realms, whose mysterious processes could be discerned through the use
of oracles. Divination and the keeping of records together encouraged
a well-developed sense of precedent, and a belief that one could learn
from the past. Society was hierarchically structured, with political
power exercised by an authoritarian ruling elite, whose lavish lifestyle
and impressive tombs rested on the extraction of surplus production
from toiling peasants.
In overthrowing the last of the Shang kings, the Zhou dynasty
(eleventh to third century BCE) elaborated and reinforced this devel-
oping Chinese worldview. The Zhou came from the western fringes of
the Shang culture area, a people who had been influenced by and
adopted much of Shang civilisation. They brought with them their
own ancestral deity, whom they called tian, meaning Heaven, and
identified with Shang Di. The Zhou kings called themselves Son of
Heaven (tian-zi), thereby claiming both moral power and a divine
mandate to rule (tian-ming). In Zhou cosmology, the Son of Heaven,
representing humankind, stood as the crucial link between Heaven,
the human world and the Earth itself. It was the duty of the Zhou kings
to sustain that linkage on behalf of all humankind through ritual
worship at the temples of Heaven and Earth.
The Shang was a great literate and artistic culture, as demon-
strated not least by its incomparable bronze metallurgy. For centuries
the dynasty had ruled the core Chinese cultural area. By what right,
then, could the Zhou claim the Shang mandate to rule? The Zhou
legitimised their seizure of power by means that were both ethical and
historical. The Zhou painted the last of the Shang kings as not just
weak and ineffective, but as morally corrupt, a man who had lost all
moral right to rule, and so who could no longer fulfil his assigned role
in the Heaven-ordained natural and political order. This established
two important principles: first, that Heaven was a moral force, which
meant that the Son of Heaven presided over what was a moral world
order; and second, that history provided crucial evidence for the
working out of those processes over which Heaven presided.
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia