44. For excavated fabric, see Ge, “Jingyang Gaojiabao zao Zhou muzang fajue ji,” 7; Sun, “Dama zaipei qiyuan yu liyong fangshi”; and Zhongguo, Zhangjiapo Xi Zhou mudi, plate 200.

61. The word for a straw hat in ode 291 was written with both bamboo (笠) and grass (苙) radicals: Hanyu da zidian, 2959. On houses, see Zhongguo, Fengxi fajue baogao, 75.

62. At the Fengxi site west of Xi’an, one of the Zhou capitals, pigs comprised 40 percent of the animal remains, followed by cattle and sheep (both 15 percent). At a stone earring workshop in the Zhouyuan, cattle remains comprised 17 percent of the remains, while pigs comprised 23 percent, sheep 21 percent, dogs 14 percent, goats 5 percent, and sheep/goats 3 percent. All of these figures are minimum number of individuals. Yuan and Xu, “Fengxi chutu dongwu guge”; Shaanxi, Zhouyuan 2000 niandu Qijia zhijue zuofang, 724–51; Lam, Zhong, and Lei, “Zhougongmiao Shang-Zhou shiqi juluo”; Peters et al., “Holocene Cultural History of Red Jungle Fowl.”

63. Terms for nets included wang 網, gu 罛, and gu 罟. Terms for fish traps included zhao 罩, gou 笱, and liu 罶, and some of these were probably installed in weirs, liang 梁. Odes 170 and 281 are about fish, while ode 35 mentions weirs with fish traps. Zhongguo, Zhangjiapo Xi Zhou mudi, 282–99, 450–55, and plates 159–60, 182–91. Lam, Zhong, and Lei, “Zhougongmiao Shang-Zhou shiqi juluo.” Reeves’ turtles were excavated at the Zhougongmiao, and both Chinese pond turtles and Chinese stripe-necked turtles were excavated from Zhangjiapo.

64. These are the Qi 漆 and Ju 沮 Rivers. Ode 180, Ji ri 吉日. Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 124; Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 429. I have modified Karlgren’s translation. For si 兕 as “buffalo,” see Lefeuvre, “Rhinoceros and Wild Buffaloes North of the Yellow River.”

65. For some representations of deer, see Lu and Hu, Baoji Yu guo mudi, 338–48; Gao, “Long xing cheng cang”; Zhongguo, Zhangjiapo Xi Zhou mudi, 161–64, color plates 15–23. Plate 24 shows an entire (sika?) deer buried as a sacrifice in a tomb; Sterckx, “Attitudes towards Wildlife and the Hunt.”

66. Bray, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.2, 105, 162; Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 656; For the argument about increasing yields, see Zhang and Fan, Zhongguo nongye tongshi, 177–89.

67. The inscription of the Yihou Ze gui records a grant of chuan 川, which is presumed to mean zhen 甽, referring to ditches between fields. Ma, Shang Zhou qingtongqi mingwen xuan, vol. 3, 34–35. On the moats, see Zhongguo, “Xi’an shi Chang’an qu Fengjing yizhi shuixi yicun,” and Epanggong yu Shanglinyuan kaogudui, “Xi’an shi Han Tang Kunmingchi.”

68. The ode is number 291, Shisanjing zhushu, 602, and Legge, The Book of Poetry, 604. The quote from the Monthly Ordinances is from Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 153. The Xunzi quote is from Wang, Xunzi jijie, 10.183 and Knoblock, Xunzi, vol. 2, 127. I have modified the translations of Legge and Knoblock.

69. This paragraph is based on Halstead, “Plough and Power” and Bogaard, Fochesato, and Bowles, “The Farming-Inequality Nexus.”

70. One of the earlier passages is Xu, Guo yu ji jie, 453 (Jinyu 9). On early writing, see Qiu, “Jiaguwen suojian de Shangdai nongye,” 164. The word geng 耕 is often translated “to plow” but often meant simply “to farm” or “to till.” Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 116–17; Yuan and Xu, “Fengxi chutu dongwu guge”; Bray, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.2, 166–67; Needham and Wang, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.2, 303–33; Smil, Energy in Nature and Society, 155–61.

71. The quote is from Liu, Zhanguo ce, 618–19 (Zhao 1), translated in Crump, Chan-Kuo Ts‘e, 336. On Qin lending oxen, see Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 25.126–27; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 74. On miniature vehicles, see Falkenhausen, “Mortuary Behaviour,” 132.

Chapter Three. Herding People

The epigraph from The Art of War, traditionally attributed to Sunzi, is my translation. Yang, Shiyijia zhu Sunzi jiaoli, 2.29; Ames, Sun-Tzu, 107. The costs are related to materials and provisions. The soldiers were not paid. On gold currency, see Thierry, Monnaies chinoises, 146.

1. This paragraph summarizes chapter 1.

2. Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution, 208; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.

3. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings.

4. Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution. This section draws on Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, and Shelach-Lavi, The Archaeology of Early China.

5. Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, 85–89, 101, 117–58; Underhill and Habu, “Early Communities in East Asia”; Underhill, “Warfare and the Development of States”; Xibei Daxue, Fufeng Anban yizhi fajue baogao; Ma, Emergent Social Complexity, 45–50; Gansu sheng, Qin’an Dadiwan, 401–28; Wang, “Shaanxi Xianyang Yinjiacun”; Yang, “Urban Revolution in Late Prehistoric China.”

6. The Liangzhu site flourished before the middle of the third millennium BCE. Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 222–46; Sun et al., “The First Neolithic Urban Center”; Zhang et al., “China’s Major Late Neolithic Centres”; Liu et al., “Earliest Hydraulic Enterprise in China”; Keightley, “At the Beginning,” 26–27.

7. Allan, “Erlitou and the Formation of Chinese Civilization.”

8. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road, 46–49; Linduff, Rubin, and Shuyun, The Beginnings of Metallurgy in China, 8–22; Mei, “Early Metallurgy”; Bao, “Xi’an Laoniupo chutu Shang dai zaoqi wenwu”; Xibei Daxue, “Xi’an Laoniupo Shang dai mudi de fajue”; Xibei Daxue, “Shaanxi Chunhua xian Zaoshugounao yizhi,” 30–33. Cylindrical implements excavated at Laoniupo and elsewhere have one hollow end for inserting a wooden handle, while the other end is sharpened like an axe. These could have been used for hoeing but would also have made good weapons, and since all the other bronze implements excavated at these sites were weapons, these were probably also weapons.

9. The official periodization holds that the Erligang period lasted roughly from 1600 to 1400 BCE, but both dates should probably be pushed a bit later. Carbon 14 dates from Lower Erligang sites date between c. 1600 and 1450, and some “Upper Erligang” period 2 remains have been dated to c. 1300 if not later. See Xia-Shang-Zhou duandai gongcheng, Xia-Shang-Zhou duandai gongcheng 1996–2000 nian, 51–52, 62–65; Campbell, Archaeology of the Chinese Bronze Age, 68–105; Thorp, China in the Early Bronze Age, 62–116.

10. Lewis, Sanctioned Violence; Underhill, Craft Production and Social Change; Cook, “Moonshine and Millet”; Chang, “The Animal in Shang and Chou Bronze Art”; Allan, “The Taotie Motif on Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes.” There is more scholarship in English on the meaning of animal motifs in Shang and Zhou art than on living animals in the lives of Shang and Zhou people.

11. Campbell, Archaeology of the Chinese Bronze Age, 77–87; Campbell, Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State; Liu and Chen, State Formation in Early China, 99–130.

12. These paragraphs are based on Campbell, Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State; Keightley, “The Shang”; Keightley, Working for His Majesty; Bagley, “Shang Archaeology”; Thorp, China in the Early Bronze Age; Underhill, A Companion to Chinese Archaeology, 323–86. See also Zhang, Shang dai dili huanjing yanjiu. Many scholars refer to the entire Erligang-Anyang period as “Shang,” and the 1200–1046 period as “late Shang.” I avoid this because we have no evidence that Erligang and Anyang were ruled by the same dynasty.

13. Campbell, Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State, 190; Keightley, “The Late Shang State,” 551–54; Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 363–67; Dong et al., “Shifting Diets and the Rise of Male-Biased Inequality.”

14. Keightley, Working for His Majesty; Campbell, Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State, 125–26, 262; Campbell, “Toward a Networks and Boundaries Approach”; Smith, “Territories, Corridors, and Networks.” For the “Tribute of Yu,” see Karlgren, The Book of Documents, 16–18.

15. Campbell, Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State, 258–61. Most turtles were probably Chinese stripe-necked turtles (Ocadia sinensis) and Chinese pond turtles (Mauremys [previously Chinemys] reevesii), though there may have been others. Li, “Yinxu dongwu yicun yanjiu,” 12, 42; Keightley, Sources of Shang History, 157–70.

16. Campbell et al., “Consumption, Exchange and Production at the Great Settlement Shang”; Keightley, The Shang, 278.

17. Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China, 359–72; Kakinuma, “The Emergence and Spread of Coins in China,” 84; Pollard et al., “Bronze Age Metal Circulation in China.”

18. Linduff, “A Walk on the Wild Side”; Honeychurch, Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire, 191–94, 201–11.

19. Fiskesjö, “Rising from Blood-Stained Fields,” quote from p. 102 (Jiaguwen heji 10197); see also 106–28, 142. Keightley, Working for His Majesty, 161–68; Lewis, Sanctioned Violence, 150–57; Legge, Mencius, 3B.280; Zhang, “Buci poutian.” Ode 78 also mentions hunting with fire.

20. Schafer, “Hunting Parks and Animal Enclosures”; Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History; Lander and Brunson, “Wild Mammals of Ancient North China”; Lander and Brunson, “The Sumatran Rhinoceros.”

21. The only bronze horses I know of are one from the Spring and Autumn period excavated at Tanggongxi Road in Luoyang in 2001, seen in the Luoyang Municipal Museum in 2013, and the Western Zhou horse found at Lijiacun in 1955, seen in Shaanxi sheng, Ji jin zhu hua zhang, 240–43; Vogt, “Between Kin and King,” 214–26; Li, “Yinxu dongwu yicun yanjiu.”

22. Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth.”

23. Chen, Yinxu buci zongshu, 291; Rawson, “Western Zhou Archaeology,” 377–82.

24. On population density in the Guanzhong, see Sebillaud, “La distribution spatiale de l’habitat,” 307–8, 232. Assuming that there was one inhabitant for each 40 square meters of an archaeological site, Sebillaud estimates that there were 800,000 people in the Guanzhong during the 1100-year Longshan period and 315,000 people during the 550-year Erligang-Shang period (1600–1050). This would mean that there were 27 percent more people in the region in any given year of the Longshan period. However, the Longshan culture may have endured for a few centuries after 2000 BCE in the Guanzhong, in which case there would have been less difference between the two periods. On early Erligang sites in the Guanzhong, see Liu, Xi’an Laoniupo, 35–56, and Zhang, Guanzhong Shangdai wenhua yanjiu, 2. The ceramics from this stratum of the Laoniupo site in Xi’an are part of the general Longshan Keshengzhuang tradition; rather than being in the Erligang style, they are similar to contemporary ceramics found farther west in the Tianshui region. On the spread of Erligang influence across the Guanzhong, see Liu, “Shang wenhua zai Xifang de xingshuai”; on Anyang’s influence in the Guanzhong, see Campbell, Archaeology of the Chinese Bronze Age, 85, 116–18, 153–55; Zhang, Guanzhong Shangdai wenhua yanjiu; Bagley, “Shang Archaeology,” 227–29.

25. Liu and Chen, State Formation in Early China, 111, 71–73; Xi’an Banpo bowuguan, “Shaanxi Lantian Huaizhenfang”; Huo, “Shitan Luonan Hongyashan.”

26. The Bronze Age remains at Laoniupo are divided into five periods, whose dates are based on similarities with Henan pottery sequences: period 1 dates to Lower Erligang (1600–1450 BCE), period 2 dates to Upper Erligang (1450–1300), period 3 dates to Yinxu periods 1 and 2 (1350–1220), period 4 dates to Yinxu 4 (1080–40), and the poorly preserved fifth period dates to slightly later. These dates are very approximate. Shaanxi sheng, “2010 nian Shaanxi sheng kaogu yanjiuyuan kaogu diaocha”; Yuan and Xu, “Fengxi chutu dongwu guge”; Liu, Xi’an Laoniupo, 26–273; Beijing Daxue and Shaanxi sheng, “Shaanxi Huixian Beicun yizhi”; Beijing Daxue, “Shaanxi Fufengxian Yijiabao yizhi”; Baoji, “Shaanxi Wugong Zhengjiapo xian Zhou yizhi faju jianbao.”

27. Dobson, “Linguistic Evidence”; Kern, “Bronze Inscriptions,” 182.

28. “Huang yi,” ode 241; Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 519. Regarding tree names, li 栵 is defined by the Erya as er 栭, which the Institut Ricci’s Le Grand Ricci (Pleco edition) identifies as a type of chestnut (Castanea seguinii). Later uses of Ju 椐 associate it with elm or Zelkova trees. The Shuowen defines zhe 檿 as mountain mulberry (shan sang 山桑) and zhe 柘 as simply “mulberry” (sang 桑). There are several species of mulberry in the region.

29. “Mian,” ode 237. I have modified Waley’s translation in a few places using Karlgren’s. The meanings of these plant names are unknown; they are poetic choices. “Malt sugar” is also something of a guess. See Waley, The Book of Songs, 247; Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 189–90; Huang, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.5, 457. On the earth mound, see Kominami, “Rituals for the Earth.”

