The History of China - #12 - E. Zhou 1: The Shattered Empire

Episode Date: February 15, 2014

King You of Zhou lays headless, the capital a smouldering ruin, and royal authority utterly destroyed. Regional lords exploit the chaos at hand to expand their own domains - and at times declare their own kingdoms - while the new, toothless Eastern Zhou kings struggle to stabilize the situation. After a holiday break, we're right back into the action with the beginnings of the Spring and Autumn Period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. www.patreon.com.au Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 11, The Shattered Empire When last we left off with the Zhou Empire, things had turned grim.

King Ye had been so keen to impress his concubine that he'd alienated, belittled, and enraged every ally he'd ever had. And it cost him both his capital city as well as his life. Today, we begin our look into the early portion of the Eastern Zhou Period, also known as the Age of Hegemony, and most famously, the Spring and Autumn period. That name, Spring and Autumn, can be a little confusing. What do seasons have to do with it? Well, nothing.

In fact, the phrase Spring and Autumn, or Chunqiu, was in classical Chinese a figure of speech for the year as a whole. It was actually a rather common title for chronicles and historical collections during this period of history. The historical name for this period, however, can be traced to one specific work, the Spring and Autumn Annals. This particular work became the name of the era not because it was particularly exhaustive it documented only the minor state of loo the Chun Chiu Annals might have been a little too witty for its own good. It's so brief, in fact, that it requires annotated commentary to even make much sense of the goings-on at all, of which there are five mentioned, but only three commentaries have survived to the present, as far as we know. So the reason this terse, nearly unintelligible work about an unimportant state became the face of the entire era is its author,

a man we'll be delving into in far greater depths in a later episode, Master Kongqiu, or, anglicized, Confucius, as he was born in Lu during the late spring and autumn. Though a relatively short period when compared to the vast stretches of time covered in our first ten episodes, a mere 368 years, the increasing amounts of information necessitates, as will quickly become the norm in this podcast, further subdividing a given period into more digestible chunks. The spring and autumn, then, is most often separated into

three major ages. The age of regional cultures from 771 to 643 BCE, the age of encroachments from 643 to 546, and finally the age of reforms from 546 to 403 BCE. Today, we'll be covering that first period, the Age of Regional Cultures, beginning with the sacking of the ancient Zhou capital of Fenghao, and the establishment of its almost completely detoothed eastern iteration in Chengzhou, some 200 miles away from the smoldering ruin. The man who would become the Eastern Zhou's first king was the late King You's eldest, though disfavored, son, Prince Ji Yizhou. He and his mother had fallen off his father's radar and been shipped off to the ceremonial city to be forgotten with the other relics. As such, when his father finally stepped on enough toes to incite a full-on rebellion,

and again, having virtually ensured that no army would possibly come riding into his rescue, Prince Yizhou was reinstated as the crowned heir by the leader of his rebellion, the man who had taken his father's head off, his uncle, the Duke of Zhou. With Feng Hao devastated, Yizhou opted to essentially stay put and took up the throne from his current seat in Zhengzhou, and taking the name King Ping. Though his uncle had handed him the crown, however, the already crumbling edifice of centralized imperial power was beyond restoration.

Ping reigned as little more than a figurehead, and where once the kings of Zhou had fielded probably the most powerful military force in the world at the time, the dynasty's rule now only extended to the borders of its tiny royal domain. And even that only through the protection of its vassal lords, for matters as trivial as bandit raids and internal power struggles. Zhou still held the mandate of heaven de jure, but the fact of the matter was the dynasty was just a phantom of its former majesty, and its so-called vassals were the true powers of the land anymore. As it became clear that the royal glue holding the various states and cities together

had lost whatever sticking power it had yet possessed, the empire shattered into hundreds of tiny autonomous city-states. Especially in the center of the Yellow River Valley, where jail control had been near-absolute for centuries, the sudden power vacuum ensured that each petty lord would now scrabble for his own little shard, usually consisting of no more than a single village and its surrounding territory.

