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Eastern Zhou: A Visual History

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Visual history of an empire

Five centuries when the Zhou kings reigned in name only, while their lords fought, and Confucius, Laozi and Sunzi thought.

Existed
771 BC to 256 BC
Duration
515 years
Existed
770 to 256 BC
Area
About 1.5 million km2 (the Zhou cultural sphere)
Capital
Luoyi (Luoyang)
Periods
Spring and Autumn (770-476); Warring States (475-221)
Ended by
Qin, 256 BC

The Eastern Zhou (770-256 BC) began when the Zhou court fled from Hao to Luoyang after the sack of 771 BC. The kings kept ritual supremacy but no real power; the Spring and Autumn period (770-476) saw hegemons such as Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin lead coalitions in the king's name while over a hundred states shrank to a dozen, and the Warring States period (475-221) saw seven great powers fight total wars with iron weapons, mass infantry and Legalist bureaucracies. This age of chaos produced the Hundred Schools of Thought. Qin extinguished the last Zhou king in 256 BC and unified China in 221.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Eastern Zhou. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

1,600 BC1,400 BC1,200 BC1,000 BC800 BC600 BC400 BC200 BC0200Eastern Zhou (771 BC to 256 BC)Open: Shang dynastyShang dynasty (1,600 BC to 1,046 BC)Open: Zhou dynasty (Western Zhou)Zhou dynasty (Western Zhou) (1,046 BC to 256 BC)Open: Chu (state)Chu (state) (1,030 BC to 223 BC)Open: Warring States period and Qin's wars of unificationWarring States period and Qin's wars of unification (475 BC to 221 BC)Open: Qin dynastyQin dynasty (221 BC to 206 BC)Open: Xiongnu EmpireXiongnu Empire (209 BC to 93)

Number of significant states

037.575112.5150770 BC: 150150770 BC600 BC: 4040600 BC475 BC: 1515475 BC350 BC: 77350 BC221 BC: 11221 BCstates (approximate)

Timeline of the Eastern Zhou

  1. 770 BC
    Zhou court moves to Luoyang
  2. 685 BC
    Duke Huan of Qi, first hegemon
  3. 551 BC
    Confucius born
  4. 453 BC
    Partition of Jin
  5. 356 BC
    Shang Yang's reforms in Qin
  6. 260 BC
    Changping
  7. 256 BC
    Qin ends the Zhou
  8. 221 BC
    Qin unifies China

Spring and Autumn

Named after the chronicle of the state of Lu, the period saw the Zhou king reduced to a ritual figure while great lords, the 'Five Hegemons', kept a semblance of order and fought the southern power Chu. Warfare was still aristocratic and chariot-borne, governed by codes; states swallowed their neighbours by the score. Confucius (551-479), a minor official of Lu, looked back to the early Zhou as a golden age of ritual and virtue.

Warring States

After the partition of Jin into Han, Zhao and Wei around 453 BC, seven major states, Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei, fought with armies of hundreds of thousands, crossbows, cavalry and siege engines. Reformers like Shang Yang in Qin created centralised bureaucracies, universal military service and land taxes. Sunzi's Art of War, Mencius, Zhuangzi, the Mohists and Legalists all wrote in this age of philosophers hawking advice to kings.

The end of Zhou

The Zhou royal domain shrank to a few towns around Luoyang, itself split between eastern and western Zhou courts. Qin, made invincible by Shang Yang's reforms and the Sichuan basin's grain, defeated Zhao at Changping in 260, allegedly burying 400,000 prisoners alive, took the Zhou domain in 256, and destroyed the last six states between 230 and 221 BC. The Zhou king's nine tripods, symbols of the Mandate, passed to Qin.

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

Wars of the same era and region

8 surprising things about the Eastern Zhou

  1. The Spring and Autumn Annals cover 722 to 481 BC and were supposedly edited by Confucius himself.
  2. The Warring States saw the first mass-produced crossbows with bronze trigger mechanisms of astonishing precision.
  3. The Zhou king in 256 BC ruled a territory smaller than a modern county.
  4. Duke Wen of Jin spent 19 years in exile before becoming hegemon; his story is a Chinese epic of patience.
  5. The 'Hundred Schools of Thought' produced Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, Mohism and the School of Names within about 250 years.
  6. The Zhou king awarded the title 'hegemon' (ba) to the strongest lord in exchange for nominal protection.
  7. Iron casting, unknown in the West until the fourteenth century AD, was in mass use in China by 500 BC.
  8. The Warring States gave Chinese its word for 'chess strategy', and the era's diplomats, the 'vertical and horizontal' alliance-makers, are still studied.

Sources

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