Western Zhou
The Western Zhou was a period of Chinese history corresponding roughly to the first half of the Zhou dynasty. It began when King Wu of Zhou overthrew the Shang dynasty at the Battle of Muye and ended in 771 BC when Quanrong pastoralists sacked the Zhou capital at Haojing and killed King You of Zhou. The "Western" label for the period refers to the location of the Zhou royal capitals, which were clustered in the Wei River valley near present-day Xi'an.
The early Zhou state was ascendant for about 75 years; thereafter, it gradually lost power. The former lands of the Shang were divided into hereditary fiefs that became increasingly independent of the Zhou king over time. The Zhou court was driven out of the Wei River valley in 771 BC: this marked the beginning of the Eastern Zhou period, wherein political power was wielded in actuality by the king's nominal vassals.
Archaeology
Zhou ritual bronzes have been collected since the Song dynasty and are now scattered in collections around the world.Scientific excavations began in the core Wei River valley and the Luoyang areas in the 1930s and expanded to a broader area from the 1980s.
Bronze vessels are a key marker of Western Zhou sites, including buildings, workshops, city walls and burials.
Elite burials usually contain sets of vessels, which can be dated using known variations in styles, as well as the paleography and content of inscriptions.
Hundreds of hoards of bronzes have been found in Shaanxi, dating from the fall of the western capital in 771 BC.
A hoard typically contains treasured vessels accumulated by a family over three centuries, carefully buried to hide them from the invaders.
Inscriptions
The Zhou produced thousands of inscriptions, mostly on bronze ritual vessels and often considerably longer than those of the Late Shang.Early inscriptions are quite short. The length of texts gradually increased until the middle of the Western Zhou period and remained fairly consistent thereafter.
The character forms and language of these inscriptions are obscure, and their interpretation rests heavily on transmitted texts.
A vessel was typically cast for some member of the Zhou elite, recording a relevant event or an honour bestowed on the owner by the king.
In the latter case, the inscription might include a narrative of the ceremony and report the speech of participants.
These give a rich insight into Zhou governance and the upper levels of Zhou society.
Many inscriptions contain details that may be compared with later histories.
More than a hundred of them commemorate a royal appointment to some government position.
More than 50 of them describe military campaigns.
Naturally the picture is incomplete, as very few inscriptions touch on military defeats or failures of government.
As the Book of Rites says of these inscriptions, "The intention of the inscriber is to extol the beautiful and not to extol the ugly."
Inscriptions usually contain some dating information, but usually not the name of the current king.
Scholars have devised a range of criteria to narrow down the reign of an inscription, including the style of the vessel, the form of the characters and details within the text.
Classics
The earliest received texts, including parts of the Book of Odes and the Book of Documents, are believed to date from the Western Zhou period.The Book of Odes is a collection of songs, traditionally divided into 160 State Airs, 105 Court Songs and 40 Hymns, set to melodies that have since been lost.
Most specialists agree that the Zhou Hymns date to the Western Zhou, followed by the Court Songs and the Airs of the States.
The Airs are said to have been collected from throughout the Western Zhou domains, but have a consistency and elegance that suggests that they were polished by the literati of the Zhou court.
The Book of Documents is a collection of formal speeches presented as spanning two millennia from the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors to the Spring and Autumn period.
Most scholars agree that the "Old Script" chapters are post-Han forgeries, and that many of the remaining "Modern Script" chapters were written long after the periods they purport to represent.
The five "announcement" chapters use the most archaic language, similar to that of bronze inscriptions, and are thought to have been recorded close to the events of the early Western Zhou reigns they describe.
However, they feature significant differences in vocabulary, grammar and outlook from bronze inscriptions dated to that period, and may date from the middle or late Western Zhou.
Four more chapters, "Catalpa Timbers", "Many Officers", "Take No Ease" and "Many Regions", are set in the same period, but their language suggests that they were written late in the Western Zhou period.
The prefaces written for each chapter, tying the Documents together as a continuous account, are thought to have been written in the Western Han period.
Early histories
Texts transmitted from the Warring States period relate traditions from the Western Zhou period.The "Discourses of Zhou" chapter of the Guoyu includes speeches claimed to be from the time of King Mu onward.
The Zuo Zhuan is primarily concerned with the Spring and Autumn period, but contains many references to events in the preceding Western Zhou period.
The Bamboo Annals provides a wealth of attractive detail, often varying from other sources, but its transmission history presents many problems.
The original text was a chronicle of the state of Wei buried in a royal tomb in the early 3rd century BC and recovered in the late 3rd century AD, but lost before the Song dynasty.
Two versions exist today: an "ancient text" assembled from quotations in other works and a fuller "current text" that Qian Daxin pronounced a forgery but some scholars believe contains authentic material.
The standard account is found in the "Basic Annals of Zhou", chapter 4 of the Historical Records compiled by the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian.
This account is a synthesis of earlier sources, relying most heavily on the Book of Documents for the early kings and the Guoyu for early ancestors and the middle and late Western Zhou period.
