The ferocious fight to the death among the strongest of the remaining states makes for grim telling. Standing armies take the field for the first time, new methods of warfare swell the casualties, and statecraft becomes more ruthless. Yet the period is by no means devoid of other arts. Stimulated by the disciples and heirs of Confucius, China’s great tradition of philosophical speculation was born. It was an era, too, of startling artistic creation in which traditional arts began to break free from the constraints of ritual. And from the recent excavation of a host of contemporary texts it appears to have been an important age for medicine, natural philosophy and the occult sciences. Far from being a cultural cesspool, the ‘Warring States’ period, like other interludes of political instability, sparkles with intellectual activity and artistic mastery.
Of all the tombs excavated in the late twentieth century, perhaps the most surprising were those opened in 1978 and 1981 at Leigudun near the city of Suizhou in Hubei province. South of the arena in which the ‘central states’ competed and nearer the Yangzi than the Yellow River, Leigudun was the capital of a mini-state called Zeng. During the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period Zeng had been subordinated by Chu, the great southern power that had once contended with the early (Western) Zhou and later with Chonger of Jin.
Although Zeng’s rulers had retained the rank of ‘marquis’, the minor status of their beleaguered marquisate promised the archaeologists nothing special in the way of grave goods. It was pure luck that one of the tombs proved to be that of the ruler himself, Zeng Hou Yi (‘Marquis Yi of Zeng’), who died about 433 BC. Even foreknowledge of this elite presence would hardly have prepared the diggers for the staggering array of exquisite jades, naturalistic lacquerware and monumental bronzes that were laboriously brought to the surface. Now occupying half of a palatial museum in the provincial capital of Wuchang (part of the three-city Wuhan complex), the contents of the Zeng Hou Yi tomb have been described by Li Ling, director of the ‘Mass Work Department’ responsible for the excavation, as an exceptional discovery ‘that shocked the country and the world as well’.25
Leigudun’s 114 bronzes weigh in at over ten tonnes, yet they ‘shock’ more by reason of the lacy profusion of their openwork decoration. Squirming with snakes, dripping with dragons and prickly with other sculptural protuberances, their shapes are further obscured by a fretwork of the wormy encrustation known as vermiculation. They look as if they have lain for two and a half millennia not in the ground but on the seabed and been colonised by crustacea. For this triumph of flamboyance over form – and of the lost-wax process over in-mould casting – one should not fault the marquis’s taste. Sites elsewhere in Chu territory have yielded items nearly as extravagant. But at Leigudun ornamentation was taken about as far as metal-melting would permit. Chu’s connoisseurs of the fanciful and intricate were already turning to lacquerware, inlay and fine silks. As the storm clouds gathered over the zhongguo, the courts and artisans of this south-central state would establish a tradition of cultural exuberance and eccentric exoticism that, in the plaintive Songs of Chu (Chuci), would long survive the political extinction of ‘great Chu’.
The centrepiece of the Leigudun collection is a house-size musical ensemble consisting of sixty-five bronze bells with a combined weight of 2,500 kilograms (5,500 pounds). The bells are clapper-less (they were struck with wooden mallets), arranged according to size, and suspended in three tiers from a massive and highly ornate timber frame, part-lacquered in red and black. In an unusual but highly successful foray into figurative sculpture, bronze caryatids with swords in their belts and arms aloft stand braced to support each tier. At the centre of the ensemble the largest bell is a replacement. Its design is more elaborate than the others and it carries a dedicatory inscription to the effect that King Hui of Chu, hearing of the death of Marquis Yi of Zeng, had had this bell specially cast and sent it as an offering to be employed in the marquis’s mortuary rites.
Significantly, the Chu ruler is here described as wang, that is ‘king’, a title still reserved to the fading Zhou, not adopted by other warring states until the late fourth century BC, but in use in Chu since at least the tenth century BC. Chu was evidently in a league apart from the ‘central states’, although its political trajectory is far from clear. Originating somewhere in southern Henan or northern Hubei, it had slowly spread to embrace an enormous arc through what is now central China from the Huai River basin to the Yangzi gorges and Sichuan. Expansion was largely at the cost of non-Xia peoples, referred to as Man, whose traditions no doubt account for Chu’s distinctive cultural profile and whose incorporation may explain why the ‘central states’ disparaged Chu as non-Xia and so ‘not one of us’.
Southward expansion had brought Chu into contact with other culturally hybrid polities outside the ‘central states’. In effect the zhongguo ‘cradle’ of Chinese civilisation in the north was already being challenged by the states of ‘core’ China farther south. They included Wu in the region of the Yangzi delta in Zhejiang, and Yue to the south of Wu in Fujian, with both of whom Chu was occasionally at war. In the late sixth century BC, Wu had overrun Chu and obliged its king to flee to Zeng, where the then marquis had given him protection. Frustrated by this grant of sanctuary, the Wu ruler had vented his fury on an earlier Chu king, whose corpse, or what remained of it, was exhumed, publicly flogged and thoroughly dismembered. Wu’s ruler was made ba (‘hegemon’) in 482 BC but nine years later was conquered by Yue. Chu thereupon retook most of its lost territory; and it is supposed that it was in remembrance of Zeng’s act of mercy to his fugitive predecessor that in 433 BC King Hui of Chu caused the great central bell of the Leigudun ensemble to be cast for the tomb of Marquis Yi, the grandson of Chu’s saviour.
States like Chu, Wu and Yue that were located around or beyond the perimeter of the northern ‘central plain’ figure prominently from the fifth century BC onwards. Their consolidation may have benefited from immigration as refugees fled from the fighting in the north, and they certainly took advantage of a wave of centralising reforms that significantly advanced state formation throughout China in the sixth to fourth centuries BC. Cause and effect are hard to distinguish in this process. To adapt a formulation used in respect of the European states in the later Middle Ages, during the ‘Warring States’ period ‘the state made war and war made the state’.26 Although in China the state proved a better warmonger than war did a state-monger – for the wars got worse and the states got fewer – the military imperative of mobilising all possible resources clearly depended on civil reforms that strengthened the authority of the state.
Qi in Shandong had pioneered the process and most other states followed suit, the last and most thoroughgoing reforms being those in Qin. Essentially the reforms reversed the earlier trend towards feudal fragmentation. Borderlands and newly conquered or reconquered territories, instead of being granted out as fiefs, were formed into administrative ‘counties’ or ‘commanderies’ under centrally appointed ministers and could thus serve as recruitment units. This system was then extended to the rest of the state; population registration and the introduction of a capitation tax would soon follow. Meanwhile oaths, sealed in blood, were sworn to secure the loyalty of subordinate lineages, while rival lineages might be officially proscribed. Regulations and laws were standardised and then ‘published’ in bronze inscriptions. Land was gradually re-allocated in return for a tax on its yield, the tax being increasingly paid in coin.
Histories, such as the Zhanguoce and the later Shiji, tend to deal with such developments in terms of personnel rather than policy. Reforms receive mention when they can be credited to a minister or adviser deemed worthy of his own biographical sketch. Viewed thus, the rivalry between the warring states includes an important element of competitive headhunting. Attracting the loftiest minds, the most ingenious strategists and the most feared generals not only improved a ruler’s chances of victory but advertised his virtuous credentials (for virtue attracted expertise like a magnet) and so advanced his candidacy for the award of Heaven’s Mandate.
Job-hunting