The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

The chariots were buried in what the Chinese call the Spring and Autumn period (c. 700–600 BCE), and they belong to the Iron Age warrior culture that flourished here at the time Homer composed the Iliad.

Like Homer’s Agamemnon, their warrior kings relied on the petty states and tribes under their overlordship to provide chariots and infantry for the army to fight their enemies for land, tribute, treasure, slaves and women.

In the Luoyang pit, then, is graphic evidence of a hierarchical warrior aristocracy, manifested in death as in life. This incredible expenditure of valuable resources reflects early Chinese social structure, ritual order, and military and economic power.

Horses were introduced into the Bronze Age cultures of Eurasia at the start of the second millennium BCE, from the Central Asian steppe.

In China, the use of chariots in war began under the Shang, when they simply carried kings and nobles into battle.

This continued until they were made obsolete by new forms of warfare, including the mass-produced mechanical crossbow in the Qin period.

In Zhou heroic poetry, chariot warfare is as lovingly described as in the hymns of the Rig Veda, the Mahabharata or in Homer.

The Zhou dynasty is the first period of Chinese history from which extended texts have survived.

The Book of Songs (Shijing) is a poetic anthology, containing the earliest texts from the world’s oldest living poetic tradition, going back to 1000 BCE, or even before. Its 305 songs are about love, courtship and marriage, agriculture, feasting and dancing, sacrifice, hunting and warfare.

On the other hand, the Book of Documents (Shujing) preserves key historical documents and claims to contain, and perhaps does, texts from the early Zhou, after the conquest of the Shang in the eleventh century BCE, including the famous narrative of the fall of the Shang (see above, here).

From now on, the control of history is linked to the control of writing, which the state monopolised through its scribes and ritual specialists. Through the written word came the possession of history.

The rule of the Zhou, then, was linked to heaven. A king and his dynasty could only rule so long as they had heaven’s favour.

Disorder would follow and society would descend into chaos: the great fear of Chinese culture even today.

The Western Zhou lasted 400 years. During this time, the concept of the Heavenly Sign or Mandate developed from a specific event in 1059 BCE, during the reign of King Wen, to the broad conception of a changing mandate tied to a theory of dynastic cycles.

what we see in this period is the creation of a paradigm. Political ideology and, indeed, political philosophy begin to be shaped in the service of a monarchical idea, that of the sage-king.

For Confucius, ‘follow the Duke of Zhou’ becomes a mantra, a golden age to be emulated rather like resetting a clock.

the cosmos was perceived as a moral order, and moral values were built into the way the earthly order worked.

Of course, in any culture the gap between the ideal and the reality of rulership is often wide, and in China, it was dependent on the success of the king’s ministers and philosophers to steer the guiding principles of governance.

Even in the communist era, the Mandate remained an invisible presence behind the autocracy of the party.

In the sixth century BCE, the Zhou state fell into decline as rival regional powers fought for supremacy. Order broke down. Violence and war became endemic – so much so that later centuries called this the Zhanguo period: the Warring States.

out of this age of conflict and political instability arose a golden age of Chinese philosophy that would define the Chinese political tradition.

This great figure who codified these ideas in the sixth century BCE was called Kong Qiu, but in later times became known as Kongfuzi, ‘Master Kong’. The name was Latinised by Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century China as Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE).

‘A transmitter who invented nothing’, as he described himself, Confucius is one of the most influential and famous figures in history.

Confucius is such a famous figure, who has gathered so many accretions from the past, that it is very difficult to see him as a man of his time – as Kong Qiu, an Iron Age thinker in a regional culture of the Eastern Zhou, in the time of Warring States.

From the gleaming new high-speed station the visitor may still approach Qufu through the countryside, a rarity in today’s China, leaving the main highway along long tree-lined country roads, through wheat fields and past small villages.

