The Penguin History of the World

6 Ancient China

The most striking fact of China’s history is that it has gone on for so long. For about 3,500 years there has been a Chinese people using a Chinese language. A unified central government, at least in name, has often been taken to be normal, in spite of periods of grievous division. As a civilization, China has had a continuing experience rivalled in duration only by that of ancient Egypt and this longevity is the key to Chinese historical identity. China has first and foremost been a cultural unit, with a significant attraction for its neighbours. The example of India shows how much more important culture can be than government, and China makes the same point in a different way; there, internally, culture made unified government easier. Somehow, at a very early date, it crystallized certain institutions and attitudes which were to endure because they suited its circumstances. Some of these attitudes seem even to have transcended the revolutions of the twentieth century.

We must begin with the land itself, and at first sight it does not suggest much that makes for unity. The physical theatre of Chinese history is vast. China today is bigger than the United States and now contains over four times as many people. The Great Wall, which came to guard the northern frontier, was in the end made up of 2,500–3,000 miles of fortifications, made over 1,700 years. From Beijing (Peking) to Guangzhou (Canton), more or less due south, is 1,200 miles as the crow flies. This huge expanse contains many climates and many regions. Above all, northern and southern China are very different. In summer the north is scorching and arid while the south is humid and used to floods; the north looks bare and dust-blown in the winter, while the south is always green. One of the major themes of early Chinese history is of the spread of civilization, by diffusion, migration or conquest, from north to south, and of the continual stimulation and irrigation of northern civilization by currents from the outside, from Mongolia and Central Asia.

China’s major internal divisions are set by mountains and rivers. Three great river systems drain the interior and run across the country roughly from west to east. They are, from north to south, the Yellow River, the Yangzi and the Pearl River and its tributaries. It is surprising that a country so vast and thus divided should form a unity at all. Yet China is isolated, too, a world by itself since long before the Pleistocene. Much of China is mountainous and except in the extreme south and north-east her frontiers still sprawl across and along great ranges and plateaux. The headwaters of the Yangzi, like those of the Mekong, lie in the high Kunlun, north of Tibet. These highland frontiers are great insulators. The arc they form is broken only where the Yellow River flows south into China from inner Mongolia and it is on the banks of this river, towards the eastern part of its present territory, that the story of civilization in China begins.

Skirting the Ordos desert, itself separated by another mountain range from the desolate wastes of the Gobi, the Yellow River opens a sort of funnel into north China. Through it have flowed people and soil; the loess beds of the river valley, easily worked and fertile, laid down by wind from the north, are the basis of the first large-scale Chinese agriculture. Once this region was richly forested and well watered, but it became colder and more desiccated in one of those climatic transformations which are behind so much primeval social change. To Chinese prehistory overall, of course, there is a bigger setting than one river valley. ‘Peking man’, a version of Homo erectus, turns up as a fire-user about 600,000 years ago, and there are Neanderthal traces in all three of the great river basins. The trail from these forerunners to the dimly discernible cultures which are their successors in early Neolithic times leads us to a China already divided into two cultural zones, with a meeting place and mixing area on the Yellow River. It is impossible to separate the tangle of cultural interconnections already detectable by that time. But there was no even progress towards a uniform or united culture. Against this varied background emerged settled agriculture; nomads and settlers were to coexist in China until our own day. Rhinoceros and elephant were still hunted in the north not long before 1000 BC.

As in other parts of the world, the coming of agriculture meant a revolution. In small sections of the area between the Yellow and the Yangzi rivers this happened not long after 9000 BC. In a much larger area people exploited vegetation to provide themselves with fibres and food. But this is still a topic about which much more needs to be known. Rice was being harvested in some areas along the Yangzi before the eighth millennium BC, and ground just above the flood-level of the Yellow River begins to yield evidence of agriculture (probably the growing of millet) around the same time. Somewhat like that of early Egypt, the first Chinese agriculture seems to have been exhaustive or semi-exhaustive. The land was cleared, used for a few years, and then left to revert to nature while the cultivators turned attention elsewhere. From what has been called the ‘nuclear area of North China’ forms of agricultural techniques can be seen later to spread north, west and south. Within it there soon appeared complex cultures, which combined with agriculture the use of jade and wood for carving, the domestication of silk-worms, the making of ceremonial vessels in forms which were to become traditional, and perhaps even the use of chopsticks. In other words, this was in Neolithic times already the home of much that is characteristic of the later Chinese tradition in the historic area.

