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.
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
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.
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.
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.