The extended lineage of the descendants still make up half the population of Qufu and clan members on the street will proudly show their ID bearing the Kong name. In the centre of the city, inside the walls, is the sprawling complex of the Kong ancestral mansion, with its 480 rooms and courtyards.

Qufu itself is still a small, charming walled town, where costumed gate ceremonies with pikes and drums are put on every night for tourists.

Today, the presence of Confucius is everywhere, despite being execrated by the communists during the Cultural Revolution.

the Master had his revenge and he is now thoroughly rehabilitated. Recently, President Xi cited him in his keynote address to the party and provided a recommendation for the latest Chinese popular edition on a wrap-around cover.

Confucius’ statue stands at the entrance to Qufu’s poshest hotel, where a copy of the Analects lies in the bedside drawer, like the Gideon Bible.

Qufu was the capital of a small Eastern Zhou tributar...

Founded in the eighth century BCE, the Archaic period in ancient Greece, it contained the palace of the kings of Lu from the Spring and Autumn period down to the Western H...

Today’s Ming walled city only occupies the southwest quarter of the ancient city, which once included the Kong cemetery. Fragments of the ancient wal...

Inside the walls no major digs have ever taken place, but a number of test soundings have revealed platforms of rammed earth for large bui...

Outside the southern gate was another platform, forming a huge open-air altar on which dances and prayers for rain were performed and which still sur...

In the sixth-fifth century BCE, therefore, Qufu was recognisably descended from the city planning of the old Shang world, with royal and ducal palaces and workshops.

He came from a provincial Iron Age city-state and his origins offer clues to who he was.

today’s Kong family have a long-preserved genealogy extending back fifteen generations from the Master...

The teaching Confucius got from his family may account for the intense loyalty he felt, all his life, to the ancient ideal of Zhou kingship, though his fate was to be ‘a wanderer in many lands’.

Confucius showed talent early, but did not have a successful career as a young member of the elite and never rose high in the state, possibly because he was a minor son of Zang outsiders.

On one occasion, he confronted three powerful rival clans in Lu and got them to agree to a plan to demolish their fortifications; he was even responsible for sending troops to crush a rebellious minister. Yet in 497 BCE, if the traditional dates are correct, when Confucius was already in his fifties, he lost his position and was ousted.

With a group of followers, he began a fourteen-year journey around China, before finally returning to Lu to study and teach. This journey is a crucial part of the biography – a mind-changing experience he shares with other great figures in Chinese history, such as the historian Sima Qian and the poet Du Fu.

For the remarkable thing about Kong, as a man from a small East Asian city-state, is that he did acquire a universal sense of humanity, or ‘humaneness’. How much he ever knew of the world beyond East Asia, though, is doubtful, and ‘humanity’ to him, perhaps, still comprised ‘All Under Heaven’: China.

The conventional image, used in later times, is of a frail old man with a smiling face and a wispy beard, his character a bit pompous and boring. Despite this, his own view of himself, as preserved by his disciples, was that enthusiasm was his main characteristic:

Even into middle age he was a man of action, adept at the outdoor activities of a cultivated man: an expert with horses, good at outdoor sports, archery, hunting and fishing. He was a tireless and bold traveller in a period when one had to travel everywhere armed.

In Confucius’ lifetime, the war-torn multi-state system under Zhou lordship was breaking down, and it became clear that long-term stability lay in some kind of political unity. It is in this context that Confucius’ career as a thinker is to be understood.

his specific message was to restore the potency of the kingship of the ‘Son of Heaven’ by concentrating power in a single, wise, legitimate monarch.

How to achieve it practically, he doesn’t say. He is talking about principles, but ideologically the blueprint is clear: a single monarch using the restored ritual norms of the Western Zhou.

As for the role of the intellectual, the key was to determine the Way (dao). When the Way is lost, the sage has a moral duty, above all else, to reform society, to set the Way back on track, to define the tradition and advise the prince.

Politics, then, was Confucius’ first and foremost concern, which is also true of Chinese philosophy as a whole.