Chinese script – on which so much of China’s civilization would be based – was in place at least 3,200 years ago. Like Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic script, Chinese began as pictographs, but soon developed phonetic associations as well. Uniquely among great civilizations, however, written Chinese characters remained graphs that stood for words, rather than developing a phonetic alphabet. 人, the character for ‘man’ (pronounced ‘ren’ in northern China today), has remained more or less the same since Chinese script began. While clearly a pictograph in form, it came to stand for the word ‘man’, and as such could be combined in other characters based on its meaning and sound. Already in the second millennium BC, written Chinese had become a flexible and complex system which over a great span of historical time was taken over in most parts of eastern Asia. In the beginning it had been used for divination and clan symbolism, but soon it became an administrative and literary language. For the élite, the written form of Chinese came to define the country’s culture, and for large numbers of people – well outside the borders of any Chinese state – mastering it came to define the essence of civilization.

We can also find in these times the appearance of a clan structure and totems, with rules and regulations on behaviour within the clan or the family. Kinship in this form is almost the first institution which can be seen to have survived to be important in historical times. The evidence of the pottery, too, suggests some new complexity in social roles. Fragments of pottery dating from around 9000 BC have been found on several sites in north-central China. Already these ceramics were made by coiling clay, adding distinctive forms of decoration, and hardening the wares in fire. There are also clear signs that there was a differentiation between coarser pots for everyday use and finer, thin-bodied ceramics used for ritual occasions. Already things were being made which cannot have been intended for the rough and tumble of food preparation and storage; a stratified society seems to be emerging before we reach the historical era.

One material sign of a future China already obvious at this stage is the widespread use of millet, a grain well adapted to the sometimes arid farming of the north. It was to be the basic staple of northern Chinese diet until about a thousand years ago and sustained societies which in due course arrived at literacy, at a great art of bronze-casting based on a difficult and advanced technology, at the means of making exquisite pottery far finer than anything made anywhere else in the world, and, above all, at an ordered political and social system that identifies the first major age of Chinese history. But it must be remembered once more that the agriculture which made this possible was for a long time confined to small parts of China, and that many parts of this huge country only took up farming when historical times had already begun.

Recent archaeological excavations have shown that starting from around 3000 BC there were a number of population centres in China, even far outside the river valleys of the east-central region. From Sichuan in the west to Hunan in the south and Liaodong in the north there were independent communities that gradually began to communicate with each other. We can see how symbols, such as the dragon, and the use of specific materials, such as jade, spread throughout the region. Even though the key political units in early Chinese history emerged in the core areas along the great rivers in the north, there is little doubt that a number of cultural elements from elsewhere became part of the Chinese palimpsest, helping to create the different layers of meaning that became China. It is probably more useful to concentrate on documenting these exchanges rather than attempting to push the project of Chinese political unity back in time to a Xia dynasty which is supposed to have ruled in the late third millennium BC. The Xia may or may not have existed, but lively towns with thousands of inhabitants existed beyond any archaeological doubt even before a large political entity was created.

The narrative of early times is very hard to recover, but can be outlined with some confidence. It has been agreed that the story of continuous civilization in China begins under rulers from a dynasty called Shang, the first name with independent evidence to support it in the traditional list of dynasties which was for a long time the basis of Chinese chronology. (From the late eighth century BC we have better dates, but we still have no chronology for early Chinese history as well founded as, say, that of Egypt.) It is more certain that somewhere about 1700 BC (and a century each way is an acceptable margin of approximation) the Shang, which enjoyed the military advantage of the chariot, imposed themselves on their neighbours over a sizeable stretch of the Yellow River valley. Eventually, the Shang domain was a matter of about 40,000 square miles around northern Henan: this made it somewhat smaller than modern England, though its cultural influences reached far beyond its periphery, as evidence from as far away as south China and the north-eastern coast shows.

Shang kings lived and died in some state; slaves and human sacrificial victims were buried with them in deep and lavish tombs. Their courts had archivists and scribes, for this was the first truly literate culture east of Mesopotamia. This is one reason for distinguishing between Shang civilization and Shang dynastic paramountcy; this people showed a cultural influence which certainly extended far beyond any area they could have dominated politically. The political arrangements of the Shang domains themselves seem to have depended on the uniting of landholding with obligations to a king; the warrior landlords who were the key figures were the leading members of aristocratic lineages with semi-mythical origins. Yet Shang government was advanced enough to use scribes and had a standardized currency. What it could do when at full stretch is shown in its ability to mobilize large amounts of labour for the building of fortifications and cities.

The Shang also contributed much in other fields, although it is uncertain how much of these advances originated with the Shang or was simply imported from other Chinese communities. It developed a rather exact calendar, which was the basis for all Chinese calendars up to the modern period. It organized a form of religion around Di, the high god, who during the late dynasty was only referred to as Heaven. It set rituals for sacrifice to Heaven or to ancestors, and made imposing bronze vessels to help with such rites. It organized labour in sophisticated manners, including the collective clearing of new land. But first and foremost it developed a centralized monarchy based on the person of the king, ‘the one man’ as he was called, who commanded its military forces and to whom surrounding states paid tribute. The Shang was an expansionist state, but also one that was attractive to others because of its advanced culture and technological capabilities.