But there were a few holdings that had managed to maintain local control over a larger piece of land. And around the periphery of the empire, the outlying states retained their regional hold on power, and now eyed hungrily the tiny squabbling statelets that could easily be incorporated into their own holdings. For these sharks circling the now defenseless minnows at the heart of the empire, the feeding frenzy had begun. By some accounts, there were as many as 148 de facto independent states at the beginning of the spring and autumn period, and at its conclusion, all but 20 will have been gobbled up by the regional powers. The four biggest offenders were those aforementioned border states, with their own powerful armies and internal centralized

controls. Jin on the northwest border, Qi along the northeastern coast, the monster that was Chu to the southwest, which you'll remember was the state that had previously crushed the six armies of the west and become largely autonomous from a very early stage. And finally, one of the most unlikely contenders for power, Qin, on the far western reaches of the empire. You remember that tiny attached state given to the royal horse breeder? Thus enthroned in Chengzhou, but with little to do but twiddle his thumbs and watch his vassal lords tear each other apart, King Ping reigned for approximately 50 years between 770 and 720 BCE. His son and heir, crowned Prince Ji Xiefu, would himself father a son before meeting his untimely

demise. And so, Ping's successor was his eldest grandson, Prince Ji Lin, enthroned as King Huan. Both grandfather and grandson, however, had an ongoing problem that would haunt them through both of their reigns. The neighboring duchy of Zheng had initially been a staunch supporter of the Zhou kings, and had been a central pillar of the royal domain's defense, a natural fit given its immediate proximity and relative strength. During the reigns of Ping and Huan, the Duke of Zheng was a man named Ji Wusheng, though he went by Duke Zhuang upon taking up office. Ji Wusheng's early life is a story of particular interest because it reveals much about the man his given name for instance wu sheng translates as difficult birth and it sur that though he was his father's eldest son, and thus the rightful heir to the duchy, his mother schemed to get her preferred son, Gongzhu Duan, into the seat in

Wuxiang's stead. Upon Duke Zhuang taking up office, she begged her son to give his brother the city of Duan and its surrounding territory as his own fiefdom. And this was no small request. Duan and its holdings were the second largest and most populated urban center in the Jiang state, and one of the territory's key fortress cities. It would have been tactically stupid to relinquish direct control of the city, and Duke Zhuang's courtiers and advisors all pleaded with him to deny the request on such grounds. Out of respect to his mother and love for his younger brother, however, the duke painfully agreed to install Gongxu Duan as the lord of Duan. Satisfied that her plot to overthrow her eldest son was proceeding as planned, Mother

Zheng urged Gongxu Duan to construct fortified walls, stockpile arms, and recruit mercenaries to bolster Duan's standing forces. To Duan's advisors, the situation appeared obvious and calamitous, all the more so because the duke continued to dismiss their concerns and insistence that he retake the city before it was too late. The duke told him that he was confident his beloved brother would never betray him, and it was his right as Duan's lord to fortify the holding against incursion. And so this naivety played directly into Lord Duan's and his scheming mother's hands, likely cackling madly all the while about how brilliant she was.

And when Duke Zhuang left his capital, fully confident that his beloved brother would never betray the trust he had placed in him, Duan of course did exactly that. On receiving word from Mami that the Duke was afield, Duan wasted no time in raising his flags in rebellion and laying siege to the capital, effectively locking Zhuang out of his own city. It seemed the naively trusting Duke's fate was sealed. In secret, however, Duke Zhuang was not nearly the deer in the headlights he had made himself

out to be. In allowing his mother and brother's plot to move forward into full-on rebellion, he had given them just enough rope to hang themselves with. Though his mother had thought Zhuang had left the capital with only a token force while leaving the bulk of his armies behind the city's walls, Zhuang had secretly moved his armies to lie in wait outside the capital. The trap had been baited and loaded, and his treasonous relatives had confidently marched directly into his jaws. Jaws he was now only too happy to snap shut clustered as his brother's forces were at the walls of the city the brilliant coup plot quickly devolved into a surrounded and entrapped rabble as chuang's forces closed in around them been attacking. Mother Zheng and her favored son's rebellion was undone, and seeing that he was stuck quite literally between a wall and a hard place, Gong Shuduan opted to take his own life, an act for which Duke Zhuang, who had truly loved his misguided brother, deeply regretted.