30. Li, Early China, 112–20; Campbell, Archaeology of the Chinese Bronze Age, 168–71.

31. Karlgren, The Book of Documents, 28–29; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 60–61; Sima, Shi ji, 120–23; Rawson, “Western Zhou Archaeology,” 382.

32. Falkenhausen, Chinese Society; Jaffe, “The Continued Creation of Communities”; Chao, “Culture Change and Imperial Incorporation”; DeLancey, “The Origins of Sinitic.”

33. Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 97–103, 247, 267, 293–99; Vandermeersch, Wangdao, 1977; Vogt, “Between Kin and King”; Zhou, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations.

34. On Zhou lineages, see Sena, “Reproducing Society”; Shaughnessy, “Toward a Social Geography” and “Western Zhou Hoards.” On the awards given by the Zhou king, see Li, Landscape and Power, 124, and Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 173–80; Chao, Chunqiu zhanguo de shehui bianqian, 31–34. On wartime contributions, see the Xi Jia pan in Cook and Goldin, A Source Book of Ancient Chinese Bronze Inscriptions, 184–86.

35. Zhongguo wenwuju, Zhongguo wenwu dituji Shaanxi fence, 44–45; Zhongguo shehuikexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo, Zhongguo kaoguxue: Liang Zhou juan, 56–62; Zhongguo, “Xi’an shi Chang’an qu Fengjing yizhi shuixi yicun”; Epanggong yu Shanglinyuan kaogudui, “Xi’an shi Han Tang Kunmingchi.”

36. Cook, “Wealth and the Western Zhou”; von Glahn, The Economic History of China, 11–43; Qiu, “Shi.”

37. Honeychurch, Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire, 202–11; Sterckx, “Attitudes towards Wildlife and the Hunt,” 22.

38. Zhongguo, “Xi’an shi Chang’an qu Fengcunbei Xi Zhou shiqi zhigu zuofang”; Sun, Craft Production in the Western Zhou Dynasty.

39. These are 141 pick-ends, 113 knives, 38 adzes, 30 axes, 15 shovels, and 4 hoes. Only the four hoes are unambiguously agricultural tools; the rest could be used for working wood, digging, mining, and so on. Chen, Xian Qin qingtong shengchan gongju, 50–62. For two examples of excavated farm tools in context, see Zhongguo, Fengxi fajue baogao, 20–23, and Shaanxi Zhouyuan kaogu dui, “Fufeng yuntang Xi Zhou guqi zaozuofang yizhi,” 30.

40. This is “Qi yue,” ode 154. Hsu, Ancient China in Transition, 8–11; Xu, “‘Bin feng’ shuo.”

41. Keightley, “Public Work in Ancient China,” 296–300.

42. Classical descriptions of the jing field system come from the Mencius, the Offices of Zhou, and the Han shu. Legge, Mencius, 3A.244–45; Jia, Zhouli zhushu, 711 (地官•小司徒); Ban, Han shu, 24.1119–20; Swann, Food & Money in Ancient China, 116–20; Levenson, “Ill Wind in the Well-Field.”

43. Regarding field overseers, tian jun 田畯 is used in odes 154, 211, and 212. The jun 畯 graph in bronze inscriptions (and the related 俊 and 駿) means something like “great,” which probably relates to the meaning of “superior.” The Erya and Shuowen define jun as nongfu 農夫, which both Zheng Xuan and Sun Yan consider an official title: Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 591, 2582; Fang, Jiagu jinwen zidian, 1064. On land exchanges, see Li, “Literacy and the Social Contexts of Writing,” 284; Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 156–58; Skosey, “The Legal System,” 323–26, 340–45. The term che 徹 is mentioned in the Analects of Confucius as a type of taxation, and some scholars believe it existed in the Western Zhou. But it seems to have referred to laying out fields and perhaps to calculating the grain they could produce, not to taxation or labor service. It also appears in odes 250 and 259. In the inscription of the Shi Qiang pan it seems to mean “to regulate, put in order.” Karlgren, Glosses on the Book of Odes, 79; Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 543, 566, 2503; He, Zhan guo guwen zidian, 932; Fang, Jiagu jinwen zidian, 251.

44. The people granted by the hundred to lords and officials were called li 鬲 and shu ren 庶人, but we do not really know what these terms meant. Keightley, “Public Work in Ancient China,” 155–78; Vandermeersch, Wangdao, 1980, 33–45, 115; Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 154. On the workshop, see Sun, Craft Production in the Western Zhou Dynasty, and Shaanxi, Zhouyuan 2000 niandu Qijia zhijue zuofang.

45. Zhu, Shang Zhou jiazu xingtai yanjiu; Pulleyblank, “Ji and Jiang.”

46. Cook, “Wealth and the Western Zhou,” 284–86; Cooper, “The Potlatch in Ancient China”; Sahlins, “Poor Man,” 296. In 1857, 45 percent of the serfs in the core regions of the Russian empire were owned by the crown itself. Lieven, Empire, 265.

47. Yan is composed of 土 and 妟 and is presumably the same character as 堰. Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 42–43, 72, 202–12; Li, “Succession and Promotion”; Li, “Literacy and the Social Contexts of Writing.” On the political geography of the Guanzhong in the period, see Li, Landscape and Power, 40–49. According to the inscription on the Yang gui 養簋 (JC4243), a ritual bronze vessel, the Zhou court appointed people to manage a yan near the five main towns in the Guanzhong. Yan has been interpreted as a dike (Zhang and Liu, Xi Zhou jinwen guanzhi yanjiu, 22), but that meaning is not attested before the Eastern Han, so in this case it is probably the same as yan 偃. Zheng Xuan’s commentary on the Zhouli glosses liang 梁 as “shuiyan 水偃” and defines it as a space in a dam or a weir where a basket or net is placed to catch fish (Sun, Zhouli zhengyi, 300–301; 天官·䱷人), while in the Zuo zhuan it seems to refer to reservoirs. Yang, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, 1107 (Xiang 25). On yan 匽 as toilets, see Zhouli zhushu (in Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 676, 天官.宮人). As for the “nine reservoirs,” the graph bei 陂 (and 波) has so many related meanings—including dike, slope, dam, and wetland—that it is impossible to say exactly what it means here. On the wetlands and forests, see the inscriptions on the Lai pan, Nangong Liu ding (JC2805), Tong gui (JC4271), Mian gui (JC4240), and Mian fu (JC4626) in Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 206–12.

48. Li, Bureaucracy and the State, especially 305–14. The bronze inscription form of the si graph combines 𤔔 and 司.

49. Based on works like the Book of Rites (Li ji), Max Weber called the system of awarding officials the income from specific subjects “prebendal feudalism.” Weber, The Religion of China, 36; Legge, The Li Ki, 16, 27–28, 115; Vandermeersch, Wangdao, 1980, 195–210; Keightley, “Public Work in Ancient China,” 154, 208. For examples of the Zhou king’s transferring land from one person to another, see Li, Landscape and Power, 133; Li, “Literacy and the Social Contexts of Writing,” 280; and Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 176. On gifts given to appointees, see Shaughnessy, Sources of Western Zhou History, 81–83, and Li, “On the Function of Cowries.” On the early United States, see Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 287–93.

50. For examples of the Zhou king’s transferring land from one person to another, see Li, Landscape and Power, 133; Li, “Literacy and the Social Contexts of Writing,” 280; Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 176. In the latter case, the previous owner of the land had the same lineage name as the recipient, and it is possible that this was a transfer of land from one family member who had finished serving the court to another who was beginning service.

51. Von Glahn, The Economic History of China, 24. On Shang-era tribute, see Wang and Yang, Jiaguxue yibai nian, 516–21; Chou, “Fu-X Ladies of the Shang Dynasty,” 361–65. On Eastern Zhou ideas about earlier tribute systems, see McNeal, “Spatial Models of the State”; Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 1509 (Zhao 13); Karlgren, The Book of Documents, 12–18; Huang, Zhang, and Tian, “Wang Hui,” in Yi Zhou shu huijiao jizhu, chap. 59.

52. Wan, “The Horse in Pre-Imperial China,” 41–67; Creel, The Origins of Statecraft, 266–73. There are more than a hundred references to horse-related officials in Li, Bureaucracy and the State.

53. Ode 242 in Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 197; Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 207 (the Jian gui, JC 2485); Legge, Mencius, 1B.153–54; Liang and Liu, Yunmeng Longgang Qin jian, slips 278, 279, 258, and 254.

54. Thatcher, “Marriages of the Ruling Elite”; Granet, Festivals and Songs of Ancient China; Dong et al., “Shifting Diets and the Rise of Male-Biased Inequality.”

55. Lewis, “The City-State in Spring and Autumn China”; Tan, Zhongguo lishi dituji, vol. 1, 21; Chen, Chunqiu dashibiao lieguo juexing. For evidence that lineages taxed their people independent of the royal courts, see Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 1348–49, 1668–71 (Zhao 3, 26). On the cultural homogenization of the population, see Falkenhausen, Chinese Society, 204–88, and Chao, “Culture Change and Imperial Incorporation.” Lieven, in Empire, 240–241, reveals a clear similarity with Russia when he describes how Russian kings, beginning in the 15th century, appropriated the land of aristocrats and either took ownership of it themselves or granted it to loyal subordinates. This gave the Russian crown control over vast resources, and was the economic base upon which the Russian empire was founded.

56. Lewis, Sanctioned Violence; Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual; Weld, “Covenant in Jin ’s Walled Cities,” 41–84; Sterckx, Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China, 122–66.

57. Hsu, Ancient China in Transition, 38–51; Creel, Shen Pu-Hai, 1, 21; Meyer, “The Baseness of Knights Truly Runs Deep.”

58. On Western Zhou rules on trying and punishing miscreants, see the “Kang gao” in the Book of Documents, the inscription on the Xiao Yu ding, and scholarly discussions of si kou 司寇. The phrase “bu dian” 不典 in the “Kang gao” is sometimes cited as evidence of a legal code, but it is not seen in Western Zhou inscriptions. See Gu and Liu, Shangshu jiaoshi yilun, 1320; Kern, “Bronze Inscriptions”; Skosey, “The Legal System,” 159, 176–78, 309–16; Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 74–75. Eastern Zhou texts on punishments included penal regulations cast in metal and the “Punishments of Lü” (Lü xing). Creel, The Origins of Statecraft, 463; Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 1402–5, 1702–3 (Zhao 6 and 29); Caldwell, “Social Change and Written Law in Early Chinese Legal Thought.”

59. Smith, “Territories, Corridors, and Networks.”

60. Many accounts of Eastern Zhou reforms begin with those of the state of Qi described in the Discourses of the States (Guoyu), discussed in more depth in my dissertation, Lander, “Environmental Change and the Rise of the Qin Empire,” 193–94), but that passage is a work of political theory written centuries later, not a description of reality. Yang, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, 783–84 (Cheng 1); Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 704–5; Hsu, “The Spring and Autumn Period,” 573; Lewis, Sanctioned Violence, 56–59. In Prussia the registration of the entire population for military service similarly played an important role in increasing the power of the central state and curtailing the feudal aristocracy. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 97–100.

61. Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 974, 1268–71, and 1376; Yang, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, 980–81 (Xiang 10), 1180–81 (Xiang 30), 1254 (Zhao 4). Yang Bojun (Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, 1181) argued that lujing 廬井 was a term meaning “village,” in which case these reforms organized rural people for military service or taxation. In his commentary on the Zhou li (Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 712; 地官•小司徒), Zheng Xuan stated that “gong (‘tribute’) refers to the nine grains and the resources of the mountains and wetlands; fu refers to sending out soldiers and corvée service” (see also Wang, Han shu buzhu 24.1567). I translate fu as “levy,” which similarly can refer to both military service and tax. All uses of the word “levy” in subsequent translations refer to fu.

62. Yang, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, 1106–8 (Xiang 25); Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 1154–55; Sun, Zhouli zhengyi, 300–301. The jiawu day was one of the days in the sixty-day cycle.

63. The first administrative positions established by Zhou regional states to administer outlying areas seem to have been zai 宰 and feng ren 封人, but we know little about their duties. Sima, Shi ji, 67.2193, 2201, 2207, 2212; Chao, Chunqiu zhanguo de shehui bianqian, 550; Yang, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, 14, 814. Quote from Hsu, “The Spring and Autumn Period,” 574. See also Xu, Zhoudai nantu lishi dili, 275–91; Yang, “Chunqiu shidai Chu guo xianzhi”; Creel, “Beginnings of Bureaucracy”; Li, Bureaucracy and the State, 171.

64. See chapter 4 for details. Classicists (ru 儒) are often called “Confucians,” but this is inappropriate for this period because Confucius and his school were just one group of classicists. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China, 57–60.

65. Because the ideology of classicists like Confucius centered on venerating the Zhou system, they knew more about it than most of their contemporaries, but they also idealized it. Their understanding of the Western Zhou system was probably an amalgam of the traditions of their homeland in Shandong with information from texts like the Odes and the Documents. The Gongyang commentary claims that the Annals recorded a famine directly following the record of the new tax in order to criticize the tax. See Legge, Ch’un Ts’ew, 329. See also Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 1887 (He Xiu’s 何休 commentary on the Zuozhuan), 2286–87 (Chunqiu Gongyangzhuan zhushu); Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 674–75 (Xuan 15), and Pi, Jingxue tonglun, part 4, p. 16.