The Shang age, we know today, saw many independent communities in the larger region, including as far away from the Shang core as Sichuan in the west. Most of them were found in the belt between the great rivers in the north, and it is likely that some of these had arrived at a level of development that was the equal of that of the Shang, though on a smaller scale and with less organized power than it possessed. It is probably right to think of the Chinese centre as a unit that gradually grew together, in part through conquest and in part through cultural diffusion or migration, starting sometime in the middle part of the second millennium BC and lasting all the way up to our own time. There was of course nothing given about this process and the size of China has waxed and waned with the power of the centre and with its degree of unity. But in cultural terms there is a degree of relentlessness about the expansion: distinct, but related cultures grew together, then incorporated nearby regions, then grew outside the original core until an exceptionally large number of people felt that they shared one culture and one heritage. For this to happen, the cultural elements that came to be shared had to be attractive as well as represented by the mighty and powerful.

The predominant regime that was to replace the Shang in the eleventh century BC is generally known as Zhou. It began as a smaller state which paid tribute to the Shang kings, but then confronted the bigger entity when – according to Chinese tradition – unreasonable demands were put to it. The Shang–Zhou transition sets the pattern in China of a cyclical change among dynasties: a righteous ruler acts according to the will of Heaven and establishes a great dynasty, which later becomes degenerate and ruled by evil men. This leading state is then confronted and crushed by a new righteous ruler, who has the will of Heaven on his side. Since the histories of the preceding dynasty were generally written by the dynasty that succeeded it, it is not hard to imagine how the cyclical pattern was first established. What we know about the Zhou succeeding the Shang is that the armies of the two states met in a great battle at Muye in central Henan in 1045 BC. The Zhou won a decisive victory, probably because of their use of advanced types of chariots: ‘the field of Muye was so broad, the sandalwood chariots were so gleaming, the teams of four were so pounding’, says a contemporary source. The Zhou may have been recipients of the mandate of Heaven – a concept they developed – but advanced military technology also did them much good.

The state which the Zhou kings erected set the form of statehood in China for a very long time to come. Although there were still other states that in part co-operated and in part tried to join together against the predominance of the Zhou, the new dynasty became the model for any Chinese government, in part because it lasted so long (its remnants were not fully extinguished until the third century BC), but also because it set a new framework for efficiency and justice. It spent 275 years at one capital, Fenghao, known later as Chang’an (today’s Xian), establishing it as China’s main capital for nearly 2,000 years. Already in the first generation of its rule, the Zhou expanded all the way to the eastern coast of China, creating a much larger state than the region had ever known before.

Duke Zhou, the adviser of his nephew the first Zhou king, created the Chinese ideal of a bureaucratic government based on the king having received the mandate of Heaven. In order to keep it, the king had to reign justly and for the good of the whole state. The officials of the state had to be trained in moral virtue and show proven ability in governance. The classic books on ethics and statesmanship were written to help in such training. The Zhou were obsessed with the creation of a functioning meritocracy, and so concerned with the written record that even lower-level appointments were recorded in triplicate (which is one of the reasons why we know so much about them). They also gradually changed the rites of the Shang into large-scale state rituals intended to show the righteousness of the ruler and his links with his people and his ancestors. It was an ideology that the empires that followed would take over and make their own.

The concept of spreading influence by setting an example of righteous rule also originated with the Zhou kings. Even though the dynasty expanded its own domain (at least up to 771 BC), its main role in the creation of China was to form a pattern for what civilized government consisted of. ‘The earlier kings,’ says a later commentary, ‘took pains to exert their spiritual qualities, thereby persuading those who were distant to come into their own fold. The many states brought them gifts, and their leaders came in from all quarters, as if they were close kinsfolk.’ The Zhou spread their influence by conquest, but also by their ability to achieve a cultural hegemony that was to long outlast their political predominance.

This predominance is displayed in its art, which is what now remains of ancient China that is most immediately appealing and accessible. Of the architecture of the Shang and Zhou, not much survives; their building was often in wood, and the tombs do not reveal very much. Excavation of cities, on the other hand, reveals a capacity for massive construction; the wall of one Zhou capital was made of pounded earth 30 feet high and 40 feet thick. Smaller objects survive much more plentifully and they reveal a civilization which even in Shang times was capable of exquisite work, above all in its ceramics, unsurpassed in the ancient world. A tradition going back to Neolithic times lay behind them. Pride of place must be given none the less to the great series of bronzes which begin in early Shang times and continue thereafter uninterruptedly. The skill of casting sacrificial containers, pots, wine-jars, weapons and tripods was already at its peak as early as 1600 BC. And it is argued by some scholars that the ‘lost-wax’ method, which made new triumphs possible, was also known in the Shang era. Bronze-casting appears so suddenly and at such a high level of achievement that people long sought to explain it by transmission of the technique from outside. But there is no evidence for this and the most likely origin of Chinese metallurgy is from locally evolved techniques in several centres in the late Neolithic.

