Shang was conquered by Zhou, a major state in the Wei Valley. The traditional date was 1122 BCE, the actual one around 1050. Claims that the Zhou people were “barbarians”—that is, non-Chinese in culture—are not sustained by archaeology; they seem to have been thoroughly integrated into early Chinese civilization. On the other hand, the early textual material cannot be simply dismissed. It records many features that, to at least one modern scholar, Sanping Chen (2012), thoroughly confirm the old “barbarian” identification. In any case, Zhou was a semiperipheral marcher state geopolitically in relation to Shang’s centrality in the Chinese world-system of the time. This then stands as an early example of a phenomenon that happened over and over in Chinese history: a semiperipheral (often originally peripheral) state rising in power, challenging the center, and often winning.
The Zhou had a capital in the twin cities of Feng and Hao, near modern Xi’an.
The early Zhou world was still one of city-states, in spite of the empire; it could not abolish, or even well control, the city-states (Lewis 2006). Only later did the Warring States succeed in truly centralizing government in their smaller realms.
The early Zhou Dynasty, like Shang, subsisted especially on millets. The mythical founder of the dynasty was Lord Millet (Hou Ji; ji was some kind of millet, probably panic, possibly foxtail). He was further mythologized as the minister of agriculture under the court of the God of Agriculture, Shen Nong (Liu An 2010: 402). It is typical of China that a god of agriculture would need a bureaucracy under him! Wheat and rice were also important, but wheat is rarely mentioned in Shang and early Zhou texts and oracle readings, whereas hundreds of mentions of millet occur (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 346; this is also true of the later Book of Songs). Archaeology confirms the great importance of millets. Beans and hemp seeds added to the pot. The hemp was grown for fiber for cloth, but no one was going to waste the edible seeds. The value of the resin for drug uses—anesthetic, religious, and recreational—was no doubt known, as it certainly was later, but was rarely (if ever) regarded in China as anything very special.
Ceramic and bronze vessels of enormous size, beauty, and technical complexity abounded. The Shang Dynasty already had a spectacular material culture, including what many consider the most beautiful bronze vessels of all time. Zhou produced ones even larger, if not more beautiful. Residue analysis confirms that these held meat, alcoholic beverages, and grains. This analysis confirms at least some of the traditional Chinese claims about which type of vessel held which food. Vessels were used in banqueting (Falkenhausen 1999), and some at least saw long use before being buried with their lordly user; residues attest this. So they were not purely ritual (Li Feng 2008). One small bronze piece, now in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, was cast at the orders of one Ran in honor of a victory by the Duke of Zhou, brother of the Zhou founder and regent for the founder’s son and successor in the latter’s youth (personal observation, helped by Berger 1994: 86 and pers. comm. of November 17, 2012). Ran paid a hundred strings of cowries for the work, showing that bronze vessels were rather routine and cheap items at the time. The duke later became enshrined as Confucius’s ideal ruler, held to be perfect at moral administration. Having an actual item from his time that commemorates a battle described in early histories is truly a miracle.
A huge bone workshop turned up near the old capital, Feng-Hao: “tens of thousands of kilograms” of bone were found, “including bones of horses, pigs, dogs, deer, elephants, and tigers” and “more than 4,000 cow skeletons” (Lu Liancheng and Yan 2002: 186). Most of these would have been recycled from food waste, though probably not the tigers.
Li Feng’s brilliant study Landscape and Power in Early China (2006) notes the advantages of the Wei River valley: closed and hard to enter, difficult to supply, and poorly connected to the rest of China. It is, however, surprisingly vulnerable to conquest from the north, because its major tributaries provide routes—challenging but not impassable for early armies—from the fairly fertile and easily held plateau country there. Central Asian regimes thus naturally tried to conquer and hold these plateaus and use them as a platform from which to strike at the heart of China. The Xiongnu were to master this strategy. Already, Western Zhou were having to fight off attackers from that direction and later found the task insupportable. The Western Zhou capital was ideal site for farming and communication, but the conquest routes from the north point like arrows at its heart. After a final epochal conquest, Zhou moved the capital east, becoming (naturally) Eastern Zhou.
This vast and open corridor to Central Asia has been greatly misunderstood and its importance underestimated. States like the Xiongnu are routinely called nomadic without any awareness that they controlled vast areas of rich and fertile (if often very dry) agricultural land just north of the Wei valley and that they could and did use this area as a platform for both the logistics and the actual routing of invasions.
Zhou had many contacts with the West. A review of art objects that are either Western-influenced or downright steppe-nomadic in inspiration and manufacture is found in Lothar von Falkenhausen’s study of Zhou archaeology, China in the Age of Confucius (2006; see esp. 204ff.). A range of objects from iron knives to belt buckles show Central Asian provenance or influence. Particularly interesting are belt plaques that are very close in style to items from Scythian and related cultures of the central and western steppe worlds (Falkenausen 2006: 231). It is possible that the Qin people, whose descendants occupied Chang’an and later founded the Qin Dynasty, were immigrants from the steppe zone. How far their origins were from Chang’an we cannot say. At least some of the Scythian-type belt plaques were cast in Qin workshops. That source may indicate a steppe origin for Qin, but the evidence suggests, instead, an exoticist fondness for the art. The romance of the steppe nomad, not unknown in our own time, was certainly present in old China, and the Qin seem to have been somewhat barbarian-influenced Chinese who romanticized their neighbors’ art.
In 771 BCE, Hao was conquered and Western Zhou humbled by the Quanrong people (cooperating with a rebellious Zhou tributary). Quanrong is rather insultingly translated “dog barbarians,” but could equally well be translated “northern non-Chinese of the noble hound.” Recall that quan is a literary word for a dog. (The insulting indigenous word gou is long famous in the compound zou gou, “walking dog” or “running dog,” for a collaborator or sellout.)
The dynasty moved its capital east to Chengzhou, later renamed Luoyi and much later Luoyang, the Yangzi Valley. This cost them the security of the easily protected Wei valley but saved them from the worst of the steppe incursions and gave them better access to the Yellow River and the North China Plain. Many later dynasties were to go through the same evolution. Han followed Zhou in moving the capital from Hao (near Xi’an) to Luoyang. Unfortunately, this move had its costs. Luoyang has no natural defenses worthy of the name. It occupies a vulnerable open valley on a tributary of the Yellow River. Thus it was easily, and frequently, attacked.
Li Feng, in his great study of Zhou and later strategic geography, comments: “It is true that some of man’s great achievements were attained by overcoming natural limits, but it is also the tendency of man to use geography in the most favorable way” (2006: 159). Indeed, but as Zhou well knew, nothing is harder to find in this world than perfectly defensible sites that are also open to easy communication and trade. Venice came closest; Bahrain and Sicily had their merits; but China had nothing remotely comparable and had to suffer. Through history, this meant an unstable, three-way tug-of-war between three regions. Xi’an was central and defensible but cut off. The central Yangzi from Luoyang to Hangzhou was perfect for communication but impossible to defend against a determined army. Beijing, already a local capital in Zhou times, was more defensible than Luoyang, more connected than Xi’an, but suboptimal on all counts. It is now—not for the first time—suffering from lack of water. The other two regions are on major rivers; Beijing has only a small stream.
A striking change took place around 850 BCE (Falkenhausen 2006: 43ff.). Arrays of vessels changed suddenly and dramatically.