66. Xu, Guo yu jijie, 206–7 (Lu yu xia); Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 1904–5 (Ai 11).

67. Mengzi zhushu in Ruan, Shisanjing zhushu, 2702; Legge, Mencius, 3A.240–42. Mencius distinguishes among three types of surplus extraction, gong 貢, zhu 助, and che 徹, but unfortunately their meanings are unclear.

68. The first quote is from Ku, A Chinese Mirror for Magistrates, 110. See Wang, Xin yu jiaozhu, 8.124. The second quote is from Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 1584–85 (Zhao 20), Shisanjing zhushu, 2388 (Chunqiu Guliangzhuan zhushu). See Legge, Mencius, 1B.153–54, 162.

69. Schafer, “Hunting Parks and Animal Enclosures”; Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History; Mattos, Stone Drums, 105–7; Sanft, “Environment and Law”; Miller, “Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability.”

70. Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe; Wong and Rosenthal, Before and Beyond Divergence; Chiang, “The Scale of War in the Warring States Period”; Lewis, “Warring States Political History,” 620–32; Hsu, Ancient China in Transition, 53–77; Yates, “Early China.”

71. Von Glahn, The Economic History of China, chap. 2; Hsu, Ancient China in Transition, 107–39; Hung, “The Art and Architecture of the Warring States Period,” 654, 679–81; Emura, Shunjū Sengoku jidai seidō kahei; Kakinuma, “The Emergence and Spread of Coins in China”; Peng, “Coinage and Commercial Development”; Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 3–9; Kerr and Wood, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.12, 302; Kuhn, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.9, 3–4, 159–60; Sima, Shi ji, 129.3253–84; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 9, 261–301.

72. Honeychurch, Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire, 128–29, 160–63, 210–15, 246–49.

73. For more details, see Lewis, “Warring States Political History”; Creel, Shen Pu-Hai.

74. Kamenka, Bureaucracy; Weber, Economy and Society, 973.

75. Lewis, “Warring States Political History”; Li and Branner, Writing and Literacy in Early China; Wang, Writing and the Ancient State, chapter 4.

76. Cao, Gudai xiyin, 2–10; Lewis, “Warring States Political History,” 608.

77. Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu”; Zhu and Chen, Yuelu Shuyuan cang Qin jian 2; Lander, “State Management of River Dikes”; Yang, “Beida cang Qin jian ‘tianshu’ chushi”; Ames, Sun-Tzu, 174–76; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 208–9; Sanft, Communication and Cooperation.

78. Harper, “Resurrection in Warring States Popular Religion,” 17.

Chapter Four. The Power in the West

The epigraph is from Sima, Shi ji, 6.277; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 164 (translation modified). The first sentence of the epigraph is found in other texts and was probably a common saying in the Warring States period. Liu, Zhanguo ce, 504 (Chu 2); Crump, Chan-Kuo Ts‘e, 244.

1. Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 3–7.

2. Huang et al., “Charcoal Records of Fire History,” 34–37; Tan et al., “Holocene Wildfires,” 171.

3. Sanft, “Edict of Monthy Ordinances”; Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 35–43, 59–276, 683–92 (my “hawks become doves” sentence paraphrases page 38). Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 97–99; Zheng, “Lun ‘Shi Qi yue’ de yong li”; Soothill, Hall of Light, 237–51. I have used Knoblock and Riegel’s translations below, sometimes slightly modified.

4. On the new year festival, see Bodde, Festivals in Classical China, 45–52; on ice, fishing, and repairs, see Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 241, 259; on hunting and fishing, see Mattos, Stone Drums, 165–66, 195–96, 220–21, 240–41.

5. The quotes in this paragraph are from Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 61, 77–78, 95–97, 98, 115. The reference to chives comes from Wang, Da dai li ji, 26.

6. Wang, Da Dai li ji, 36–37; Soothill, Hall of Light, 239–40; Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 135 (cicadas), 155 (“the soil is steaming”). On insects attacking crops, see Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 14, 88, 214–17, 314, 476–79, 508, 614, 666, 674, 684, 932, 1906–13.

7. The quotes are from Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 189, 191. On malnutrition, see Wei et al., “Dental Wear and Oral Health as Indicators of Diet,” and Pechenkina, Benfer, and Ma, “Diet and Health in the Neolithic of the Wei and Yellow River Basins.” On millet cooking, see Jaffe, “The Continued Creation of Communities.”

8. Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 208.

9. “Water begins to freeze” is from Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 223–25. The crickets passage is from ode 154, while “big rat” is from ode 113. See Waley, The Book of Songs, 164, 309. On meat sauces, see Huang, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.5.

10. Dong et al., “Shifting Diets and the Rise of Male-Biased Inequality”; Miller et al., “Raising Girls and Boys in Early China”; Gururani, “Forests of Pleasure and Pain.”

11. Von Glahn, The Economic History of China, chap. 2; Hsu, Ancient China in Transition, 107–39; Hung, “The Art and Architecture of the Warring States Period,” 654, 679–81; Emura, Shunjū Sengoku jidai seidō kahei; Kakinuma, “The Emergence and Spread of Coins in China”; Peng, “Coinage and Commercial Development”; Kerr and Wood, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.12, 302; Kuhn, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.9, 3–4, 159–60; Sima, Shi ji, 129.3253–84; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 9, 261–301; Liu, Xian Qin liang Han nongye.

12. Sima Qian does not specify whether the “Qin record(s),” Qin ji 秦記, was one document or several; his statement that it “does not include months or days” matches the year-by-year annals of the “Qin Basic Annals” and also those unearthed at Shuihudi. If one ignores the longer stories in the “Basic Annals,” which are taken from texts like the Zuo zhuan and Intrigues of the Warring States, one is left with the rather bare annals taken from the “Qin records.” Sima, Shi ji, 15.685–87; Shaughnessy, “The Qin Biannianji”; Fujita, “Shi ji” Zhanguo shiliao yanjiu, 221–69; Gao, Yunmeng Qin jian chu tan, 12–17, 122–47.

13. Zhao, “New Explorations of Early Qin Culture”; Li, “A Study of the Bronze Vessels and Sacrificial Remains”; Liu, “Gansu Tianshui Maojiaping yizhi dongwu yicun”; Falkenhausen, Chinese Society, 233–39; Jaffe, “The Continued Creation of Communities.”

14. Sima, Shi ji, 5.179; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 91; Falkenhausen, “Mortuary Behaviour”; Falkenhausen, Chinese Society, 215. Qin’s capital in Baoji was called Pingyang 平陽.

15. Wang, Shang, and Hu, Qin wuzhi wenhua shi, 208; Sima, Shi ji, 129.3261; Watson, Records, 441.

16. This review of Qin archaeology largely follows Falkenhausen, Chinese Society, 111, 213–43, 326–38; Falkenhausen, “Mortuary Behaviour”; Falkenhausen, “The Waning of the Bronze Age” (quote from p. 487). Shelach, in “Collapse or Transformation,” p. 129, argues that it is the largest tomb complex ever built for a single person.

17. Mattos, “Eastern Zhou Bronze Inscriptions,” 111–23 (on the celestial mandate); Falkenhausen, “The Waning of the Bronze Age,” 459–62; Shaanxi, “2014 nian Shaanxi sheng kaogu yanjiuyuan kaogu diaocha,” 10–11; Zhongguo, “Xi’an shi Chang’an qu Fengjing yizhi shuixi yicun.”

18. Mattos, Stone Drums, 105–7, 220–21, 237–41.

19. Thatcher, “Central Government of the State of Ch’in,” 33; Sima, Shi ji, 5.179; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 91.

20. In 713 Qin eliminated Bo 亳/Dang She 蕩社 (possibly near Xi’an); in 697 it attacked Peng Xi 彭戲 in the eastern Guanzhong; in 688 it attacked the Rong of Gui 邽 and Ji 冀 near Tianshui; in 687 it took Du 杜 (near Xi’an) and Zheng 鄭 (in the Zhouyuan); and in 640 Qin destroyed the polities of Liang 梁 and Rui 芮 in the eastern Guanzhong. The four settlements made into xian were Gui, Ji, Du, and Zheng. Sima, Shi ji, 1.182–89; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 92–98; Qian, Shi ji diming kao, 271, 275, 368; Li, Landscape and Power, 245–62; Shaanxi sheng, Liangdaicun Ruiguo mudi.

21. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World.

22. Li, Landscape and Power, 175–87; Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, esp. 68–90; Yang, Chunqiu Zhanguo shiqi Zhongguo beifang wenhua dai, 36–43; So and Bunker, Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier.

23. Wei et al., “Dental Wear and Oral Health as Indicators of Diet”; Liu, “Gansu Tianshui Maojiaping yizhi dongwu yicun.”

24. Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, 328–463; Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, 93–126.

25. The Rong town near Sanmenxia was Maojin 茅津, probably near modern Pinglu 平陸 County. Qian, Shi ji diming kao, 512; Lin, Qin shi gao, 117. Sima Qian’s account of Qin’s conquest of the Rong seems to have been taken from a Warring States work of political argumentation, parts of which also appear in the Han Feizi. See Sima, Shi ji, 5.192–94; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 100–101; Wang, Han Feizi jijie, 10.71–72; On the Qin tombs in the Jing River valley, see Falkenhausen, “The Waning of the Bronze Age,” 488.

26. Yates, “The Horse in Early Chinese Military History,” 36–57; Creel, The Origins of Statecraft, 262–88; Gaunitz et al., “Ancient Genomes Revisit the Ancestry of Domestic and Przewalski’s Horses.”

27. Linduff, “Production of Signature Artifacts for the Nomad Market”; Linduff, Hanks, and Bunker, “First Millennium BCE Beifang Artifacts,” 282–87; Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China.

28. The details of these wars are scattered through the Zuo zhuan (especially the periods of Lords Xi and Wen) and chapters 5, 39, and 44 of the Shi ji. Lin, Qin shi gao, 117–45; Sima, Shi ji, 5.186–93; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 95–100.

29. Sima, Shi ji, 5.202; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 108; Chavannes, Les Mémoires Historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien, 2:253 n. 314; Pines, “The Question of Interpretation”; Pines, “Biases and Their Sources”; Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” chap. 2; Chen, “Two Ordinances Issued during the Reign.”

30. Qin offered a diplomatic gift to Shu in 475 BCE, which reveals that Qin was in contact with polities far to the south at that time (Sima, Shi ji, 5.199, 15.688–89; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 106–7). The town in the Hanzhong Basin was called Nan Zheng. The “Basic Annals of Qin” records that Qin took Nan Zheng from Shu, but the “Chronological Table of the Six Kingdoms” records that Shu took it from Qin (Sima, Shi ji, 5.199–200, 15.679, 700, 713). Note that the area named Hanzhong that Qin and Chu fought over for several decades was not the modern region of that name but an area farther east, perhaps around modern Ankang (Qian, Shi ji diming kao, 213). Sage, Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China; Bagley, Ancient Sichuan.

31. Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” chap. 2; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 211–15.

32. Barbieri-Low, “Coerced Migration and Resettlement.” For other examples of how imperialism affects the central regions of empires, see Hosking, Russia, and McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible.

33. Quote from Loewe, “Review of ‘Shang Yang’s Reforms and State Control in China.’” Hara, in “Nōhon” shugi to “ōdo” no hassei, and Muramatsu, in Chūgoku kodai kankyōshi no kenkyū, also discuss the environmental history of Shang Yang’s reforms. More general works on Shang Yang include Pines, The Book of Lord Shang; Vandermeersch, La formation du légisme; Li and Yang, Shang Yang’s Reforms and State Control in China; Dean and Massumi, First and Last Emperors.

34. The main Qin rulers after Lord Xiao were Lord—and then King—Huiwen 惠文 (r. 337–311 BCE), King Zhaoxiang 昭襄 (r. 306–251 BCE), and King Zheng 政/the First Emperor 始皇帝 (246–210 BCE). Sima, Shi ji, 5.199–202; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 106–9; Ma, Qin ji shi, 147, 856–70; Li, Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations, 235.

35. Shang Yang had worked under Gongshu Cuo 公叔痤, who had learned from Wu Qi 吳起, who had served under Li Kui 李悝. Gongshu Cuo credited Wu Qi with emphasizing the balance of rewards and punishments in encouraging soldiers to follow the king’s law. Although later texts treat Li Kui as an important reformer, he is rarely mentioned in early texts, and Wu Qi seems to have been more highly regarded. Li Kui is credited in the Shi ji with “the teaching of maximizing the power of the land” (74.2349), which could also describe the ideas of Shang Yang. Vandermeersch, La formation du légisme, 24–25; Swann, Food & Money in Ancient China, 136–44; Liu, Zhanguo ce, 5.212–16 (Qin 3), 22.781–84 (Wei 1); Crump, Chan-Kuo Ts‘e, 132–35. For an example of the Wei influence on Qin, see Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 208–10; Lewis, “Warring States Political History,” 603–6; Liao, The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzῠ, vol. 2, 212; Wang, Han Feizi jijie, 43.397; Creel, Shen Pu-Hai.