None of the bronzes reached the outside world in early times, or at least there has been no discovery of them elsewhere which can be dated before the middle of the first millennium BC. Nor are there many discoveries outside China at earlier dates of the other things to which Chinese artists turned their attention, the carving of stone or the appallingly hard jade, for example, into beautiful and intricate designs. Apart from what she absorbed from her barbaric nomadic neighbours, China not only had little to learn from the outside until well into the historical era, it seems, but had no reason to think that the outside world – if she knew of it – wanted to learn much from her.

The Zhou era in political terms was more or less over by the 770s BC; the dynasty continued as the ‘Eastern Zhou’, revered, but increasingly politically irrelevant. Its Fenghao capital was destroyed by barbarian forces. The ‘Spring and Autumn’ era, which lasted up to the 480s BC, saw the gradual development of a multi-state system, which included states set up by groups that had never been under Zhou predominance but which had by now accepted Zhou government forms and rituals. At the core of this system stood the Zhou successor entities which referred to themselves as the ‘central states’ or Zhongguo, which – over time – became the Chinese name for China. These were the states where the élites felt a particular responsibility for upholding, as an ideal, the system of government established by the Zhou when the going was good. Although they were rarely strong in military terms, these élites insisted that the continuation of rectitude within the borders of each Chinese state was a collective responsibility. In so doing, they probably did more to uphold a lasting concept of a cultural China through troubled times than did the states that gained prominence on the periphery.

Although China had to learn to live with contending states for more than 500 years after the collapse of the Zhou, the concept of a form of unity was preserved, at least for a while, through regular inter-state meetings and the concept of Ba or a senior ruler. This mid-first millennium BC United Nations obviously came about as a result of the wish to avoid war, which would have been seen as war among brothers. In spite of regular armed conflict, a sense of balance was extended to other parts of China, which – at least for 200 years or so – helped keep a state of more peace than war. Most striking of all, even if the region was disunited, economic and cultural advances flowered and spread much wider than they had before.

The mid-first millennium BC saw in China fundamental increases in agricultural productivity which soon could sustain a much larger population. The main breakthroughs were in irrigation and in better tilling of the land, which made for greater yields. Communications increased and so did trade – attempts by each state to control trade were more than made up for by the needs of each territory and the protection individual states were willing to give to its traders. The invention of minted coins also helped create one economy – there were many currencies, but each of them was trusted throughout the central Chinese area since diluting the metal worth would not be in anyone’s interest. For a time the post-Zhou balance of power seemed to serve many purposes at once. But by the fifth century BC, as the peripheral powers increased their influence and their rivalry with each other, it became obvious that the centre could hold no longer, and that the Zhou legacy was not enough to keep a form of stability in place.

At the end of the Spring and Autumn period there was in China a profound and prolonged sense of social and political crisis. As a result, there was a burst of speculation about the foundations of government and ethics. The era was to remain famous as the time of the ‘Hundred Schools’, when wandering scholars moved about from patron to patron, expounding their teachings. One sign of this new development was the appearance of a school of writers known as the ‘Legalists’. They are said to have urged that law-making power should replace ritual observances as the principle of organization of the state; there should be one law for all, ordained and vigorously applied by one ruler. The aim of this was the creation of a wealthy and powerful state. This seemed to many of their opponents to be little more than a cynical doctrine of power, but the Legalists were to have important successes in the next few centuries because kings, at least, liked their ideas. The debate went on for a long time. In this debate the main opponents of the Legalists were the followers of the teacher who is the most famous of all Chinese thinkers – Confucius. It is convenient to call him by that name though it is only a Latinized version of the Chinese term Kong Fuzi, or ‘Master Kong’. Confucius was to be more profoundly respected in China than any other philosopher. What he said – or was said to have said – shaped his countrymen’s thinking for 2,000 years and was to be paid the compliment of bitter attack by the first post-Confucian Chinese states in the twentieth century.

Confucius’s birth-name was Kong Qiu, and he was born in the minor state of Lu (present-day Shandong) in 551 BC. Since his father died when he was very young, he was brought up by his mother, and probably trained as a book-keeper. His family consisted of many important scholars and officials, and Confucius himself was to spend some time as a minister of state and an overseer of granaries but probably never rose above a minor official rank. When he could not find a ruler to put into practice his recommendations for just government he turned to meditation and teaching; his aim was to present a purified and more abstract version of the doctrine he believed to lie at the heart of the traditional practices and thus to revive personal integrity and disinterested service in the governing class. He was a reforming conservative, seeking to teach his pupils the essential truths of ancient ways (Dao) materialized and obscured by routine. Somewhere in the past, he thought, lay a mythical age when each man knew his place and did his duty; to return to that was Confucius’s ethical goal. He advocated the principle of order – the attribution to everything of its correct place in the great gamut of experience. The practical expression of this was the strong Confucian predisposition to support the institutions likely to ensure order – the family, hierarchy, seniority – and due reverence for the many nicely graded obligations between men.

