done bird representations and, soon after, to more geometric forms (Li Feng 2008: 37). This may have been because lineages tend to grow over time, and eventually there are simply too many people to remember separately or worship with the same amount of display.
At this point, in modern times, lineages would split and families would consolidate their worship around their own remembered kin. Something similar seems to have happened in Zhou. Younger and distant kin get less attention, with rites being redefined and reorganized to take this into account. However, the most striking change around 850 is a quite different one: the overwhelming importance of alcoholic liquor comes to a sudden and dead stop. Vessels identified by both textual and residue evidence as vessels for jiu (alcoholic drinks—beer or ale at this time) disappear almost completely. After 850, the vessels are almost strictly for meat and grain dishes. Lothar von Falkenhausen quotes a number of later—but still quite early—texts deploring drunkenness at solemn rites and suggests that reform may have come about because people succumbed too enthusiastically to very human temptations at rites that were supposed to be properly serious.
Early Zhou was still kin based and patrimonial, not a feudal society (Bellah 2011: 400) and not a true bureaucratic empire like later China. Zhou gradually developed a true bureaucratic organization, with the emperor managing it. He had to deal with local lords who had their own courts and small bureaucracies and who were rather conditionally loyal (Li Feng 2008 gives a long and detailed explanation of this system).
A neat insight into the transition is given in the Guanzi material (Rickett 1965) and the Zuojuan annals. These show the machinations of the Zhou court and the local lords as the former tried to bring the latter into a routine and subservient relationship. The latter, naturally, tried to maintain their independence. Power shifted constantly. Much later, the brutal Qin and autocratic Han Dynasties broke the power of the local lords.
The term “feudal” is not well applied to China; the old Chinese term fengjian, usually translated thus, really means something quite different (Falkenhausen 2006: 246; Li Feng 2008). Nor were China’s hierarchy of local elites much like the dukes, earls, and marshals of the West. China went from a patrimonial system (based on the king’s royal family and relatives) to a bureaucratic one with specified titles under court control; there were local semi-autonomous lords with tributary relationships with the states, but such lords were on the frontiers or in remote areas. The Zhou lords were not independent estate holders trading service for patronage. There were local lords with serfs or serf-like dependents, but they progressively lost their independence from about 600 BCE onward. By Han times, large estates owned by elites still existed but were under state control; by Tang, even these had been cut down, though not totally eliminated.
A fascinating insight into the thinking of the time is the word gong, translated as “duke,” because it does indeed indicate a high and quasi-autonomous lord; it literally means “common,” as in “the common people.” Apparently the gong was the governmental head of the common lands or the direct governor of the common people or both. (Recall that our word “duke” simply means “leader” etymologically.)
Bronze inscriptions give more insight into this (Falkenhausen 2006; Li Feng 2008; see Allan 2002for many pictures of early Chinese objects). There were three key functionaries: the supervisors of land, of construction, and of horses (Li Feng 2008: 71ff.). The last was so important that it became a surname, Sima—quite literally, “overseer of the horse.” (Chinese surnames, like English ones such as Smith and Fisher, are often derived from the occupation of an ancestor.) The supervisor of land was in charge of many environmental issues, from levees along the rivers to regulating and promoting farming. He oversaw supplying forage grass and forest and other products to the court and its appanages, as well as managing the hunting grounds. There were hierarchies of such supervisors; we read of them at the national level, but apparently military units and presumably local officials had their own supervisors. These or other officials took charge of marshes, orchards, pastures, and other natural and domestic biota (Li Feng 2008: 125ff.). There was sometimes a separate supervisor of marshes (313; the word here translated “marshes” actually means “bottom lands”—it includes drier river-bottom forests, swamps, and other riparian environments as well as marshes). There was still, as in Shang, a supervisor of dogs—mostly of hunting dogs but also those used for sacrifice.
A fascinating and important environmental note is buried in an obscure inscription from around 800 BCE. Lord Qiu cast a bronze vessel with a long inscription concerning a summary transcript of the king’s proclamation rewarding Qiu for meritorious service. The king said: “I order you to assist Rong Dui in comprehensively managing the Inspectors of the Forest of the four directions so that the temple-palaces be supplied” (Falkenhausen 2011: 243; his translation). It is extremely striking to find that forestry management was already considered so important that an entire bureaucracy for it was designated by the king himself. More important still is that it was clearly about management for sustainable production: continuing supplies for the temple-palaces. The Japanese still manage sustainable supplies of large timbers for temple construction.
Another revealing note on a ritual bronze tells us that the king rewarded one Pengsheng (who had provided some horses) with fields that extended from a birch-pear grove on one side to “the mulberry trees in the Yu stream” on the other (Li Feng 2008: 17). This use of trees to mark boundaries is interesting; it must have caused nightmares to the surveyors when those groves disappeared over time.
In both Confucianism and Legalism, farmers were held to be nobler and more virtuous than merchants; farmers produce food and fiber, merchants merely transport things around—and make a vulgar profit to boot. Throughout Chinese history, this differential valuation remained in place. In fact, it surfaced anew in deadly fashion under Mao Zedong. Still, few principles in human history have been more thoroughly ignored in practice. Many literati and others did indeed try hard to remain virtuous, devoting their lives and families to farming or the service of the state, but China never lacked for merchants. Merchants often tried to rise socially by getting their children educated and—if possible—into government service, but this did not usually mean giving up the family business. In fact, government servants got involved deeply in trade, as readers of Chinese histories and novels know.
The people who were less urbanized—the famous “barbarians” of Western-language books on China—were a diverse lot. There is no one Chinese word for them. In the Zhou Dynasty, the Rong on the north, the Yi and Di on the west, the Wu in the east, the Yue to the southeast, and other culturally different peoples each had their own names. (Many other terms came into use later, including the familiar fan of modern times. The latter is found not only in the well-known Cantonese slur faan kuai lou, “foreign ghost person”—mistranslated as “foreign devil”—but also in many food terms.) Translating all those Zhou ethnic words as “barbarian,” as is traditional in western-language sources, captures something of the superior attitude of the Zhou, but it both overtranslates the concept and undertranslates the reality. The Chinese had reason to use all those different terms; they were labeling regional cultural groupings.
The Zhou were surrounded by non-Chinese peoples. Some may have spoken other Tibeto-Burman languages, some probably spoke Altaic or Korean languages. On the south, Thai was certainly very commonly spoken—there are countless mutual loanwords. Other languages of Miao, Yao/Mien, and Austronesian stock were presumably not unknown, but in these cases we lack identifiable loanwords in Chinese.
Later Zhou and the Warring States
In later Zhou, China became more populous, grain became more basic to life, and game gradually moved out of the reach of ordinary people. By the rise of Han, only the elite and the remote mountain dwellers had much chance at anything bigger than a rabbit. Farming was basically in the hands of yeoman farmers, as it remained throughout most of Chinese history—as a result of government policy established in Warring States times. Huge estates worked by serfs and/or slaves were, however, well known. The Warring States period was a time of political and social complexity, and the continuum from slave and serf to freeman was apparently as complex as it was in feudal Europe a few centuries later—though by this time China was firmly bureaucratic, not feudal. The complexities usually had more to do with relations with the state than with local