36. On evidence from tombs, see Falkenhausen, Chinese Society, 319.

37. For Sima Qian’s biography (Shi ji, chapter 68), see Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 7, 87–96. On the Book of Lord Shang, Yuri Pines dates chapters 2–4 and 12 to before 350 BCE and chapters 6–8 to 350–330. Pines, The Book of Lord Shang, 25–58; Gao, Shang Jun shu zhu yi, 6–11; Duyvendak, Book of Lord Shang; Pines, “Alienating Rhetoric.” For artifacts with inscriptions that mention Shang Yang, see Qiu, Zhongguo gudai du liang heng tuji, 44, and Portal, The First Emperor, 34. On Shang Yang’s fame, see Li and Yang, Shang Yang’s Reforms and State Control in China, xvi–xliii; Wang, Han Feizi jijie, 13.97, 14.101, 43.397; Sun, “Shi Ji ‘Shang jun liezhuan’ shiliao jueyuan.”

38. The quoted passage is my translation from Jiang, Shang jun shu zhuizhi, 2.12; Pines, The Book of Lord Shang, 127. On the use of “one” to mean “unified under the control of the state,” see Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-Huang, 13, 18, 42, 44, 47; Sanft, Communication and Cooperation, 41–42. As shown in Graham, “The ‘Nung-Chia,’ ” some agro-centric ideologies tended more toward anarchism than despotism. Shang Yang’s new levies were fu 賦. See Sima, Shi ji, 5.203; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 109; Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 106–13.

39. It is unclear how the “clarified the positions” passage from Sima Qian should be punctuated and interpreted, though the general meaning is clear. Sima, Shi ji, 68.2230; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 7, 89–90 (translation modified); Takigawa, Shiki kanchū kōshō, 68.3405. On the Wei statute, see Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 208–9; Lewis, The Construction of Space, chap. 2.

40. The translation draws on both Pines and Duyvendak. Jiang, Shang jun shu zhuizhi, 4.32–34; Pines, The Book of Lord Shang, 153–54; Duyvendak, Book of Lord Shang, 204.

41. Hsing, “Qin-Han Census and Tax and Corvée Administration.”

42. Incidentally, it is sometimes stated that Shang Yang arranged families in groups of both ten and five, but really it was only five. It would seem that later commentators interpreted the shi in shiwu (variously written 仕伍 or 士伍) to mean “ten” (仕), when in fact it was a variant of shi 士, which had become a general term for an adult male (unranked commoners were called shiwu 士伍). Sima, Shi ji, 68.2230; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 7, 89; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 13, 145–46; Xu, Han shi waizhuan jishi, 143; Yates, “Social Status in the Ch’in,” 201–3; Kiser and Cai, “War and Bureaucratization in Qin China.”

43. Scott, Seeing Like a State; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 7, 91; Sima, Shi ji, 68.2232; Lewis, Sanctioned Violence, 273; Pines, The Book of Lord Shang, 200. I have modified the translation to reflect my understanding of this ambiguous passage.

44. Excavated measures from the final two centuries BCE reveal that a chi 尺 averaged 23.1 centimeters. Based on that, we can calculate the following: 6 chi = 1 bu 步 (1.39 meters); 30 bu = 1 ze 則; 1 square bu 步 = 1.9 square meters; 240 square bu = 1 mu 畝 (457.1 square meters); and 100 mu = 1 qing 頃. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 699–711; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 211–15; Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 551–58; Sima, Shi ji, 6.238.

45. Peng, Zhangjiashan Han jian “Suan shu shu,” 113–28; Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu,” 152, 161–67.

46. Leeming, “Official Landscapes in Traditional China.”

47. Guo, “Zhanguo Qin feng zongyi washu,” 182.

48. Liu, Zhanguo ce, 504 (Chu 2); Crump, Chan-Kuo Ts‘e, 244. These words are attributed to Zhang Yi, a Qin minister, who gives a much longer discourse on the power of Qin in Liu, Zhanguo ce, 95–114 (Qin 1); Crump, Chan-Kuo Ts‘e, 125–30.

49. On tomb distribution, see Teng, “From Vassal State to Empire,” and Falkenhausen, “Mortuary Behaviour,” 115. The site distribution information on map 9 is taken from Zhongguo wenwuju, Zhongguo wenwu dituji Shaanxi fence [Atlas of Chinese Cultural Relics], 52–63. Note that the top map ends before the Eastern Zhou period and the bottom one supposedly begins after it, so Eastern Zhou–era archaeological sites are supposedly not depicted in either map. However, the map of the Eastern Zhou era on page 61 of the Atlas includes very few sites, which suggests that the Qin-Han map, depicted here on the bottom, also includes some Qin sites of the late Eastern Zhou period.

50. On the location of early iron deposits, see Wagner, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.11, 83–114, and Falkenhausen, Chinese Society, 224–33. An example of a strong emphasis on the importance of metal tools is Yang, Zhanguo shi, 42–57. On the environmental effects of metal tools, see Storozum et al., “Anthrosols and Ancient Agriculture.” On wells, see Gao, Ming-Qing shiqi Guanzhong diqu shui ziyuan, 47–55.

51. The eastward move of Qin’s capital may have begun when Qin Lord Suling 肅靈 (r. 424–415 BCE) lived in Jingyang 涇陽, somewhere near the modern county of the same name. Sima, Shi ji, 5.202, 6.287, 68.2232; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 172; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 7, 2006, 107; Wang, “Qin Xian gong du Yueyang”; Zhongguo shehuikexueyuan, “Qin Han Yueyang cheng yizhi”; Wang, “Qin dingdu Xianyang de shengtai dilixue.”

52. The walls are 843 × 902 × 426 × 576 meters. Shaanxi sheng, Qin du Xianyang kaogu baogao, 10–12.

53. Ibid., 13, 34–43, 212–17; Wang, Qin Han shiqi shengtai huanjing yanjiu, 93–94. On Xi’an’s water supply, see Shi, “Han-Tang Chang’an yu shengtai huanjing.”

54. Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, 25–29; Elman and Kern, Statecraft and Classical Learning, 33–93, 129–54; Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China, 42–51; Huang, “The Ming Fiscal Administration,” 116.

55. The Offices of Zhou is arranged by offices, so the relevant sections can be found under their titles: butchers (pao ren 庖人), cooks (yong 饔 and peng ren 亨人), hunters (shou ren 獸人), fishers (yu ren 漁人), turtle catchers (bi ren 鱉人), tailors (feng ren 縫人), cobblers (ju ren 屨人), specialists in furs (si qiu 司裘), skins (zhang pi 掌皮), silk (dian si 典絲), hemp (dian xi 典枲), and dying cloth (ran ren 染人), as well as people in charge of meat preserves (hai ren 醢人), vinegar preserves (xi ren 醯人), alcohol (jiu zheng 酒正 and jiu ren 酒人), other ingestible liquids (jiang ren 漿人), salt (yan ren 鹽人), rice (chong ren 舂人), cured meat (xi ren 臘人), ice (bing ren 凌人), and orchards (chang ren 場人). See also Sterckx, Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China, 134–43; Poo, “Religion and Religious Life of the Qin.”

56. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 923–37, 1254; Barbieri-Low, Artisans in Early Imperial China; Guan and Herrmann, Kao Gong Ji; Shaanxi sheng, Qin du Xianyang kaogu baogao.

57. I estimate that around 2,300,000 of the 2,436,360 people recorded as living in the region’s three administrative units in the mid-Han population records inhabited the 15,000-square-kilometer area of the Guanzhong and surrounding foothills. Ge, Xi Han renkou dili, 96; Tan, Zhongguo lishi dituji, 2.5–6; Yang, Chutu jiandu yu Qin Han shehui, 12–15. We know of three districts in Xianyang: Yin 陰, Chang’an 長安, and Jianzhang 建章, all located south of the Wei River. Xu, Qin Han lishi dili yanjiu, 52–58. On the cemeteries, see Shaanxi sheng, Xi’an Youjiazhuang Qin mu. On the bridge, see Shaanxi sheng, “Xi’an shi Han Chang’an chengbei Wei qiao”; Ban, Han shu, 63.2747; Li, Shuijingzhu jiaojian tushi, 354, 536.

58. Quote from Wang, Han Feizi jijie, 35.337. These two paragraphs draw on Xu, Qin Han ducheng yu ziran huanjing, 161–66; Schafer, “Hunting Parks and Animal Enclosures”; Sanft, “The Construction and Deconstruction of Epanggong.” On Han farms, see Zhou, “Guanzhong Qin-Han taolu.” For the commoner in Shanglin, see Sima, Shi ji, 85.2562.

59. Tang Huaqinggong kaogudui, “Tang Huaqinggong tangchi yizhi.”

60. Needham, Wang, and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.3, 228–31, 285–96; Watson, Records, 53–60; Liu et al., “Earliest Hydraulic Enterprise in China.” On Zheng, see Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition, 974 (Xiang 10); on Wei, see Sima, Shi ji, 29.1408. On Wu’s canals, which are the origins of the Grand Canal, see Shi, “Lun Jishui he Honggou.”

61. Wang, Xunzi jijie, 9.168; Lander, “State Management of River Dikes,” 347–53; Knoblock, Xunzi, 106. The passage from the Annals of Lü Buwei reads: “When one lacks the strength, do not irrigate land and plough it” (my translation), from Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 653.

62. Sima, Shi ji, 29.1408; Watson, Records, 54–55; Wang, Han shu buzhu, 29.2867–68. On this genre of political stories, see Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, 1–11, and Mawangdui, Zhanguo zonghengjia shu. These stories contain much accurate history, but it is often impossible to separate fact from fiction.

63. This was the 240-pace mu, which equals 461 square meters, so 40,000 qing would make 184,000 hectares. And 300 li is 126 kilometers. Sima, Shi ji, 29.1408. Watson, Records, 54–55. On the area of land, see Will, “Clear Waters versus Muddy Waters,” 288.

64. Fei et al., “Evolution of Saline Lakes”; Li, Guanzhong shuili kaifa, 19–20.

65. Sima, Shi ji, 29.1408; Watson, Records, 54–55; Will, “Clear Waters versus Muddy Waters.” The sixth-century Commentary on the Classic of Rivers (Shuijing zhu 水經注) lays out the path in some detail, though the system had been significantly modified since the Qin and many of the landmarks it mentions are unknown. Yang and Xiong, Shuijing zhushu, 16.1455–61.

66. Eliassen and Todd, “The Wei Pei Irrigation Project in Shensi Province,” 172; Wuhan shuili dianli xueyuan, Zhongguo shuili shi gao, 124–25. For a modern map, see Liu, Zhongguo ziran dili tuji, 134. On silt, see Needham, Wang, and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.3, 227. On Sima Qian’s implausibly high numbers, see Bodde, “The State and Empire of Ch’in,” 98–102.

67. Eliassen and Todd, “The Wei Pei Irrigation Project in Shensi Province,” 176; Huang et al., “Extraordinary Floods of 4100–4000 a BP”; Huang et al., “Holocene Palaeoflood Events.” I would like to thank graduate students at Shaanxi Normal University for providing me with the flow records for the Jing River.

68. Qin, Yang, and Zhao, “Shaanxi Jingyang xian Qin Zheng Guo Qu”; Wang, Han shu buzhu, 29.2880; Ban, Han shu, 29.1685.

69. Li, Guanzhong shuili kaifa, 20, 32–33; Will, “Clear Waters versus Muddy Waters”; Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, 298–315.

70. Wang, Dong Zhou Qin Han Guanzhong nongye; Zhang and Fan, Zhongguo nongye tongshi Zhanguo Qin Han, 164; Sabban, “De la main à la pâte”; Hsu, Han Agriculture, 84–85.

71. The phrase is zhen yu tu 甽浴土. Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 26.655.

72. Gao, Wen xuan Li zhu yishu, 67–70; Knechtges, Wen Xuan, vol. 1, 111–13. Translation modified. It literally says “50,000 dikes and mounds,” but this is apparently a stock phrase for area. Ban does not say 50,000 of what unit of area.

Chapter Five. Watching Over the Granaries

The epigraph is my translation. Jiang, Shang jun shu zhuizhi, 4.34; Pines, The Book of Lord Shang, 154. “Hay and straw” are apparently counted as one item. The Book of Lord Shang frequently criticizes sophists and includes them in this list only in order to contrast them with “useful people.”

1. The term shi huangdi would more literally be translated “first majestic deity,” but I will follow the custom of using the terms “empire” and “imperial,” which derive not from the religious language preferred by Qin’s king but from a Latin military title, imperator.

2. Yates, “The Rise of Qin”; Scott, Seeing Like a State.

3. For the argument that China’s early empires were among the most administratively intensive in the ancient world, see Finer, The History of Government. On Qin and early Han excavated legal texts, see Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 39–46, 221–33; Staack and Lau, Legal Practice in the Formative Stages of the Chinese Empire; Yates, “Evidence for Qin Law in the Qianling County Archive.”

4. Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” chap. 2; Ardant, “Financial Policy and Economic Infrastructure”; D’Altroy and Earle, “Staple Finance, Wealth Finance and Storage.”

5. Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 183–88; Smith, “Territories, Corridors, and Networks.”

6. On the enfeoffment argument, see Sima, Shi ji, 6.238–39, 254–55; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 137, 146–47.

7. On the history of administrative organization in China, see Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China; Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael.

8. On Qin religion, see Poo, “Religion and Religious Life of the Qin,” and Sanft, “Paleographic Evidence of Qin Religious Practice.” On the ideology of rulership in China and elsewhere, see Finer, The History of Government, 26; Vandermeersch, “An Enquiry into the Chinese Conception of the Law”; Lieven, Empire, 10–11.