This was teaching likely to produce men who would respect the traditional culture, emphasize the value of good form and regular behaviour, and seek to realize their moral obligations in the scrupulous discharge of duties. It was immediately successful in that many of Confucius’s pupils won fame and worldly success (though his teaching deplored the conscious pursuit of such goals, urging, rather, a gentlemanly self-effacement). But it was also successful in a much more fundamental sense, since generations of Chinese civil servants were later to be drilled in the precepts of behaviour and government which he laid down. ‘Documents, conduct, loyalty and faithfulness’, four precepts attributed to him as his guidance on government, helped to form reliable, sometimes disinterested and even humane civil servants for hundreds of years.

Within Confucius’s interest in reanimating the old, the principle of each man’s duty to perfect his own character reigned supreme. But the civilized human being should also regulate his outward behaviour so that it conformed to the precepts set by the ancients. Much as the Christian Bible was to do later, Confucius believed that a principle of the reciprocal sense of ethics would help in this regard; he said that ‘what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others’. He believed that the study of history was the key to all moral improvement and improvement in statecraft. And just as much as he stressed loyalty as the supreme virtue, he stressed the need for forthrightness, even in adversity. The non-opposition to illegitimate orders would lead to the ruin of a country: ‘The superior man’, Master Kong stated, ‘has neither anxiety nor fear.’

Confucian texts were later to be treated with something like religious awe. His name gave great prestige to anything with which it was associated. He was said to have compiled some of the texts later known as the Thirteen Classics, a collection which only took its final form in the thirteenth century AD. Rather like the Old Testament, they were a somewhat miscellaneous collection of old poems, chronicles, some state documents, moral sayings and an early cosmogony called the Book of Changes, but they were used for centuries in a unified and creative way to mould generations of China’s civil servants and rulers in the precepts which were believed to be those approved by Confucius (the parallel with the use of the Bible, at least in Protestant countries, is striking here, too). The stamp of authority was set upon this collection by the tradition that Confucius had selected it and that it must therefore contain doctrine which digested his teaching. Almost incidentally it also reinforced still more the use of the Chinese in which these texts were written as the common language of China’s intellectuals; the collection was another tie pulling a huge and varied country together in a common culture.

It is striking that for the rest of his life (he died in 479 BC) Confucius had so little to say about the supernatural. In the ordinary sense of the word he was not a ‘religious’ teacher (which probably explains why other teachers had greater success with the masses). He was essentially concerned with practical duties, an emphasis he shared with several other Chinese teachers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Possibly because the stamp was then so firmly taken, Chinese thought seems less troubled by agonized uncertainties over the reality of the actual or the possibility of personal salvation than other, more tormented traditions. The lessons of the past, the wisdom of former times and the maintenance of good order came to have more importance in his teachings than pondering theological enigmas or seeking reassurance in the arms of the dark gods.

Yet for all his great influence and his later promotion as the focus of an official cult, Confucius was not the only maker of Chinese intellectual tradition. Indeed, the tone of Chinese intellectual life is perhaps not attributable to any individual’s teaching. It shares something with other oriental philosophies in its emphasis upon the meditative and reflective mode rather than the methodical and interrogatory which is more familiar to Europeans. The mapping of knowledge by systematic questioning of the mind about the nature and extent of its own powers was not to be a characteristic activity of Chinese philosophers. This does not mean they inclined to other-worldliness and fantasy, for Confucianism was emphatically practical. Unlike the ethical sages of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, those of China tended always to turn to the here and now, to pragmatic and secular questions, rather than to theology and metaphysics.

The period that followed Confucius’s death – known as the Warring States, lasting roughly from 481 to 221 BC – in many ways stood for the opposite of everything that the great sage had insisted on. An era of disunity produced a time of intense warfare as the inter-state system created around the Zhou dynasty’s long decline broke down. The most powerful states engaged in a series of wars which created countries of a new kind, organized for maximum military benefit. With militarization came a number of military innovations: convex bows and iron lances, stronger than anything seen before; mass infantry formations, intended for offensive battles; better trained cavalry and better armour and helmets; and the development of siege warfare, which laid waste to cities and whole states. The most representative text of the time was not by any of the period’s many philosophers, but a military compendium called The Art of War, by a strategist (of somewhat doubtful historicity) named Sunzi.