As for his scheming mother, there seems to have been little love lost indeed for the two. Duke Zhuang locked her away in a tower, famously declaring, We will meet again under the ground. All of this is simply to say, Duke Zhuang was neither a fool nor a man to be trifled with. Someone should have given that memo to King Huan. The state of Zheng, its inter-familial rebellion now soundly squashed eventually began to get caught up in the mad scramble of expansionism and annexation that had engulfed much of the empire at the states of Qi and Lu to reap the spoils of conquering the city-states of the Yellow River Valley, the increasing independence of his vassal deeply worried King Ping. In an effort to allay his liege lord's fears, Duke Zhuang agreed to exchange hostages with the capital in an effort to prove his loyalty.

In spite of this, however, relations between the throne and its buffer state continued to deteriorate throughout Ping's lifetime. When Ping's grandson, Prince Jilin, succeeded as King Huan, he had had just about enough of the state of Zheng's shirking of its duties and cavorting about with the other states. In an act of punishment so foolhardy it makes one's head spin, King Huan decided that the best course of action would be to offend Duke Zhuang by summarily removing him from his longtime position as High Court Minister. Zhuang responded in kind by henceforth ceasing to pay his expected tribute to the crown and refusing the king's summons, essentially saying, screw me? No, no,

my friend, screw you. The tit-for-tat exchange finally escalated to outright conflict in 707 BCE, when King Huan, deciding enough was enough, mounted a punitive expedition into Zheng to deal with Duke Zhuang once and for all. Now, you'll note I said King Huan mounted an expedition, because it was by no means his expedition. With the Zhou state so far diminished, what would have once been a fairly straightforward incursion with the royal armies was no longer such a simple affair. Recall, if you will, that Zhou was now preparing to mount an assault on its own security forces. As such, Huan was forced to cobble together as best he could a patchwork of regiments from the states of Cai, Chen, and Wei to even field a force that could, on paper, stand toe-to-toe with the Zheng army. And that only by draining much of the royal treasury to purchase outright what would once have been freely given. This Friday, grab your friends.

Novocaine? I thought you'd be dead by now. Get to the theater and experience the movie audiences are calling. An adrenaline rush of a good time. It's a big screen blast. Find a badass. I know, right? Nova Cane. Friday. Still, an army was an army, right?

And thusly assembled, King Huan squared off against the amassed forces of Duke Zhuang in a place called Shu Ge. And it was the battle that followed which would decisively prove that a group of soldiers does not an army make. Upon surveying the enemy forces, Duke Zhuang's chief advisor noted that the flanks of Huang's forces were manned by soldiers from the state of Chen. Chen was currently embroiled in a brutal civil war, and as such, any soldiers it had lent to King Huan were likely in a state of disarray. What's more, the states of Cai and Wei had recently been soundly defeated by Zheng, so its soldiers were once again staring down the very army that had already defeated them in the

field, rendering them demoralized. Armed with such insight into the enemy he faced, Zhuang decided to try something quite new. Rather than meeting the center of the royal expedition directly, he would devote his strength to the flanks of the enemy line, which would, their analysis indicated, quickly crumble and allow the hardened center force to be crushed against the army on two sides at once. A pincher attack. Though a gamble, after all, if one or both flanks didn't give up quickly enough, he risked exposing his own center to a killing stroke. The stratagem proved to be a wild success. The disorganized troops on the wings were confronted with such overwhelming force that they quickly were routed and fled. As such, the central Zhou force found itself outflanked and surrounded on three sides so quickly, King Huan didn't even have the chance

to make a dignified escape. Prior to his charioteers finally pulling their king out of the melee and back to his domain, Huan was significantly wounded in battle. That heaven would allow its own son to be so humiliated and maimed in battle utterly sapped what few doubts might have remained in the minds of the lords. The days of Zhou supremacy were long gone. The incursion into Zheng and the decisively disastrous Battle of Shu Ge served not to rein in the king's protector, but only confirmed the already de facto independence of the now only nominally vassal states from royal control. After all, if a