9. Habberstad, Forming the Early Chinese Court.

10. Many works on the Han government are arranged in the same order as the officials listed in chapter 19 of the Han History. I use Loewe’s versions of official titles but change his “Superintendent” to “Minister” and “Ministry” since the Chinese terms refer to both officer and office. Loewe, The Government of the Qin and Han Empires; Bielenstein, The Bureaucracy of Han Times; Bu, Qin Han guanliao zhidu; Wang, Han shu buzhu, 19.859–915; Loewe, A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods, 757–65. On the seal impressions, see Zhou and Lu, Qin fengni ji; Zhongguo, “Xi’an Xiangjiagang yizhi Qin fengni”; and Shaanxi sheng, Qin du Xianyang kaogu baogao.

11. The higher of the two Chancellors was called xiangbang 相邦, a position often given to foreigners (keqing 客卿), while the lower was called chengxiang 丞相. The Imperial Counselors were called yushi dafu 御史大夫, and the Supreme Commander was tai wei 太尉. In the Han, the Chancellor, Imperial Counselor, and Supreme Commander were known as the “three lords” (san gong 三公), and the ministers were known as the “nine ministers” (jiu qing 九卿), but there is no evidence that these terms were used in Qin. Nie and Liu, “Qin zhi xiangbang”; Sima, Shi ji, 6.236, 260, 267, 71.2311; Bodde, China’s First Unifier; Wang, Han shu buzhu, 28.866; Fu, Qin fengni huikao, 3.

12. The Chinese titles of these ministries are (1) fengchang 奉常 or taichang 太常; (2) langzhong ling 郎中令; (3) weiwei 衛尉; (4) taipu 太僕; (5) tingwei 廷尉; (6) dianke 典客; (7) zongzheng 宗正; (8) zhisu neishi 治粟內史; (9) shaofu 少府; and (10) zhongwei 中尉. The ministries of Ceremonies, the Palace, Guards, State Visits, and the Capital were concerned mostly with the capital region. Seal impressions of Qin’s fengchang, langzhong cheng 郎中丞, tingwei, zongzheng, shaofu, zhongwei, and neishi have been found. Early Han statutes also list offices of Border Fortifications, beisai duwei 備塞都尉; Cavalry and Chariots, cheqiwei 車騎尉; and Counselors of the Palace, zhong dafuling 中大夫令, at the same rank as ministers, which may have been the case in Qin. Loewe, The Government of the Qin and Han Empires, 24–33; Bielenstein, The Bureaucracy of Han Times, 17–69; Fu, Qin fengni huikao; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 983–87, 1179.

13. On the prayer to Mount Hua, see Pines, “The Question of Interpretation”; Sima, Shi ji, 6.266, 28.1371–77; Watson, Records, 16–18; Falkenhausen, Chinese Society, 328–36; Hung, “The Art and Architecture of the Warring States Period,” 716–17; Nylan and Vankeerberghen, Chang’an 26 BCE, 24, 33, 211–12; Xu, Qin Han ducheng yu ziran huanjing, 182–99. On the god of agriculture, see Sanft, “Paleographic Evidence of Qin Religious Practices.”

14. Chen, Peng, and Liu, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 1, 55–56; Wang, Han shu buzhu, 19.883–85; Dubs, The History of the Former Han Dynasty, vol. 1, 281–83, 242; Fan, Hou Han shu 26.3590. Qin’s Great Granary was called tai cang 太倉, and its Main Treasury was danei 大内. Tai, which means “great,” is variously written 泰, 大, and 太. The Han History also says that the Ministry of Finance was in charge of the Sacred Field (ji tian 籍田), the office of ceremonial plowing, but we do not know if that existed in Qin. Wang, Han shu buzhu, 19.883–85, 21.1164; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 54; Fu, Qin fengni huikao, 58; Yang, Chutu jiandu yu Qin Han shehui, 3–30. On the Main Treasury, see Hulsewé, “Ch’in Documents,” 195–200; Sima, Shi ji, 11.446. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 1013; Fu, Qin fengni huikao, 63.

15. Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 78, 121; Gale, Discourses on Salt and Iron, 34; Wang, Yantielun jiaozhu, 6.78. The figures on the income of the Han Lesser Treasury versus the central government come from the Xin lun, a text from the mid-Han. Wang, Han shu buzhu, 19.884.

16. On Qin’s communication system, see Wang, Qin Han jiaotong shi gao, 28–32; Sanft, Communication and Cooperation, chap. 6; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 211–15; Lien, “Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period.”

17. On the order to make maps, see Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, 118 (nos. 8-224, 8-412, 8-1415); Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 479. Quoted passage from Jia, Zhouli zhushu, 333–34 (地官•大司徒).

18. Sima, Shi ji, 53.2014.

19. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 111–20; Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 72. The Qin term for county Magistrate was da sefu 大嗇夫 or xian sefu 縣嗇夫. Because sefu was a general term for a person in charge of something, I follow Hulsewé in translating it “overseer” in all cases except that of the magistrate. Han documents also refer to overseers of towns (yi 邑), markets (shi 市), travelers’ lodges (chuan she 傳舍), kitchens (chu 廚), and storehouses (ku 庫), all offices that may have existed in Qin. Financial offices were called shao nei 少内. On Magistrates, see Qiu, “Sefu chutan,” and Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 36, 87. On overseers, see Hulsewé, “Ch’in Documents,” 201–4; Ye, “Jiedu Liye Qin jian”; Yinqueshan Han mu zhujian zhengli xiaozu, Yinqueshan Han mu zhujian, 1:81.843–46, 85.88–97, 90.948; Hubei Sheng and Suizhou Shi kaogu dui, Suizhou Kongjiapo Han mu jiandu, 123, 197.

20. On the groups of five, see Yates, “Social Status in the Ch’in,” 219–28; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 788–89.

21. Wang, Han shu buzhu, 1.10; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 111–19; Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 104.

22. Chen, Peng, and Liu, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 1, 63–64, 93–95, 135 (nos. 36, 37, 86–93, and 187); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 29, 38–41, 53–55, 78–82, 90–101; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 823–32.

23. For a statute on the information produced by local officials, see Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 798–99. On the registers of the Bureau of Households, see Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, 167 (no. 8-488); on the registers of the Bureaus of Works and Granaries, see Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, 164 (nos. 8-480 and 8-481); and on the registers of the Qianling Bureau of Finance, see Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, 152–53 (no. 8-454).

24. Hsing, “Qin-Han Census and Tax and Corvée Administration”; Chen, “Liye ‘huji jian’ yu Zhanguo moqi de jiceng shehui”; Sanft, “Population Records from Liye.” Ye, in “Jiedu Liye Qin jian,” provides an example of a nonwidowed woman listed as a head of household (Liye no. 8-19).

25. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 697–706; Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 15.1–3; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 21.

26. For a brief comparison of European and Qing taxation, see Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael, 5–9.

27. On grain storage in Chinese history, see Bray, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.2, 378–423; Will and Wong, Nourish the People. On the hemp tax, see Zhu and Chen, Yuelu Shuyuan cang Qin jian, vol. 2, 6.28.

28. The Chinese names of these five registers are zhai yuan hu ji 宅園戶籍, nian xi ji 年細籍, tian bi di ji 田比地籍, tian he ji 田合籍, and tian zu ji 田租籍. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 798–99 (slips 331–32).

29. Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 686–702; Yamada, Shin Kan zaisei shūnyū, 33.

30. The quote is from Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 15 (nos. 1–3). I have modified the translation in Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 21; see also Yates, “Some Notes on Ch’in Law,” 247. On collecting fixed amounts from a specific area of land, see Peng, Zhangjiashan Han jian “Suan shu shu,” 77.85, and Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu,” 135.

31. Korolkov, “Empire-Building.” An example of these conversion rates is this: “[The tax on] 3 square bu of millet is 1 dou; on 4 square bu of wheat is 1 dou; on 5 square bu of small beans is 1 dou.” Peng, Zhangjiashan Han jian “Suan shu shu,” 58.43; Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu,” 119; Chemla and Ma, “How Do the Earliest Known Mathematical Writings Highlight the State’s Management of Grains?”; Chemla and Guo, Les neuf chapitres, 201–61.

32. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 23; Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 81–110; Hunan sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiu suo, Liye Qin jian, 1:1:150 (this is no. 8-1165 in this publication, but no. 8-559 in Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, 179). On the uses of hay, see Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu,” 126–27 (nos. 52–54). On feather and cocoon taxes, see Hunan sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiu suo, Liye Qin jian, vol 1, 76, 222 (nos. 8-518, 8-1735).

33. Peng, Zhangjiashan Han jian “Suan shu shu,” 73.72; Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu,” 132.

34. Jiang, Shang jun shu zhuizhi, 6.42; Duyvendak, Book of Lord Shang, 111; Pines, The Book of Lord Shang, 158–59; Legge, Mencius, 1A.129; Johnston, The Mozi, 20.200–1; Sima, Shi ji, 79.2423.

35. Sima, Shi ji, 6.251; Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, xii, 346 (no. 8-1519). On the “grassy fields,” see Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 2, 21, 49 (nos. 9-15, 9-40); see also 377 and 477 (nos. 9-1865, 9-2344); Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 796 (nos. 323 and 324); Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 233, 558–62.

36. On the use of convicts for farming, see Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 122–23, and Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, 141 (no. 8-383). For the quote on Qin, see Liu, Zhanguo ce, 18.618 (Zhao 2); Crump, Chan-Kuo Ts‘e, 336. On the ranks, see Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, xxii, 873–75, 1328; on the presence of similar systems in Tang law, see Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty.

37. One bu equaled six chi 尺, and one chi was around 23.1 centimeters. So bu were 1.39 meters in length and 1.9 square meters in area; 240 square bu equaled one mu 畂; and 100 mu equaled 1 qing 頃. A mu was around 457 square meters, so a qing was 45,700 square meters. An acre, by comparison, is 4,047 square meters, and a hectare is 10,000. For the laws on land redistribution and on high-ranked people’s taxes, see Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 790–93 (slips 310–17), and Yang, “Er nian lü ling’ yu Qin-Han ming tian zhai zhi.” On measures, see Wilkinson, Chinese History, 552–58. For the idea that these laws were intended to limit the landholdings of the powerful, see Yang, “Notes on the Economic History of the Chin Dynasty,” and Takigawa, Shiki kanchū kōshō, 68.3405. On the statuses without rank, see Yates, “Social Status in the Ch’in,” 201–3.

38. Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 790–91 (nos. 312–13).

39. Confusingly, the shi was a unit of both weight, equal to 120 jin 斤 (250 grams each, for a total of 30 kilograms), and volume, equal to 100 sheng 升 (200 milliliters each for a total of 20 liters). Swann calculates that one Han shi was equivalent to 1.29 US bushels of unhusked millet. Ban, Han shu, 24.1125; Swann, Food & Money in Ancient China, 140–42, 365; Wilkinson, Chinese History, 555–56. For modern land figures, see Brandt and Sands, “Land Concentration,” 182.

40. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, 2–3; Shih, A Preliminary Study of the Book Ch’i Min Yao Shu.

41. On later periods, see Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty, 1–11; Balazs, “Le traité économique du ‘Souei-chou,’” 144–53; Yang, “Notes on the Economic History of the Chin Dynasty,” 119–26, 167–68.

42. On the Zheng Guo Canal in later periods, see Will, “Clear Waters versus Muddy Waters,” 325. The quote from the British officer comes from Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, 87; Barbieri-Low, “Coerced Migration and Resettlement in the Qin Imperial Expansion.”

43. Chen, Peng, and Liu, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 1, 65 (no. 40); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 41–42; Selbitschka, “Quotidian Afterlife”; Yates, “War, Food Shortages, and Relief Measures in Early China.”

44. Chen, Peng, and Liu, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 1, 56–57 (nos. 21–27); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 34–35.

45. Cai, Qin guo liangshi jingji yanjiu (the Ao 敖 granary was at Xingyang 滎陽); Sima, Shi ji, 97.2694; Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 19 (nos. 49–50); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 31.

46. This section draws on Korolkov, “Empire-Building” and Hulsewé, “Some Remarks on Statute Labour.” For fascinating lists of labor duties from the Liye documents, see Chen, Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi, vol. 1, 84–85, 196 (nos. 8-145, 8-663).

47. Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 26 (no. 136); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 67.

48. See Chen, Peng, and Liu, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 1, 105 (nos. 115–24); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 63–64; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 902–10. The translation is mine, based on Chen, Sun, and Yan, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 4, 225–37; Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 211–15; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 693–711.

49. Needham, Wang, and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.3, 299–306; Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 497–509; Shi, “Lun Jishui he Honggou.”

50. On the Han statutes, see Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 902–3. On water administration, see Lander, “State Management of River Dikes.” The description of the duties of the Office of Waters is based on Ru Chun’s commentary on the Han History and on the Sanfu huangtu. Wang, Han shu buzhu, 19.870, 884–85, 894–96; Fu, Qin fengni huikao, 18; He, Sanfu huangtu jiaoshi, 353–55.

51. The quote is from Shelach, “Collapse or Transformation?,” 129; Sima, Shi ji, 6.244–59; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 139–51. Loewe, in “On the Terms Bao Zi, Yin Gong, Yin Guan, Huan, and Shou,” argues that the 700,000 laboring families mentioned by Sima Qian were probably yin guan 隐官, prisoners who had suffered mutilating punishments but were then manumitted to some degree. On monarchy and environment, see Warnke, Political Landscape.