Sunzi’s principles were those of inner cohesion and outward duplicity. According to The Art of War:

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.

Sunzi also recommended a centralization of the means necessary to wage war; the nobles must pay taxes to the centre, and always be willing to follow the king into battle. As time had passed only noblemen could afford the more expensive weapons, armour and horses which increasingly came into use. The warrior using a chariot as a platform for archery, before descending to fight the last stage of the battle on foot with bronze weapons, evolved in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era into a member of a team of two or three armoured warriors, moving with a company of sixty or seventy attendants and supporters, accompanied by a battle-wagon carrying the heavy armour and new weapons like the convex bow and the strong iron lance and sword which were needed at the scene of action. The nobleman remained the key figure under this system as in earlier times.

Like in the much-faulted period that preceded it, the Warring States era was not just about disunity, conflict and destruction. It was also an era of great cities and palaces, of great art, and of advances in science and medicine. China’s bronze art and ceramics developed further, but was now accompanied by the creation of delicate forms of lacquerware, textiles and silk. A recent find from Jiangxi province in south-central China shows aristocratic dresses made of fine silk based on stunning dyeing and weaving techniques far more advanced than those of earlier periods. The tomb figurines of the era form naturalistic portraits of individuals, showing the massive gains in sculpture, drawing and painting in the late first millennium. By 200 BC Chinese art was set in patterns that would last almost for another millennium.

The first substantial gains in Chinese medicine also came out of this period of strife and seeming political collapse. The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, the oldest work of Chinese medical theory, was compiled around the first century BC but was based on earlier texts outlining the diagnosis and treatment of various illnesses. It is in part a detailed medical compendium, establishing the correct and incorrect relationships between man, nature and Heaven, outlining anatomy and pathology and how to arrive at the right diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. Importantly, these texts generally discard former theories of witchcraft and other forms of magic and replace them with observation and proven beneficial effects of herbs and treatments. Acupuncture came into Chinese medicine roughly at the same time, and has been a staple of it ever since.

Astronomy was another field that expanded much during this time. Shi Shen and other astronomers made detailed charts of the stars and observed the spots on the sun and their development. Comets and planets were discovered and recorded. A rudimentary compass was already in use. Most of these findings were established to help with the development of a more exact calendar, with navigation and with the correct relationships within the state and among states. Injustices and errors on earth were reflected in heavenly disarray, Chinese astronomers believed, and even though the sky held an observable reality of its own, it was linked to the reality of human lives in all sorts of ways. A solar eclipse or an earthquake signalled a change for the worse in the fortunes of a state, but they also gave scientists a chance to observe celestial and earthly phenomena on their own accord. For ordinary people such observations were of little use; they were more preoccupied with what the earth could bring forth than with what the sky above foretold.

China’s vast peasant population paid for all that China produced in the way of civilization and state power. What little we know of their countless lives can be quickly said; even less can be discovered than about the anonymous masses of toilers at the base of every other ancient civilization. There is one good physical reason for this: the life of the Chinese peasant was an alternation between his mud hovel in the winter and an encampment where he lived during the summer months to guard and tend his growing crops. Neither has left much trace. For the rest, he appears sunk in the anonymity of his community, tied to the soil, occasionally taken from it to carry out other duties and to serve his lord in war or hunting. Literature and the creation of history were for the powerful – the scholars and officials, the aristocracy and the kings.

Though Chinese society was to grow much more complex by the end of the Warring States Period, a distinction of common people from the nobly born remained. There were important practical consequences: the nobility, for example, were not subject to punishments – such as mutilation – inflicted on the commoner; it was a survival of this in later times that the gentry were exempt from the beatings which might be visited on the commoner (though, of course, they might suffer appropriate and even dire punishment for very serious crimes). The nobility long enjoyed a virtual monopoly of wealth, too, which outlasted its earlier monopoly of metal weapons. None the less, these were not the crucial distinctions of status which lay elsewhere in the nobleman’s special religious standing through a monopoly of certain ritual practices. Only noblemen could share in the cults that were the heart of the Chinese notion of kinship. Only the nobleman belonged to a family – which meant that he had ancestors. Reverence for ancestors and propitiation of their spirits had existed before the Shang, though it does not seem that in early times many ancestors were thought likely to survive into the spirit world. Possibly the only ones lucky enough to do so would be the spirits of particularly important persons; the most likely, of course, were the rulers themselves, whose ultimate origin, it was claimed, was itself godly.