relatively small state like Zheng could repulse the king's patchwork army, heck, anyone could. The cost of... What's more, the cost of fielding that army had absolutely bankrupted Chengzhou and the king, so much so that when Huan died in 697 BCE, it would take the crown more than a decade to raise enough money to give him a proper royal funeral. This hardly came as news to the state of tchou however for more than two centuries now since their crushing victory over the six armies of the west the crown's so-called authority was nothing but a distant memory a respectable march or duchy. As such, though it was by far the largest and most populous state, it was as yet still a relatively low-ranking one, a mere Viscountee. On the heels of King Huan's humiliating defeat, however, Chu's Viscount of 37 years, Ni Xiong Da, decided that enough was enough, and his state wasn't going to suffer under the yoke of a clearly failed state any longer, even nominally. Thus, in 704 BCE, Viscount Mi declared the state of Chu now the Kingdom of Chu, fully equal to the Kingdom of Zhou, and placed himself as King Wu in his capital, Danyang.

Chu had grown tremendously over the centuries because of its aggressive policy of expansionism. What had once been its many neighbor states had, by hook or by crook, all been annexed and incorporated into Chu. It should be noted, however, that such state policies were pretty normal for the day. Larger states swallowed up smaller or less powerful ones as a matter of course, even in times of peace. Now a kingdom in its own right,

Chu sought what else yet more territory to absorb. It began by declaring war on neighboring Jiao, which it steamrolled in short order. On the heels of such a one-sided conquest, King Wu eyed his next prize. He sent his son, Prince Qu Xia, to lead the next expedition to subdue the state of Luo. Qu Xia, however, fatally underestimated the Luo's ability and resolve to fight, and hadn't counted on them being able to call on their Lu nomad allies. He and his army rapidly became bogged down and ultimately trapped between the two forces on the borders of Luo. His army was defeated, and the survivors, including the prince, beat a hasty retreat to the Chu city of Huangyu.

There, in shame at his failure to produce victory, Prince Chusha hanged himself. As for his fellow survivors, their story is a tale in what mercy meant in this age. King Wu ultimately spared them from death for their crime. You know, the crime of not winning the war. By taking the blame onto himself. This pardon, however, happened only after he ordered that each of the soldiers have their right foot amputated, so that next time they wouldn't run away. He was lenient after all, not a pushover. At the height of its power, Shu was absolutely massive, controlling what is now most of Hubei

and Hunan provinces, as well as significant portions of Chongqing, Guizhou, Henan, Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. Now if you don't happen to have a map of China immediately in front of you, just take my word that it's a huge slice of South Central China, stretching from deep in the interior semi-tropical forests all the way to the Pacific coast. As an independent realm, the Kingdom of Chu would survive for the next 400 years before finally bending the knee to the ascendant Qin Dynasty in the 3rd century BCE. But for now, for Zhou, the only silver lining to choose declaration of independence was that the kingdom's aggressive expansionism provided ample reason for Zhou's remaining vassals to remain in the fold of the empire, and ready to bind together in

mutual defense for fear of possible conquest and annexation. Back in Chengzhou, in the absence of any real political clout anymore, the king of Zhou was very much in need of an alternate means of protecting his capital, crown, and dynastic line against banditry and barbarian raids, not to mention any of his own lords who might think that the time was right to start a dynasty of their own, as Chu had just proved was a very attractive and attainable option. To that end, the king instituted the Bajiu system of state hierarchy. Under this, the king would name the lord of the most powerful state as Bajiu, meaning hegemon, over the lesser powers of the kingdom. In return, the hegemon was obligated to use that power and authority to protect those lesser states,

and most importantly, the king himself, from outside incursions from the wild peoples that surrounded the weakened civilization, the northern Di, the Southern Man, the Eastern Yi, and the Western Rong especially. As traditionally told, there will be five hegemons, but as with many titles of historical significance in China, the meaning of five doesn't just mean five. Symbolically, the number five signifies completeness, since its written character has within it 5 breaststrokes. So, while most tellings do bend over backwards to cram 5 and only 5 figures into the 5 hegemons, what may very likely have been meant was just all the hegemons,

of which we'll ultimately have 7 candidates, and only three of which are largely agreed on. Before we get to our first hegemon, though, I'd like to take a moment to split hairs on what exactly we mean by that. I just got done telling you that the hegemon was the lord of the most powerful state, and that's not exactly true. During the spring and autumn period itself, the designation of Bajiu was conferred onto the state, not the individual ruling it. So one could accurately say, the state of Jin struggled for hegemony over its neighbors. History, on the other hand, has come to confer the title directly on the lord who brought said state to power over its rivals.