52. Tucker et al., “Moving in the Anthropocene.”

53. Sima, Shi ji, 88.2570; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 7, 367. Translation of qing 輕 modified to reflect its meaning “to treat lightly, consider of scant importance.” For examples of scholarship that questions the traditional view of Qin, see Bodde, “The State and Empire of Ch’in”; Sanft, Communication and Cooperation. The unnecessarily large size of the Straight Road was emphasized in Huang, “A Study of Qin Straight Road.”

54. Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 20 (no. 63); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 45; Lander, Schneider, and Brunson, “A History of Pigs in China.” On livestock theft, see Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 46, 51–53, 70 (nos. 5–6, 29, 41–50, 21); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 122–33, 189.

55. Sima, Shi ji, 128.3254, 3262; Watson, Records, 434, 441; Wu, “Cultural Hybridity and Social Status.”

56. On the idea that Qin had plenty of oxen, see Liu, Zhanguo ce, 18.618 (Zhao 2); Crump, Chan-Kuo Ts‘e, 336. Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 18–25 (slips 47, 72–74, 117–24); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 30, 47, 63; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 920–33 (nos. 421–25); Peng, Zhangjiashan Han jian “Suan shu shu,” 52 (nos. 53–54); Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu,” 126–27.

57. Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 16–25 (nos. 13–20, 31, 126–27); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 26–28, 74, 115.

58. Zhou and Lu, Qin fengni ji, 183–98; Fu, Qin fengni huikao; Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 983–84, 1014, 1061, 1079–80, 1118–62, 1256; Wan, “The Horse in Pre-Imperial China.”

59. Chen, Peng, and Liu, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 1, 161, 170 (nos. 9–10, 29–30); Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 107, 114.

60. Sanft, “Environment and Law”; Miller, “Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability in Early China”; Rickett, Guanzi, vol. 1, 107; Knoblock, Xunzi, 9.241.

61. Miller, “Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability in Early China”; Swann, Food & Money in Ancient China, 121. The officials in the Offices of Zhou are called shan yu 山虞, lin heng 林衡, chuan heng 川衡, and ze yu 澤虞. Jia, Zhouli zhushu, 590–95 (地官); Biot, Le Tcheou-li, 105–6; Knoblock and Riegel, Annals, 6.155 (see also p. 653); Wang, Xunzi jijie, 9.168; Knoblock, Xunzi, 106.

62. Quoted passage from Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian, 2 (nos. 3–6); Hulsewé, Remnants of C’h’in Law, 22 (I have modified Hulsewé’s translation). Yates, “Some Notes on Ch’in Law,” 248; Liang and Liu, Yunmeng Longgang Qin jian, slips 278, 279, 258, and 254 include fragments of Qin statutes in the Yunmeng Park in Hubei and state that poachers caught hunting boars, dogs, and three kinds of deer in the park were to be sentenced to hard labor, while anyone caught with dholes, wolves, raccoon-dogs, porcupines, foxes, pheasants, and rabbits were not to be punished. On charcoal, see Dauben, “Suan Shu Shu,” 146.

63. The “Moneymakers” chapter of the Historical Records shows that the Warring States period was a time of large-scale private commerce, though it may reflect Sima Qian’s own time more than the conditions a century or two earlier. Sima, Shi ji, 129.3253–84; Watson, Records, 433–54. On mining and metals, see Golas, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.13, 72–109; Wagner, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.11, 140–44. On the convict miners, see Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 215 (citing Liye Qin jian bowuguan, 57–58 (nos. 12-3, 12-447).

64. Wagner, Iron and Steel in Ancient China, 258; Wagner, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.11, 83–170; Liu, Xian Qin liang Han nongye, 33–39. On excavated texts, see Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society, 1251–54; He, “Xinjian Liye Qin jiandu ziliao xuanjiao (yi),” (no. 10-673).

65. Chen, “Two Ordinances Issued during the Reign of the Second Emperor.”

66. On the Fangmatan maps, see Yan, “Tianshui Fangmatan muban ditu xintan”; Chen, Sun, and Yan, Qin jiandu heji, vol. 4; Wang and Li, “Fangmatan Qin ditu linye jiaotong shiliao”; Harper and Kalinowski, Books of Fate and Popular Culture, 21–25. The Han History states that the mountainous valleys of the upper Wei River and neighboring Tao River had so many forests that people built their homes with wood, something remarkable to people from the Guanzhong, whose buildings were made of rammed earth and bricks. Shi, Huangtu Gaoyuan lishi dili yanjiu, 125, 149–50; Wang, Han shu buzhu, 28.2824; Wang, Yantielun jiaozhu, 3.41. On floating timber down rivers, see Wang, Xin yu jiaozhu, 7.101; Major et al., Huainanzi, 18.733.

67. On maps, see Rickett, Guanzi, 387–91; Hsing, “Lun Mawangdui Han mu ‘zhujun tu’”; Jia, Zhouli zhushu, 597 (地官•卝人); Chen, Sun, and Yan, Qin jiandu heji shiwen zhushi xiudingben, vol. 4, 197.

68. Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, 168; Sima, Shi ji, 6.283; Scheidel, “The Early Roman Monarchy,” 233–34.

69. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 388 (citing Weber).

Chapter Six. A Hundred Generations

The epigraph is part of a poem by Mao Zedong, “Du Fengjian lun cheng Guo lao 讀《封建論》呈郭老,” in Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao, vol. 13, 361. Mao considered the Qin First Emperor (the “ancestral dragon”) a kindred spirit, a fellow founder of a new political system. “Giving up the ghost” refers to the hun 魂, the ethereal soul that disperses after a person’s death. Some editions have ye 業 instead of Qin in the first line, as in “the emperor’s achievements are still with us.” Michael Loewe makes a similar point in his “Review of ‘Shang Yang’s Reforms and State Control in China.’”

1. This paragraph is based on Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” chap. 7.

2. On illegal colonization, see Perdue, Exhausting the Earth; Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers; Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy. On state-organized resource extraction, see Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur.

3. Will and Wong, Nourish the People.

4. “Smithian growth” refers to economic growth resulting from the division of labor and the expansion of markets, in contrast to the much faster growth that became possible with fossil-fueled industrialization. Von Glahn, The Economic History of China, 9–10; Korolkov, “Empire-Building.”

5. On the general expansion of Chinese speakers and their ecosystems, see Marks, China; Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and Their Neighbours”; Wilkinson, Chinese History, sections 25.1, “Internal Migration,” and 25.2, “Becoming Chinese.” On the Pearl River Delta, see Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins, 171–89. On writing indigenous ancestors out of genealogies, see Szonyi, Practicing Kinship.

6. On the colonization of what is now South China, see Brindley, Ancient China and the Yue; de Crespigny, Generals of the South; Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt; Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks; Churchman, The People between the Rivers. On Sichuan, see von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes. On Korea, see Byington, The Han Commanderies in Early Korean History; Lee, “Protect the Pines, Punish the People.” On the southwest, see Yao, The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China; Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist; Wu et al., “Resettlement Strategies and Han Imperial Expansion into Southwest China”; Giersch, Asian Borderlands; Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins; Li, “Towards an Environmental History of the Eastern Red River Delta.” On the adoption of Chinese-style governance in Japan, see Totman, Japan, 74–92.

7. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed; Miller, Fir and Empire.

8. Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire; Perdue, China Marches West; Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China; Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain; Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur.

9. For an overview based on traditional sources, see Needham, Wang, and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.3. On the Yellow River, see Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants; Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State; Pietz, The Yellow River. On the south and the “hydraulic cycle,” see Will, “State Intervention.” See also Zheng, Shui dao qu cheng.

10. Lander, “State Management of River Dikes”; Ling, Zoumalou Wu jian caiji bushu zhengli, 424–54.

11. On water control literature, see Needham, Wang, and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4.3, 323–29; Zheng, Shui dao qu cheng. On agricultural manuals, see Bray, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.2, 55–80; Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, 121–26.

12. On the People’s Republic, see Marks, China, 307–91.

Epilogue

1. On the Euro-American “phobia of the state,” see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population and especially The Birth of Biopolitics.

2. Elvin, “War and the Logic of Short-Term Advantage”; Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, chap. 3.

3. On the impossibility of economic growth without increased resource use, see Smil, Growth.

4. Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth.”

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Illustration Credits

Figures

Title-page illustration. Thanks to Robert Bagley for providing me with this image, which I have modified, from Tch’ou and Pelliot, Bronzes antiques, plate 16.

Figures 1, 9, 11. Photos from the collection “Mission archéologique, Chine, 1914” from Victor Segalen, Augusto Gilbert de Voisins, and Jean Lartigue’s archaeological expedition to China. Each comes from a different folder: fig. 1 from “Ling-pao hien, passe de Han-kou-kouan,” fig. 9 from “Ts’in ling,” and fig. 11 from “Lin-t’ong hien.” Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 2. Images republished with permission of Princeton University Press, from Andrew T. Smith and Yan Xie, eds., A Guide to the Mammals of China, illustrated by Federico Gemma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. except for those of the water buffalo (from “Animals Exhibited at the Calcutta Agricultural Show,” Illustrated London News, July 2, 1864, 5), the rhinoceros (from the Viscount Walden, “Report on the Additions to the Society’s Menagerie,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1872, 789–860), and the aurochs (from Smith, The Animal Kingdom, plate 51).

Figure 3. Detail of Millet and Sparrows by Geiai 芸愛, sixteenth-century Japan. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 4. Ceremonial wine vessel with cover (you). Chinese, Western Zhou dynasty, 11th century B.C. Bronze with eight-character inscription. H. 25 cm (9 13/16 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Anna Mitchell Richards Fund. 34.63a-b.

Figure 5. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1915.107). Thanks to the Freer Gallery for the image of the vessel and to Amy McNair and Artibus Asiae for permission to publish the drawing from Weber, “Chinese Pictorial Bronze Vessels,” Figure 69.

Figure 6. Thanks to Sun Zhouyong and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology for permission to use this image, which is taken from Liu, China’s Terracotta Warriors, 121. The model is 22.6 centimeters high.

Figure 7. On the tomb, see Han Yangling bowuguan, Han Yangling. Thanks to Sun Zhouyong for these images and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology for permission to use them.

Figure 8. Thanks to Jiao Nanfeng for providing me with this image and permission to use it.

Figure 10. Photographed at the Shaanxi Provincial Museum. The model is 27 centimeters tall. Photo by author.

Figure 12. Image from Chen, Sun, and Yan, Qin jiandu heji (2014), 350. Size: 26.5 by 18.1 by 1.1 centimeters. Thanks to Chen Wei and Wuhan University Press for permission to use this image.

Maps

Map 1. China topography map (detail), Wikimedia Commons. Source: Tom Patterson, US National Park Service. Labels and demarcation have been added.

Maps 2, 3, 6, 8. Base map by Lynn Carlson, GISP.

Maps 4–5. Data are from the Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu, and Henan volumes of the Zhongguo wenwu dituji as digitized in Hosner et al., “Archaeological Sites in China during the Neolithic and Bronze Age,” supplementary dataset, PANGAEA, 2016: https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.860072. Maps by Lynn Carlson, GISP.

Map 7. Based on Tan, Zhongguo lishi dituji, vol. 1, 33–34. Base map by Lynn Carlson, GISP.

Map 9. Data from Zhongguo wenwuju, Zhongguo wenwu dituji: Shaanxi fence.

Map 10. Thanks to Kaogu for permission to use this image from Qin, Yang, and Zhao, “Shaanxi Jingyang xian Qin Zheng Guo Qu.”

Map 11. Based on Tan, Zhongguo lishi dituji, vol. 2, 3–12, and Korolkov, “Empire-Building,” 195. Base map by Lynn Carlson, GISP.

