252 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
turies it was called the Western Zhou because the capital was at Chang’an and
new forms for organizing the state were worked out by the new elite class,
which consisted of the new Zhou leaders and the former Shang nobility who
had merged into a single class. For Zhou kings it was easier to capture a region
than to govern it. Kinship ties of loyalty, rather than bureaucratic organization,
were the cement that held society together. In theory, all the territory con-
quered by the king belonged to him, but in order to control his territories, he
gave his male kinsmen the right to colonize and govern lands in his name.
These bonds of fealty were ritually enacted. At Chang’an, the Zhou king estab-
lished an altar to the God of the Soil on the west side of his palace gate and an
altar to his ancestors on the right side of the gate. When a younger brother or
nephew established a vassal state, he took a clod of earth from the Son of
Heaven’s altar to his own capital and built his own local altar to the God of the
Soil. In performing rites to his local God of the Soil, he acknowledged the
supremacy of the Son of Heaven at Chang’an. But he built a shrine to his own
ancestors on the right side of his gate. There was little military force emanating
from the capital to hold these vassal states to the center; it all depended on
these bonds of loyalty, ritually enacted.
Ancestor worship thus had powerful political significance; only aristocratic
lineages were entitled to worship their ancestors, and an elaborate code of rules
linked a family’s rank in the Zhou state to the complexity of ancestral rites and
the number of generations of ancestors that could be worshipped. Commoners
were not entitled to worship ancestors beyond three generations, could not
offer meat, and could worship only once each season. Ancestor worship
throughout Chinese history changed in response to changes in the state and in
the nature of elite classes, as we shall see.
During the last five centuries, called the Eastern Zhou because the capital
moved to Luoyang, it all began to unravel. Thoughtful people looked back on
those early decades of the Western Zhou when the feudal system still worked
as a golden age.
The early Zhou system of linking vassal states to the king through bonds of
loyalty and ritual action gradually dissolved as those many secondary states
grew larger and more powerful than the Zhou king himself. It was an easy mat-
ter to forget the old loyal bonds and begin to act autonomously; a prince had
his own shrine to the God of the Soil and his own ancestral shrine outside his
palace door. At one point over 170 states were operating independently, form-
ing alliances against stronger states and absorbing weaker states until they
began to eat one another up. This era, known by the ironically poetic name of
the Spring-and-Autumn period (722–481 B.C.E.), gave way to the Warring
States period (403–221 B.C.E.), when the competing states had worn each other
down to only six. It was not surprising that people looked back with longing on
the peaceful times when all states lived harmoniously under a single king.
Clearly the Zhou golden age was over. However, great strides were made in
other areas of social life. Iron, a metal strong enough to make plows that could