and above all ‘humane’ in the sense of treating others as they would expect to be treated themselves. Rulers, while enjoying the confidence of the people and ensuring that they are fed and safe, should be attuned to Heaven’s Mandate and as aloof and constant as the northern star. Laws and punishments invite only evasion; better to rule by moral example and exemplary observance of the rites; the people will then be shamed into correcting themselves. Self-cultivation, or self-correction (a forebear of Maoist ‘self-criticism’), is the key to virtue. Of death and the afterlife, let alone ‘portents, prodigies, disorders and deities’, Confucius has nothing to say. It is up to the individual, assisted by his teacher, to cultivate himself. Not even he was born with knowledge; he is just ‘someone who loves the past and is diligent in seeking it’.22
‘I transmit but do not innovate. I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity.’23 For Confucius, ‘the Way’ was the way of the past and his job was that of transmitting it or conveying it. The mythical Five Emperors, the Xia, the Shang and above all the Zhou – these were the models to which society must return if order was to be restored. ‘I am for the Zhou,’ he declared, meaning not the hapless incumbent in Luoyang but Kings Wu, Wen, Cheng and Kang of the early (Western) Zhou and of course the admirable Duke of Zhou. The rites of personal conduct and public sacrifice must be observed scrupulously; more important, they must, as of old, be observed sincerely. The ‘rectification of names’, a quintessentially Confucian doctrine, was a plea not for the redefinition of key titles and concepts in the light of modern usage but for the revival of the true meaning and significance that originally attached to them. More a legitimist than a conservative, Confucius elevated the past, or his interpretation of it, into a moral imperative for the present.
And there it would stay for two and half millennia. It was as if history, like Heaven, brandished a ‘mandate’ that no ruler could afford to ignore. But this general principle soon came to transcend the particular injunctions contained in the few, if pithy, soundbites of The Analects. Aboard the Master’s ‘conveyance’, and labelled as ‘Confucianist’ (rather than ‘Confucian’), then ‘Neo-Confucianist’, would be loaded all manner of doubtful merchandise. History would prove more tractable than Heaven.
WARRING STATES AND STATIST WARS
By the time Confucius died in 479 BC, the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period was fast fading into the crisis-ridden ‘Warring States’ period. Already the large state of Jin, once ruled by Chonger, was disintegrating. Not until the end of the century would it be consolidated into the three states of Han, Zhao and Wei (not to be confused with the river of that name), so presenting the Zhou king in Luoyang, their supposed superior, with an unwelcome fait accompli. When he did reluctantly accept it, it is said that the bronze cauldrons of Zhou, symbols of the ancient dynasty’s virtue, ‘shook’. Also shaken, in fact toppled, within a century of Confucius’s death was the ruling house of Qi, the largest state in Shandong. In a fin de siècle atmosphere ‘all now took it for granted that eventually the now purely nominal Zhou dynasty would inevitably be replaced by a new world power’.24
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,