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations.

agriculture: and commercial expansion, 107, 108

continuity in, 59–60

environmental impact, 6–11, 12, 14–15, 32–33, 56–57, 74–75, 190, 194–95

evolution in China, 16–17

historical development, 6–10, 12, 33, 46

irrigation, 34, 70–71

as labor service for states, 21–22, 95–96, 104–5, 136, 155

as main subsistence strategy, 42

manuals, 199

origins and expansion, 39, 42–43, 191–92

plot sizes and layout, 172–73, 174

political organizations’ origin in, 74–75, 155, 191

and population growth, 15–16

seasonal cycle of farmers, 117–19, 121–22

and sedentism, 48–49, 52–57

Shang dynasty, 82–83

state and power evolution, 3, 6, 15, 17, 21, 74–75, 194, 197–98

and taxation, 9–10, 18, 22, 74–75, 193

tools in archaeology, 54, 59

Zhou Period, 64–73

Anban site, 49, 54

ancestors, 80, 82

animals (wild): in archaeological record, 47–48, 54, 56, 60, 68

attraction to farmed areas, 56

dietary evidence, 56

diversity evidence, 47

diversity reduction, 54, 69, 72, 99, 120

domestication’s impact, 62

and “Great Wall” of Qin, 179–80

large animals, elimination of, 85

in North China, 6, 35, 36, 38–39, 40–41

in parks, 99, 107, 126, 145

written evidence, 65. See also domesticated species; livestock

Annals of Lü Buwei, 147, 152, 183

Anthropocene, 15, 202–4, 207n2

Anyang, 7–8, 80–81, 82–83, 84, 88

apricots, 59, 66

archaeology: in Bronze Age, 63–64

cities in, 63, 78

and domestication, 42–43, 47, 56

and environmental change, 2, 56–57, 59

faunal record, 47–48, 54, 56, 60, 68

grains in, 46, 47

and political power, 20, 76–77

scholarship in China, 2, 11–12

settlements in, 48–49, 52–57, 63, 76–79

social divisions and wealth in, 20, 49, 52, 77–78

status in, 49

and text analysis, 11–12, 65. See also individual sites; specific periods or empires

artisans, in Qin, 144–45

Art of War (Sunzi), 74, 219–20

aurochs, 35, 41, 48,

Ban Gu, 30, 152, 156,

Banpo site, 49, 52, 53

“Basic Annals of Qin,” 122, 123

baskets, 52, 68, 117

Benjamin, Walter, 15

birds, 39, 214–15n38

Blue, Gregory, 85

Book of Lord Shang, 135–36, 137, 154, 235

Book of Odes: fruit mentioned, 55–56, 214n36

jing field system, 95–96

plants and animals in Zhou, 65–69

“Zai shan” hymn, vi, 95–96, 205

on Zhou colonization, 88–89

bovids, 61–63, 71–72, 120, 180–82. See also cattle; sheep; water buffaloes

brassicas, 67

bronze: and animals, 80, 85, 86, 94, 221n21

importance for elite, 79, 80

in Shang, 81

vessels and weapons, 79, 80, 86

in Zhou, 94, 94–95

Bronze Age, 63–64, 76, 77, 79

broomcorn (or common) millet (Panicum miliaceum), 44, 55

buildings, description and sizes, 49, 52

bureaucracy and bureaucratic government: as aspect of political centralization, 10, 23–24, 30, 111–12, 193

definition and concept, 24–25, 108, 110–11

development, 108

in environmental history, 24

in Qin, 116, 133, 143–44, 154, 156, 157, 161, 168, 193

in Spring and Autumn period, 104

in Warring States period, 111–12

burials. See cemeteries and tombs

canals, in Qin, 177–78. See also Zheng Guo Canal

capitalism, 202–3

cattle: in archaeology, 72

ceramic examples, 120

to pull plows, 61, 71–72

in Qin, 121, 181–82

in Shang, 83–84

cemeteries and tombs: ceramic animals, 120

as evidence, 20, 77, 78

at Laoniupo, 88

of Qin, 122–23, 124, 125, 140, 144, 162

and stratification, 78, 79, 124

central governments: in Eastern Zhou, 102

and lineages, 96–97, 111

power, 23, 111

in Qin, 160–65

Chang’an, 151, 188

chickens, 57, 61, 68, 121, 180

children, and nutrition, 121

China: administrative history, 30–31

arable river valleys and plains, 37

imperial system creation, 31, 90–91, 154

legal tradition, 102

map, 4–5

origins as political entity, 3

political model, 10, 24, 30, 87, 133, 189, 190–91, 193

premodern political systems, 12

replacement of nature, 1–2, 19, 31, 38

writing tradition, 30–31. See also North China, specific topics

Chu state, 103–4, 110, 132, 187

Cishan site, 44, 46

cities: archaeology, 63, 78

in Bronze Age, 77, 78

in Henan, 78–79

in Qin, 142–43. See also settlements

civilization, 15

clans. See lineages

class, divisions in, 7

climate, 34–37, 62–63, 210–11n5

colonization, 88–89, 128, 132, 195–96

commerce, 107–8, 121–22, 157, 188. See also economy

commoners/common people, 9, 18, 96, 176–77

Confucius, 102, 104, 105–6

conservation, 107, 183–84

convicts, as labor, 10, 156, 174, 177

copper, 79, 87–88, 184

corvée labor, 156, 176–77

counties (xian), 104, 127, 165–66

crimes, in Qin, 177

crops and harvest, 105–6, 167, 168–69

culture in China, 30, 112, 195–98

Dabuzishan tombs, 124

Dadiwan site, 46, 46–47, 54

Dan River valley, 51, 116, 132

deer, 47–48, 60, 69

desalinization of fields, 152

diet, 46–47, 53, 60

disasters (natural), 18, 118, 169, 191

diseases, 16, 60–61

divination, 57, 81, 83, 89

document discoveries, 2, 156

dogs, 43–44, 53, 60, 180

domesticated species: ceramic examples from tomb, 109, 120

and diseases, 60–61

exchange in East Asia, 61

impact on wild animals, 62, 69

impact on world, 14–15, 32–33

in Qin, 121, 180–82

and relationship with humans, 43–44, 180. See also individual species

domestication of animals and plants: agricultural bias, 39, 42

and archaeology, 42–43, 47, 56

bovids, 61–62

horses, 84

in Longshan, 57, 60–62

reliance on, 48–49, 191

and wild/domesticated dichotomy, 43

wolves and dogs, 43–44

in Yangshao, 6–7, 48–49, 53, 56

Dongying site, 56, 58, 60

Dujiangyan, 146

Eastern Zhou period: bureaucracy, 24–25

centralization of government, 102

description, 8–9, 64, 90, 91

hunting, 94, 126

land control, 100

lineages, 100, 101

officials in government, 98

periodization, 91

power and violence in, 100–101

taxation, 105–6. See also Spring and Autumn period; Warring States period

ecology: definition, 16

political ecology, 2–3, 16–17

economy, 13, 143–45, 195, 202–4. See also agriculture; commerce

Elvin, Mark, 11, 85, 87, 203

empire(s): continuity in China, 194–99

definition and rule of, 18

environmental impact, 12–13, 200

power in China, 193–94

enfeoffment, 91, 159

environment: definition, 2

early views in China, 12

and governance, 201, 202

as history of society, 13

and patriarchy, 26

transformation in China, 1–2, 19, 31, 38

environmental history: bureaucracy in, 24

and the future, 203–4

scholarship on, 11

states in, 16–19

turning point in Qin, 133–34

and valorization of violence, 27

environmental impact: from agriculture, 6–11, 12, 14–15, 32–33, 56–57, 74–75, 190, 194–95

from economy, 195, 202–3

by European empires, 12–13, 199–200

of people, 19, 194

of political organizations, 75–76, 85, 87, 90

political power, 15, 75

population as proxy, 15–16

in PRC, 199

in Qin, 160, 177–80

and Qin reforms, 115–16, 133, 136, 140, 153

by states, 19, 112–13, 193–95, 197, 199–202

Erligang (city and state): description and growth, 79–80, 87, 192

environmental impact, 87

western expansion, 57

Erlitou, 58, 79

European empires, transformation of nature, 12–13, 199–200

exploitation of resources: forests and metals, 183–87

human history, 14–15

and political power, 106–7

and size of settlements, 77

by states, 183, 197–98

fallowing, 71, 119

Fangmatan maps, 185, 186, 187

farming and farmland. See agriculture

feasting, 79–80

Feng. See Feng-Hao

Feng-Hao, 70–71, 88, 92–93

fertilizers, 71, 119

field systems, 95–96, 138–39

fire / firewood and burning, 46, 59, 68, 85, 145, 184

fish and fishing: archaeological evidence, 47, 52, 54–55, 64

nets and traps, 54–55, 68–69, 218–19n63

in Zhou, 68

five-family mutual responsibility system, 103, 138, 165

food, 62, 118–19, 144. See also agriculture

foragers: diet and tools, 46–47

diseases, 16, 61

as way of life, 39, 42, 43

forests: in North China, 37–38

in Qin, 183–84, 185, 186, 187

foxtail millet (Setaria italica), 44, 45, 55

fruit: cultivation, 56, 59

in written record, 55–56, 66, 214n36

gender inequalities, in archaeological evidence, 49, 55, 121

geography of North China, 34–38

Gongsun Yang. See Shang Yang

gourds and melons, 66–67

grain: in archaeology, 43, 46, 47

cultivation’s impact, 44–46

importance to states, 45

as income and resource in Qin, 155, 163–64, 168

as problem for health, 55, 60

as source of power, 21

storage in early China, 44

surpluses and labor service for states, 21–22, 174

and taxes, 9–10, 18, 168, 174

granaries: administration by government, 155–56

ceramic granary, 174, 175

distribution in Qin, 175–76

and taxes, 9–10, 18, 168, 174

“Great Wall” of Qin, 179–80

grinding mills, 152

group violence, and patriarchy, 27

Guantaoyuan site, 46, 47

Guanzhong Basin (Shaanxi Province): as base for early states, 34

Bronze Age sites, 63–64

description and historical importance, 2–3

divergence in Longshan, 57–58

ecosystem and environment, 37–39, 140

geography and climate, 34–37

grain evidence in archaeology, 46, 47

Longshan archaeological sites, 57–63, 58

map of, 4–5, 35

population, 140, 141, 221–22n24

and Qin, 8, 9–10, 126–33, 140–46, 153

Qin archaeological sites, 140, 141, 233n49

as study region, 34

water, 140

Yangshao archaeological sites, 48–49, 50–51, 52–57

in Zhou period, 64–65

Guliang commentary, 107

hairpins, 93

Han Dynasty and Empire: description, extent, and practices, 10, 188, 193, 196

histories, 30, 161

as political model, 10, 154, 190, 193

taxation and surplus, 193

water control, 178

Han Feizi, 134, 145

Han History (Han shu) (Ban Gu): on central government, 161, 162, 163

historical role of, 30

on horses, 182

land productivity, 172

as source, 156

Han River valley, 131–32, 185

Han state, 110, 130, 147

Hao. See Feng-Hao

health, 55, 60

hemp, 59, 65, 67, 117–19, 144, 168

herding and pastoralism: control by states, 196

description and role, 127–28

increase, 61, 69–70

as metaphor for rulers and ruled, 17

in Qin, 127, 128, 129, 181

in Western Zhou, 93

Historical Records (Shi ji) (Sima Qian), 122, 126–27, 132, 156

historical writings in China, 30–31

Holocene, 35–37, 42, 62–63, 210–11n5

Hopkins, Keith, 173

horseback riding, 108, 109, 129

horses: appearance in Longshan, 8, 61

breeding and procurement, 99

in bronze, 94, 221n21

burial, 88

domestication, 84

extinction in wild, 129

in Qin, 109, 122, 129, 181, 182

in Zhou, 93, 99

household levy, 168

household records, in Qin, 167

houses, description and sizes, 49, 52

Huanbei (city), 81

hunting: as benefit for agriculture, 85

on bronze, 94

in Qin, 126, 146

in royal parks, 99, 107, 126, 145

in Shang, 84–85

and status or elites, 69, 84–85

in Zhou, 69, 93, 94, 101

insects, 105, 118

institutions. See political organizations

iron and iron tools, 140–41, 184–85

irrigation: in North China, 34, 70–71

in Qin, 140, 146, 151–52, 178

in text records, 147

in Zhou, 70–71, 93, 126

Jiangzhai site, 6–7, 12, 49, 52, 54, 67

Jia Yi, 114–15

Jing (Han emperor), ceramics from tomb, 120

Jing (Qin lord) tomb, 124, 125

jing field system (“well-field” system), 95–96

Jing River, 129, 148, 150

Jin state, 110, 116, 130

jujube fruit (Ziziphus jujube), 55, 66

Kangjia site, 58, 60

Korolkov, Maxim, 169

land: allocation in Qin state, 168, 171–73

control by state, 75, 100

as military service privilege, 9, 136, 173

and population, 170–71

productivity, 172

separation of farmers from ownership, 21, 136

transfers in Zhou, 97, 98, 99–100

landscapes, domestication in North China, 33, 140

land tax, in Qin, 168

Laoguantai period and sites, 46, 46–47

Laoniupo site, 58, 63, 64, 87–88, 222n26

laws and legal documents, 102, 156, 171–72, 183–84

lineages (or clans): in Qin, 137

in Shang, 81–82, 83

in Warring States, 111

in Zhou, 96–97, 100, 101

Lingkoucun site, 49, 52–53

Li Si, 162, 183

Liu Bang, 165–66, 187–88

livestock. See cattle; chickens; horses; sheep; water buffaloes

Liye (Hunan), 137, 159, 160

Loess Plateau, 34–35, 35, 36, 37, 70

Loewe, Michael, 133

Longshan period and sites: archaeological sites, 49, 52, 57–63, 58, 77–78

beginning of surplus and states, 7

cultural exchange evidence, 61

description and features, 7, 8

domestication of animals and plants, 57, 60–62

inequality increases, 58–59

main changes in Guanzhong Basin, 57–59. See also individual sites

“Lucky Day” (ode 180), 69

Luoyang, 34–35, 64–65, 79

Lu state, 101, 105, 106, 110

malnutrition, 55, 60

mammals, 26, 38, 40–41, 48, 179–82, 214n38

manure, 71, 121

Maojiaping site, 122–23

Mao Zedong, 190, 242–43

maps, in Qin, 164

markets, 22, 65, 121, 157, 169, 195

marriages, 82, 100

Marx, Karl, 11, 21

mathematics, 112

meat eating, 69, 80

men and power, in archaeological evidence, 49. See also patriarchy

Mencius, 1, 85, 99, 106

Mesopotamia, 20–22

metal, 81, 84, 141–42, 184–85

military power, and male violence, 27

military service: as labor, 174

land as privilege, 9, 136, 173

rank system in Qin, 9, 136–37, 138, 156, 171–72

milk consumption, 62

millets, 45

in archaeological evidence, 55, 59

description and importance in North China, 44, 45–46, 53

in history of agriculture, 6, 7, 9, 34, 44, 47

in seasonal cycle, 45–46

in Zhou, 65, 217n55

mining, in Qin, 184–85

ministries (government), 162–63, 236–37n12

money (or coins), 17, 22, 157, 169

“Monthly Ordinances” (Yue ling) 71, 117, 119

mulberry trees, 67–68, 118, 171

mutual liability system, 138, 165

nature, 207n2. See also environment

neishi, 145, 163, 236n12

Neolithic period: archaeology in China, 11, 12, 20, 46–49, 52–57

early archaeological sites, 46

grain stores, 44

in Mesopotamia, 20–21

socioeconomic stratification, 20. See also individual sites

Nianzipo site, 63, 64

North China geography, climate, and ecology, 34–39. See also agriculture; specific topics