The family emerged as a legal refinement and sub-division of the clan, and the Zhou period was the most important one in its clarification. There were about a hundred noble clans, within each of which marriage was forbidden. Each was supposed to be founded by a hero or a god. The patriarchal heads of the clan’s families and houses exercised special authority over its members and were all qualified to carry out its rituals, and thus influence spirits to act as intermediaries with the powers which controlled the universe on the clan’s behalf. These practices came to identify persons entitled to possess land or hold office. The clan offered a sort of democracy of opportunity at this level: any of its members could be appointed to the highest place in it, for they were all qualified by the essential virtue of a descent whose origins were god-like. In this sense, a king was only primus inter pares, a patrician outstanding among all patricians.

The family absorbed enormous quantities of religious feeling and psychic energy; its rituals were exacting and time-consuming. The common people, not sharing in this, found a religious outlet in maintaining the worship of nature gods. These always got some attention from the élite, too, the worship of mountains and rivers and the propitiating of their spirits being an important imperial duty from early times, but they were to influence the central developments of Chinese thought less than similar notions in other religions.

Religion had considerable repercussions on political forms. The heart of the first ruling houses’ claim to obedience was their religious superiority. Through the maintenance of ritual, they and they alone had access to the goodwill of unseen powers, whose intentions might be known from the oracles. When these had been interpreted, the ordering of the agricultural life of the community was possible, for they regulated such matters as the time of sowing or harvesting. Much turned, therefore, on the religious standing of the king; it was of the first importance to the state. This was reflected in the fact that the Zhou displacement of the Shang was religious as well as military. The idea was introduced that there existed a god superior to the ancestral god of the dynasty and that from him there was derived a mandate to rule. Now, it was claimed, he had decreed that the mandate should pass to other hands. Inevitably, this cyclical view of history provoked speculation about what might be the signs by which the recipient of the new mandate should be recognized. Filial piety was one, and to this extent a conservative principle was implicit. But Zhou writers had also introduced an idea rendered not very comfortably into English by the word ‘virtue’. Clearly, its content remained fluid; disagreement and discussion were therefore possible.

In Shang times all the great decisions of state, and many lesser ones, were taken by consulting oracles. This was done by engraving turtle shells or the shoulder-blades of certain animals with written characters and then applying to them a heated bronze pin so as to produce cracks on the reverse side. The direction and length of these cracks in relation to the characters would then be considered and the oracle read accordingly by the king. This was an enormously important practice from the point of view of historians, for such oracles were kept, presumably as records. They provide us with evidence for the foundation of Chinese language, as the characters on the oracle bones (and some early bronzes) are basically those of classical Chinese. The Shang had about 5,000 such characters, though not all can be read.

For centuries writing would remain the jealously guarded privilege of the élite. The readers of the oracles, the so-called shi, were the forerunners of the later scholar-gentry class; they were indispensable experts, the possessors of hieratic and arcane skills. Their monopoly was to pass to the much larger class of scholars and officials in later times. The language thus remained the form of communication of a relatively small élite, which not only found its privileges rooted in its possession but also had an interest in preserving it against corruption or variation. It was of enormous importance as a unifying and stabilizing force because written Chinese became a language of government and culture transcending divisions of dialect, religion and region. By the Warring States Period its use by the élite tied the country together.

Several great determinants of future Chinese history had thus been settled in outline by the third century BC, as the country was about to enter a new form of political organization as an empire. This transformation came after increasing signs of social changes which were affecting the operation of the major institutions. This is not surprising; China long remained basically agricultural, and change was often initiated by the pressure of population upon resources. This accounts for the impact of the introduction of iron, probably in use by about 500 BC. At an early date tools were made by casting, as iron moulds for sickle blades have been found dating from the fourth or fifth century. Chinese technique in handling the new metal was thus advanced in very early times. Whether by development from bronze casting or by experiments with pottery furnaces, which could produce high temperatures, China somehow arrived at the casting of iron at about the same time as knowledge of how to forge it. Exact precedence is unimportant; what is noteworthy is that sufficiently high temperatures for casting were not available elsewhere for another nineteen centuries or so.

Another important change under the period of disunity was a great growth of cities. They tended to be sited on plains near rivers, but the first of them had probably taken their shape and location from the use of landowners’ temples as centres of administration for their estates. This drew to them other temples, those of the popular nature gods, as communities collected about them. Then, from late Zhou, a new scale of government began to make itself felt; we find large-scale ramparts and city walls, specialized aristocratic and court quarters and the remains of very large buildings. By late Zhou times, its principal city of Chengzhou (near present-day Luoyang in Henan) was surrounded by a rectangle of earth walls each nearly 2 miles long.

There were scores of cities by 300 BC and their prevalence implies an increasingly varied society. Many of them had three well-defined areas: a small enclosure where the aristocracy lived, a larger one inhabited by specialized craftsmen and merchants, and the fields outside the walls which fed the city. A merchant class was another important development. It may not have been much regarded by the landowners but currencies were used, which shows a new complexity of economic life and the presence of specialists in trade. Their quarters and those of the craftsmen were distinguished from those of the nobility by walls and ramparts around the latter, but they, too, fell within the walls of the city – a sign of a growing need for defence. In the commercial streets of cities of the Warring States Period could be found shops selling jewellery, curios, food and clothing, as well as taverns, gambling houses and brothels.