Sima Qian's depiction of the entire Zhou dynasty as eight centuries of decline from its idealized founders has shaped views of the dynasty from his time until the present day.
Wei River valley
The valley of the Wei River was the homeland of the Zhou before their conquest of the Shang, and remained the political centre and directly-ruled royal domain throughout the Western Zhou period.It also contains the vast majority of archaeological finds from the period.
The valley is a graben formed in the Cenozoic era as part of the Fen–Wei Rift System.
It is bounded on the south by the Qinling Mountains and on the west by the Liupan Mountains.
To the north lies the Loess Plateau, into which the northern tributaries of the Wei have carved deep valleys.
The valley is broad, with fertile soil, abundant rainfall and ground water from the Loess Plateau and Qinling Mountains.
The areas to the west and north are much drier and less suited to agriculture.
The valley was known historically as the Guanzhong, or 'land within the passes'.
To the east, the route through the Hangu Pass in the narrow valley of the Yellow River leads to the North China Plain.
The route to the interior follows the Jing River to Xiao Pass on an eastern spur of the Liupan range and thence down the valley of the Qingshui River to the upper reaches of the Yellow River.
This route would later be part of the Silk Road, and was used by armies throughout history.
The origins of the Zhou are obscure.
The archaeology of pre-conquest Wei valley is varied and complex, but no material culture comparable to the dynastic Zhou has been found.
Archaeologists searching for the predynastic Zhou have focused on the Zhouyuan south of Qishan, which is mentioned in early texts and was a key ritual centre of the Western Zhou.
Two different pottery types are found in this area, and archaeologists differ on whether the people who produced one or the other, or both, were the ancestors of the Zhou.
It is likely that several groups from across Shaanxi banded together to conquer the Shang.
History
The sequence of Western Zhou kings given by the Han historian Sima Qian is matched by the list inscribed on the excavated Lai pan.Inscriptions and received texts hint at some irregularities in the succession, but these had apparently been smoothed out in the official narrative by the time of the Lai pan.
Most scholars divide the Western Zhou into early, middle and late periods, which also correspond roughly to stylistic changes in bronze vessels.
Sima Qian felt unable to extend his chronological table beyond 841 BC, the first year of the Gonghe Regency, and there is still no accepted chronology of Chinese history before that point.
The Cambridge History of Ancient China used dates determined by Edward L. Shaughnessy from the "current text" Bamboo Annals and bronze inscriptions.
In 2000, the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project produced a schedule of dates based on received texts, bronze inscriptions, radiocarbon dating and astronomical events.
However, several bronze inscriptions discovered since then are inconsistent with the project's dates.
Conquest of the Shang
The conquest is reflected in the material record by the sudden appearance throughout the Wei River basin of burials in the Shang style and sophisticated bronze vessels of all the types produced by the Shang, from whom the Zhou had evidently acquired skilled craftsmen, scribes and abundant resources.They also expanded the Late Shang practice of inscribing bronze vessels to create lengthy texts recording the accomplishments of their owners and honours bestowed on them by the king. The inscriptions also show that the Zhou had adopted Shang ancestor rituals. This adoption of Shang practices suggests an effort to legitimate Zhou rule.
However, the Zhou did not adopt human sacrifice, which was so extensive in the Late Shang, or even mention it in any of their texts.
The Shi Qiang pan, part of a family cache found in western Shaanxi, was cast in the reign of King Gong by the latest in a family of scribes descended from a scribe brought to Shaanxi after the conquest.
The lengthy inscription, summarizing the history of the Zhou and that of the Wei family, begins:
Accordant with antiquity was King Wen! first brought harmony to government. The Lord on High sent down fine virtue and great security. Extending to the high and low, he joined the ten thousand states.
Capturing and controlling was King Wu! proceeded and campaigned through the four quarters, piercing Yin and governing its people. Eternally unfearful of the Di, oh, he attacked the Yi minions.
Longer accounts are found in later sources.
Both the Historical Records and the Bamboo Annals describe campaigns by King Wen in southern Shanxi.
They state that King Wen moved the Zhou capital from Qiyi to Feng, and his son, King Wu, made a further move to Hao across the Feng River.
King Wu is said to have expanded his father's campaigns to the Shang, defeating them in the decisive Battle of Muye, which is also described in the "Great brightness" song of the Classic of Poetry.
The 33-character inscription on the Li gui gives a brief contemporaneous account of the conquest, confirming the sexagenary date given by received sources:
When King Wu rectified Shang, it was jiazi morning.... On xinwei, the king was at Jian encampment and gave officer Li metal, used to cast for my honoured ancestor Zhan this precious ritual vessel.
According to the Yi Zhou Shu, the Zhou army spent two months in the area mopping up resistance before returning to the Wei valley.
The received texts relate that King Wen left two or three of his brothers to oversee the former Shang domains, nominally ruled by Wu Geng, the son of the last Shang king.