North China Plain, and Qin, 159

nuts, 53, 56, 66, 213n29

Offices of Zhou (Zhou li), 143–44, 164, 183, 234n55

officials in government, 97–98, 101, 111–12, 161–66

“On Herding the People” (essay), 14, 17, 206–7

oral health. See teeth

orchards, 43, 145, 166

oxen and ox-drawn plows, 71–72, 181

palaces, and economic life, 143–45

paleoecology, in China, 2

parks, Qin royal, 99, 107, 126, 145–46

pastoral nomadism. See herding and pastoralism

patriarchy, 25–26, 27

patrilineal kinship, 81–82, 91

peace, and environmental change, 10, 19, 99, 194

People’s Republic of China (PRC), 10, 29, 199

pigs, 47, 53, 60, 121

plant fibers, use of, 52, 59–60, 66–67, 218n60

plants, 55–56, 65–68. See also domestication of animals and plants

plows, 71–72

political ecology, 2–3, 16–17

political organizations: environmental impact, 75–76, 85, 87, 90

and the future, 201–4

historical overview, 7–11

Mesopotamia as example, 20–21, 22

origins, 20–22, 74–75, 155, 191

and patriarchy, 25–26, 27

reuse of earlier model by states, 10, 24, 30, 87, 133, 189, 190–91, 193

rise as dynamic of history, 22–23, 191–93

warfare in growth of, 27–28, 75, 76. See also states

political power: in archaeological evidence, 20, 76–77

centralization in bureaucracy, 10, 23–24, 30, 111–12, 193

from commoners’ perspective, 18

description and definition, 17–18

early ideas, 11

and economy, 13, 202, 203–4

emergence from agriculture, 3, 6, 15, 17, 21, 74–75, 194, 197–98

environmental impact, 15, 75

origins in East Asia, 76–90

resistance to, 104, 105–6

use of existing systems, 10, 23–24. See also specific empires or periods

pollen, 6, 52–53

population (human): cultural homogenization, 100–101, 196

density in Guanzhong Basin, 221–22n24

increase due to agriculture, 42, 44

and labor, 71

and land, 170–71

numbers as proxy for environmental impact, 15–16

in Yangshao, 54, 57

precipitation, 34–38, 118

Prunus fruits, 56, 66

“Qin” as origin of “China,” 3, 188

Qinling Mountains, 35, 37, 130–31, 131, 132

Qin state and empire: administrative history, 30, 126–27, 133, 134, 137–38, 142–45, 155–67, 190–91

agricultural system, 155–56

agriculture and food supply, 128, 144, 145, 175–76

agriculture expansion and reforms, 115, 133, 135–36, 138–39, 146, 151–52, 192–93

animals, 180–82

archaeological documents, 2

archaeological sites, 140, 141, 233n49

armies and military, 10, 136

bureaucracy (centralized), 116, 133, 143–44, 154, 156, 157, 161, 168, 193

burials in archaeological evidence, 122–23, 124

collapse, 25, 154, 180, 187–88

commanderies, 158, 165–66

early history and rise, 8–9, 122–26, 128–29, 152–53

economy, 121–22, 157, 188

Empire, 158

empire overview, 154–55, 192

environmental impact, 160, 177–80

expansion into Guanzhong Basin, 8, 126–33

financial affairs, 163–64

forests and mines, 182–87

formation and zenith, 9–10, 114–15, 188

grain and taxes, 9–10, 167–70, 174, 190, 193

important locations, 116

information gathering, 164–65, 167, 168–69

move to central Guanzhong Basin, 9–10, 140–46, 153

and origins of China, 3, 114

oxen use, 72

as political model, 10, 133, 189, 190, 191, 193

as political organization, 155–60

population shift, 140, 141

power and government, 115, 124, 127, 128–30, 133–35, 138, 152–53, 155

rank system, 9, 136–37, 138, 156, 171–72

records about, 108

reforms and impact on environment, 115–16, 133, 136, 140, 153

royal burials and elite tombs, 124, 125, 162

seasonal cycle of farmers, 117–19, 121–22

state-strengthening reforms, 30, 115, 133–40, 153

taxation, 167–70, 193

territories (“old” and “new”), 157–59, 158

water control, 125–26, 140, 143, 146–52, 150, 177–78

and Zhou, 91, 114–15, 123–24, 130

ranks, 136–38, 171–72

registers, in Qin, 166–67

rhinoceros, 36, 41, 48

rice, 55, 198

roads, in Qin, 177

rodents, 40, 121, 214n38

Roman empire, 10, 23, 28, 161, 173

Rong, 122, 123, 127, 128–29

royal parks, 99, 107, 126, 145

sacrifices, 20, 62, 80, 101

in Qin, 160, 162–63

salt, 82, 185

Scott, James, 11, 29–30

seals, use of, 111, 161

seasonal cycle, 117–22, 207

sedentarism, 48–49, 55

settlements: appearance in China, 48–49, 191–92

archaeological evidence, 48–49, 52–57, 63, 76–79

in Bronze Age, 77

building by Zhou, 89

as ecosystems, 56

in Erligang, 80

layout and features, 49, 52

in Qin, 126–27, 128–29

walled towns, 7–8, 57, 78, 79, 81

in Western Zhou, 65

“Seventh Month” (ode 154), 95

sex, and power, 26

sexual division of labor, 26, 68, 121

Shang dynasty: allies and tributes, 83

animals and hunting, 83–85

archaeological sites, 88

cattle and animals in workshops, 83–84

conquest by Zhou, 64, 87, 89–90, 192

environmental impact, 85, 87

labor, surplus, and power, 82–83, 87

political organization, 81–83, 87

society and lineages, 81–83

tribute collection, 98

Shanglin park, 145–46, 163

Shang Yang (a.k.a. Gongsun Yang): on ecological logic of states, 17

influence and role in Qin, 9, 115, 134, 193

reforms of Qin, 133–37, 192

on surplus creation, 25

as theorist, 12, 134

sheep, 1, 17, 56, 60–62, 98, 120, 128, 166

Shen Buhai, 134

Shi Nianhai, 11

Shuanghuaishu site, 58, 60

Shu state, 110, 132, 231n30

Sichuan, 131–32, 184, 196

silk and silkworms, 60, 67–68

Sima Qian: on Qin, 107, 122, 135, 136–37, 138, 164–65, 179, 180, 181

on “Qin records,” 229n12

and Zheng Guo Canal, 147–48, 149, 152

smelting, 88, 140, 184

social evolutionism, 28

society: changes in Longshan, 57

environment as history of, 13

hierarchy and stratification, 8, 9, 17

and human biology, 26

and power, 22, 28

transition from landholding to selling of labor, 21

socioeconomic stratification, 20, 52, 57, 77–78, 88

soldiers, 102, 176

soybeans, 55, 65–66, 217n55

sparrows, 45, 56

spindle whorls, 49, 54, 60

“Spreading Out” (ode 237), 88–89

Spring and Autumn Annals, 105

Spring and Autumn period: description, 91

job allocation and titles, 101

state power, 101–4, 105–7

state reforms, 103–4, 105

written laws, 102

state, definition of, 17–18

states: centralization of power, 23

ecological logic, 17

encouragement of agriculture, 16–17, 197–98

and environmental history, 16–19

environmental impact, 19, 112–13, 193–95, 197, 199–202

exploitation of resources, 183, 197–98

fluctuation of power, 28, 193–94

labor service, 21–22, 95–96, 104–5, 136, 155

land control, 75

origins and evolution, 7–8, 27–28, 112–13, 191–93

and patriarchy, 25–26

transition to, 22–25

state-strengthening reforms: in PRC, 29, 199

in Qin, 30, 115, 133–40, 153

in Spring and Autumn period, 103–4, 105

war and warfare, 29–30, 136

status, archaeological evidence, 49

“Statute on Agriculture,” 138, 177

“Statutes on Granaries,” 175–76

“Statutes on Stables and Parks,” 181, 182

surplus, definition of, 25

surveys, 103, 137–38

sustainability, early views in China, 12

“sustainable development,” 202

Taerpo ceramic horse rider, 109

Taosi (town), 7, 58, 78

taxes and taxation: and agriculture, 9–10, 18, 22, 74–75, 193

for crops, 105–6, 168–69

and grain or granaries, 9–10, 18, 168, 174

history in China, 104–5

as model of governance, 190

and production for more taxes, 25

in Qin, 9–10, 167–70, 174, 190, 193

standardization, 106

systems and structures, 167–68

tax farming by Romans, 23

teeth and oral health, in archaeology, 53, 55, 60

temperate forests, 38

textiles, 49, 59, 67–68, 117–19

texts. See written texts

“They Clear Away the Grass” (“Zai shan”; ode 290), vi, 95, 96, 205.

“Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth” (Elvin), 85, 87, 203

Tilly, Charles, 29

tombs. See cemeteries and tombs

trees, 53, 68, 185–87, 211n7

tribute collection, 83, 98–99

“Tribute of Yu” (Yu gong), 82–83

turtle shells and plastrons, 83

urbanization, 7, 78–81, 142–43

vegetables, 66–67, 119

vegetation, 37–38, 52–53

villages. See settlements

violence, 27, 77, 101

von Glahn, Richard, 195

walled towns, 7–8, 57, 78, 79, 81, 143

warfare: in formation of states and political organizations, 27–28, 75, 76

and resources, 27–29, 155–56

state-strengthening reforms, 29–30, 136

in Warring States, 107, 108

Warring States period: commercial expansion, 107–8

description, 91

natural resources, 182–83

oxen use, 71, 72

state power, 108, 110, 111–12

states in, 107, 110

territories and control, 110

water buffaloes, 6, 41, 48, 69, 85, 86

water control: in archaeology and texts, 147

as power of states, 198–99

in Qin, 125–26, 140, 143, 146–52, 177–78

in Western Zhou, 70–71, 93, 126. See also Zheng Guo Canal

wealth, 7, 20, 49, 52, 62, 97

Weber, Max, 11, 24, 110

Wei River, 34, 37, 63, 122, 142–43, 145

Wei state, 108, 110, 116, 130, 134

“well-field” system (jing field system), 95–96

wells, 140, 143

Western Zhou period: archaeological evidence, 93, 122–23

architecture and buildings, 92–93

commoners, 96

description, 8, 64, 90, 92–93

fall of, 90–91

government, 97–98

hunting, 69, 93

irrigation and water control, 70–71, 93, 126

job allocation and titles, 97–98

labor service in agriculture, 95–96, 104–5

laws, 102

lineages, 96–97

plants and animals, 65–69, 99

political power, 23, 93, 95–97

wetlands, 39, 68, 183–84

wheat farming, 59, 66, 151–52

Wittfogel, Karl, 11, 206n7, 208n10

wolves, domestication of, 43–44

women, 26–27, 55, 82, 121

wood and timber, 68, 184, 185, 186, 187

workshops, 79, 83–84, 144, 166

writing: and bureaucracy, 24, 110–11

first evidence, 81

as form of power, 24

in Qin, 126

of regulations, 111

written laws, 102

written texts: discoveries in China, 2, 156

as evidence vs. archaeology, 11–12, 65

xian (counties), 104, 127, 165–66

Xian (Qin lord), 134, 142

Xi’an area, importance, 2–3, 143

Xianyang, 116, 140, 142–45

Xipo site, 49, 54, 55, 56, 214n37

Xunzi, 32, 71, 72, 147, 183, 210

Yangshao period and sites: archaeological sites and evidence, 48–57, 50–51

description, 6

domestication of animals and plants, 6–7, 48–49, 53, 56

first half, 48–49, 52–54

second half, 54–57. See also individual sites

Yangzi River, 198, 199

Yanshi site, 79

Yellow River, 36, 37, 198

Yellow River valley, 3, 34, 40–41, 128

Yong (Qin capital), 116, 123–26, 130

Yueyang (city), 116, 142

“Zai shan” (“They Clear Away the Grass”; ode 290), vi, 95, 96, 205

Zhangjiashan statutes, 156, 167, 171–72, 178

Zhao state, 110, 128, 130

Zheng (Qin king, later First Emperor): description, 155

mausoleum complex, 124, 146, 178–79, 179

palace, 146, 178

power, 160–61

Zheng Guo Canal, 146–52

on map, 116, 141

Zheng state, 103, 110, 147

Zhou dynasty and state: administration, 92, 97–98

conquest of Shang, 64, 87, 89–90, 192

description, 8, 64–65, 87, 88, 90–91, 192

environmental impact, 90, 99

grain surpluses and labor service, 22

land use, 97–100

origins, 87–90

as political power, 87, 90–92, 99–101, 104–6, 111, 192

and Qin, 91, 114–15, 123–24, 130

significance, 90

tribute collection, 98–99. See also Eastern Zhou period; Western Zhou period

Zhouyuan (“Plain of Zhou”), 35, 88–89, 92–93, 123–24, 126, 140

Zichan, 103