Western Zhou

The Zhou had a problem after they defeated the Shang. The Shang kings had claimed a unique relationship with their own high god and with their royal ancestors, and had run an enormous divination apparatus on that basis. A rival house that overthrew them needed an account of why the gods had permitted it. The answer, worked out in the early Zhou documents and traditionally credited to the Duke of Zhou, was the Mandate of Heaven: Heaven grants the right to rule to a house that governs well and withdraws it from a house that does not, and the transfer is not arbitrary but earned. That claim was designed to legitimate one conquest and it did something much larger. It made the ruling house permanently accountable to a standard outside itself, and it supplied every subsequent Chinese rebellion with a ready made justification, since a dynasty that could be shown to have failed had by definition already lost the mandate.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China sets out how the surviving early Zhou speeches make the argument. It is worth noting what the doctrine does not say. It offers no promise to any individual, no afterlife and no personal relationship with Heaven; it is a theory about the legitimacy of government, and it stayed one for three thousand years.

The best written source for the Western Zhou is not a book. It is the inscriptions cast into ritual bronzes, often on the inner wall of a vessel where no one could read them once the vessel was in use. They record royal appointments, grants of land and people, military successes and legal settlements, and they almost always end with a formula in which the maker dedicates the vessel to a named ancestor and expresses the wish that sons and grandsons will treasure it for ever. That combination is the point. A bronze was simultaneously a record of the family's standing, an object used to present food and drink to the ancestors at sacrifice, and an heirloom asserting that the line would continue.

The religion of the period runs through it. Ancestors were not remembered, they were fed, and the right to feed them in the proper vessels was regulated by rank, so that the number and type of vessels a family could use was itself a statement about its place. The Zhouli, a later text describing an idealised Zhou administration, presents this ritual order as a complete system of offices and observances, and Confucian writers of much later centuries treated the arrangement as the model from which their own age had fallen away.