So when I say or you read something like the Duke of Qi became the hegemon, it's actually more like a shorthand for saying that the state of Qi, then ruled by Duke Huan, was conferred hegemony over the other states within Zhou. And it's with Duke Huan of Qi that we'll start the hegemonic system. Duke Huan had ruled his state, which occupied the northeast of the empire, since 685 BCE, with the help of his ever-loyal prime minister, Guan Zhong. Guan Zhong, who was the real powerhouse behind the rise of Qi, began his tenure wanting to both expand and make more streamlined the elements of state and his lord's ability to rule it. Thus, he instituted a series of sweeping reforms aimed at just that. The core tenets of those

reforms were centralization of power under the duke and dividing Qi into 15 districts, each tasked with a specific trade for the betterment of the whole state. Guanzhong also devised a workaround for the long-standing bottleneck on state military might, the feudal levy system, whereby local lords had been tasked with providing conscripts to their superior when called on. Guan would instead directly apply conscript levies to the district capitals, thus bypassing the bureaucracy and the lord who might hold more men back for himself. Economically, Guangzhong was also responsible for much change within Qi. A unified tax code, for instance, state monopolization of iron and salt production, as well as opening up what may have been the first ever state-sanctioned brothel, called the Nushi, to fund the government treasury. The results spoke for themselves. The reforms magnified Qi's power manifold, and it was soon able to annex 35 of its neighboring

city-states, which only further fueled its growth. That kind of power projection was exactly what prompted the King of Zhou, now King Hui, the great-grandson of the wounded King Huan, to proclaim Qi as the hegemonic power of the empire, with the slogan Dunhuang Rongyi, or respecting the king and defending against the barbarian. Qi's rise to power under Duke Huan and Guan Zhong continued unabated for four decades, before the prime minister at last took ill and died. On his deathbed, Guan Zhong warned his lord that many of his advisors were not to be trusted and to send them away from his capital at once.

To appease his dying friend, Duke Huang did as he was asked and sent away the four advisors named by Guan. For as many as three years, he kept them in exile. But after Guan Zhong's death, the duke eventually accepted the quintet back into his fold. Now Guan Zhong had been the catalyst behind Huan's and Qi's meteoric rise to power as hegemon. He had faithfully and ceaselessly given his lord and friend sage advice. Why Huan took this, his final urging, so lightly will likely never be fully known, but that decision to ignore Guan Zhong in the end would lead to Duke Huan's grisly downfall. The cabal of advisors staged a secret coup, locking Huan in his chamber and then giving instructions to the outside world in his name,

and proving that fiction, even HBO fiction, truly has nothing on historical fact. He was left there to starve to death for months. Ultimately, he was found in 643 when one of his wives, no longer accepting the placations of his advisorsers snuck into the duke's compound and found wriggling from the door-frame itself a host of grave-worms on opening the door she discovered what was left of his desiccated corpse just what became of Duke Huan's advisors-turned-murderers. While it's likely they were put to death for their treachery, Huan's sons may have been too busy squabbling amongst themselves for power to effectively deal with the traitors in their midst. Regardless, with the death of Duke Huan of Qi, or rather, its discovery, the first hegemon was no more,

and once again, the states would vie for power over one another. This milestone marks the end of the Age of Regional Cultures, and heralds the arrival of the second phase of the Spring and Autumn Period, what we'll cover next week, the Age of Encroachments. Thank you for listening. By using Stamps.com, you can easily print your own approved and exact U.S. postage right from your home computer and printer to be mailed anywhere in the world, even China. Just print the postage directly on labels, envelopes, or just plain paper, drop it in your mailbox, and away it goes. And right now, Stamps.com has two great offers for you. The first is a four-week no-risk trial, including $25 in postage coupons, a free digital scale to help you weigh your packages, and a supplies kit, all together an

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of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the center of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.