The whole late first millennium era was marked by disorder and growing scepticism about the criteria by which the right to rule was recognizable. The price of survival for the princes who disputed China was the elaboration of more effective governments and armed forces, and often they welcomed innovators prepared to set aside tradition. This can also be said of systems rivalling Confucianism which were evolved to satisfy Chinese needs. One was the teaching of Mozi, a fifth-century thinker who preached an active creed of universal altruism; men were to love strangers like their own kinsmen. Some of his followers stressed this side of his teaching, others a religious fervour which encouraged the worship of spirits and had greater popular appeal. Laozi, another great teacher (though one whose vast fame obscures the fact that we know virtually nothing about him), was supposed to be the author of the text which is the key document of the philosophical system later called Daoism. This was much more obviously in competition with Confucianism for it advocated the positive neglect of much that Confucianism upheld – respect for the established order, decorum and scrupulous observance of tradition and ceremonial, for example.

Daoism urged submission to a conception already available in Chinese thought and familiar to Confucius, that of the Dao or ‘way’, the cosmic principle which runs through and sustains the harmoniously ordered universe. The practical results of this were likely to be political quietism and non-attachment; one ideal held up to its practitioners was that a village should know that other villages existed because it would hear their cockerels crowing in the mornings, but should have no further interest in them, no commerce with them and no political order binding them together. Such an idealization of simplicity and poverty was the very opposite of the empire and prosperity Confucianism upheld.

All schools of Chinese philosophy had to take account of Confucian teaching, so great was its prestige and influence. A later sage, the fourth-century Mencius (a Latinization of Mengzi), taught men to seek the welfare of mankind in following Confucian teaching. The following of a moral code in this way would assure that Man’s fundamentally beneficent nature would be able to operate. Moreover, a ruler following Confucian principles would come to rule all China. Eventually, with Buddhism (which had not reached China by the end of the Warring States Period) and Daoism, Confucianism was habitually to be referred to as one of the ‘three teachings’ which were the basis of Chinese culture.

The total effect of such views is imponderable, but probably enormous. It is hard to say how many people were directly affected by these doctrines and, in the case of Confucianism its great period of influence lay still in the remote future at the time of Confucius’s death. Yet Confucianism’s importance for the directing élites of China was to be immense. It set standards and ideals for China’s leaders and rulers whose eradication was to prove impossible even in our own day. Moreover, some of its precepts – filial piety, for example – filtered down to popular culture through stories and the traditional motifs of art. It thus further solidified a civilization many of whose most striking features were well entrenched by the third century BC. Certainly its teachings accentuated the preoccupation with the past among China’s rulers which was to give a characteristic bias to Chinese historiography, and it may also have had restrictive effects on some forms of scientific enquiry. Evidence suggests that after the fifth century BC a tradition of astronomical observation which had permitted the prediction of lunar eclipses fell into decline. Some scholars have seen the influence of Confucianism as part of the explanation of this decline. Overall, China’s great schools of ethics are one striking example of the way in which almost all the categories of her civilization differ from those of the European tradition and, indeed, from those of any other civilization of which we have knowledge. Its uniqueness is not only a sign of its comparative isolation, but also of its vigour.

Two great forces came together to create China. The first of these was a continuing diffusion of culture outwards from the Yellow River basin. To begin with, Chinese civilization was a matter of tiny islands in a sea of barbarism. Yet by 500 BC it was the common possession of scores, perhaps hundreds, of what have been termed ‘states’ scattered across the north, the Yangzi region and eastern Sichuan. It also gradually spread to the south-central regions, where Hunan, northern Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces are now. In this latter region one of the great countries of the Warring States era, the Chu, gradually expanded. Although owing much to the Zhou, it had many distinctive linguistic, calligraphic, artistic and religious traits of its own. By the end of the period of Warring States we have reached the point at which the stage of Chinese history is about to be much enlarged.

The second of these fundamental and continuing processes under both the Shang and Zhou dynasties was the establishment of landmarks in institutions which were to survive until modern times. Among them was a fundamental division of Chinese society into a landowning élite and the common people. Although the form of the state was about to change profoundly with the emergence of the first Chinese empires, these distinctions remained, with set patterns of great families not dissimilar from what would later be found in the Roman empire and in medieval Europe. There was also an ideology of rectitude and correctness in form that was to transcend the big political divide in Chinese history of the second century BC, when the Qin empire was created. By then, ideology, social organization and culture had come together to create China, a people and a territory with a sense of unity in the eyes of all beholders.