his ears. ‘Chonger’ literally means ‘double-eared’, a sobriquet presumably preferable to ‘single-eared’ but here taken to indicate some peculiarity, perhaps pendulous lobes. Sealing his fate by being implicated in a plot, in 655 BC the youthful Chonger fled into exile and so embarked on a nineteen-year saga of picaresque adventure.
Accompanied by a band of loyal and capable companions, Chonger first spent some years among the Di, another non-Xia people, and then wandered extensively throughout the Zhou states and south as far as the great state of Chu in the Yangzi basin. Useful contacts and insights were acquired and feats of statecraft performed. Also contracted were debts-to-be-repaid, scores-to-be-settled and brides-to-be-deserted – in equal measure. With a growing reputation for outspoken courage and with plentiful evidence of Heaven’s favour, the prodigal Chonger returned to his native Jin on the death of his ruling half-brother and duly succeeded him as Jin Wen Gong (‘Duke Wen of Jin’) in 636 BC.
A year later Jin’s forces restored the legitimate Zhou king after he had been temporarily ousted from his embattled enclave at Luoyang. Then in 634 BC they defeated an invading army from Chu at a place called Chengpu. It was the first battle in Chinese history that was recorded in sufficient detail for modern military historians to produce a plan of engagement showing rectangular troop concentrations and arrowed lines of advance.15 A hundred war chariots and a thousand foot-soldiers were captured for presentation to the Zhou king, who now feted the once outcast Chonger as the saviour of zhongguo (‘the central states’) and officially recognised him as ba, a title that may be rendered as ‘overlord’ or ‘protector of the realm’.
Terms like ba, gong and zhongguo pose a problem since they are conventionally translated into non-Chinese languages in a somewhat random fashion. Ba, for instance, is commonly rendered as ‘hegemon’, a Greek title awarded to one of the near-contemporary Hellenic city-states, usually Sparta or Athens, in recognition of its primacy and leadership. In China the ‘hegemony’ also changed hands; the ruler of Qi in Shandong had previously held it, and Jin would later be succeeded as ba by Chu, Wu, Qin and others. But in its Chinese context, the term was meaningless without the legitimacy and overall authority, albeit nominal, of the Zhou. Accepting his appointment at the third time of asking – a deferential convention – the Jin ruler made this clear: ‘Chonger ventures to bow twice, touching his head to the ground, and respectfully accepts and publishes abroad these illustrious, enlightened and excellent commands of the [Zhou] Son of Heaven.’16
Lip-service to the Heavenly Mandate and to the idea of a single ruling lineage survived, and it set apart those who adhered to it – the so-called Xia (sometimes Hua-Xia) people – from peoples who did not, such as the Rong and the Di. In both the Greek and Chinese worlds a literate and increasingly urban society now shared a sense of superior distinction that transcended internal conflicts. The Greek states sublimated their differences at the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, where the first games were supposedly staged as early as 776 BC. Less famously, the Chinese states, while observing certain conventions in their cut-throat statecraft as if it too were a competitive sport, also held athletic games. Instituted by the up-and-coming state of Qin in the early ‘Warring States’ period, they included trials of strength, dancing, archery, chariot-racing and some sort of butting contest involving horns.17
While the Greek ‘hegemon’ serves as a rendering of ba, it is the ‘duc’ or ‘duke’ of the Romance languages which is invariably used to translate gong; hence ‘Duke of Zhou’ for Zhou gong. In similar fashion ‘marquis’ is used for hou, ‘viscount’ for zi, and so on down through the rungs of the European aristocracy and the rankings of the Zhou elite to ‘esquire’ or ‘knight’ for shi. This convention was adopted because social and economic relationships in ancient China seemed to conform to what European historians understand by ‘feudalism’. But the analogy should not be taken too far. Zhou China and medieval Europe differed – by, at the crudest, some 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) and 1,500 years. Additionally Marxist historians, while insisting on a prior age of slavery under the Shang, have quibbled over just when the supposed transition to feudalism may have taken place; and others have doubted whether Chinese feudalism ever involved the contractual relationships that underpinned the European system (and led, for instance, to English barons demanding a Magna Carta).18 But the use of ‘duke’, ‘marquis’, etc. continues, and it has led to the introduction into Chinese history-writing of other exotic and perhaps misleading terms, such as ‘manorial lands’ and ‘seigneurial rights’.
Zhongguo is in another category. The word in Chinese consists of two characters, the zhong character clearly depicting ‘central’, ‘middle’ or ‘inner’, and the guo character meaning ‘state’ or ‘kingdom’. It is in fact the name by which the Chinese still know their country today, ‘China’ itself being as much an alien expression to the people who live there as, until the nineteenth century, ‘India’ was to the people who live there. As the geographical name of the modern republic, zhongguo (‘the Central State’ or ‘Central Country’) appears on politically correct maps, and its twin characters feature among the six officially used to express the phrase that is translated as ‘The People’s Republic of China’. The same two characters, however, were once no less correctly rendered as ‘the Middle Kingdom’; and before that they were used to indicate the ‘central states’ of the later Zhou (for guo, like all Chinese nouns, can be either singular or plural).
In other words, depending on its historical context, zhongguo can designate a small nucleus of antagonistic states in northern China or its antithesis – a vast east-Asian agglomeration of territories under a single centralised government. The term is almost as misleading as ‘the Great Wall’. But promoters of a long and continuous tradition of Chinese civilisation rightly stress that only a shared sense of identity could have generated the concept in the first place. ‘The central states’ of the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods shared a common culture; they already evinced what has been called ‘a superiority complex’ in relation to their less literate neighbours; and in their nominal allegiance to the Zhou and Heaven’s Mandate they preserved amid the harsh realities of competitive coexistence the ideal of a more harmonious political hierarchy under a single and more effective dispensation.
THE CONFUCIAN CONVEYANCE
Through this shared world and culture of the later Zhou’s ‘central states’ there roamed not only exiled adventurers like Chonger of Jin but merchants and craftsmen, teachers, magicians, moralists, philosophers and charlatans. It was Asia’s age of itinerancy. Beyond the Himalayas the Gangetic plain also swarmed with vagrants – renunciates, metaphysicians, miracle-workers and holy men; among them were Mahavira, the founding jina of Jainism, and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (‘Enlightened One’) whose teachings would enjoy a longer currency in China than in India. In both countries the multiplicity of hard-pressed states and rival courts offered avid listeners and potential patronage. Troubled times inspired a spirit of enquiry and a predisposition towards novel solutions. So too did social upheaval and the emergence of a market economy.
In northern China, social integration was already under way. In the later Zhou period the fortified cities of the Zhou’s feudatory states extended their writ beyond their immediate hinterlands to incorporate less assertive communities. These were often comprised of non-Xia peoples, whom the literate Xia knew as Di and Rong (in the west and north) or Man and Yi (in the south and east). Subdued by conquest or seduced by alliance (typically including marriages like that of Chonger’s mother), the non-Xia chiefs embraced the ‘feudal’ system of exploitation and exacted the usual tithes from whatever resources of land and labour they commanded. Under the early (Western) Zhou, agricultural exactions had taken the form of service, with the peasant labouring on a portion of his holding for his ‘feudal’ superior under a division of agrarian activity known as the ‘well-field’ system. But by the late ‘Spring and