Zhou Overview

I'll be looking at the Zhou period for the next several posts starting with this overview. It goes for almost a millenium (no, not the overview) so that seems only fair. It's also possibly the closest thing to a 'real' first Chinese dynasty and one that we really know much about and it's also certainly a very formative period for Chinese culture.

Within the Zhou period there are usually considered to be several important divisions. I’ve also already mentioned that the Warring States period (which I’ll discuss later) is partly contained within what is also considered to be the late Zhou period by scholars. A further division is often made into the earlier Western Zhou period (c. 1,040 BCE to 771 BCE) and the later Eastern Zhou period (c. 722 BCE to 481 BCE) so named as the capital was forced to move east (mainly in order to secure the empire against serious threats from western ‘barbarians’). In addition the Spring and Autumn Period (named for a local series of annals of the early Eastern Zhou period traditionally either written or compiled by Confucius late in the period) immediately precedes the official Warring States period and is the later of two divisions of the Eastern Zhou era.

Three things are especially noteworthy of the Zhou era (including the Warring States period) and I’ll examine them in the next post: the instability (indicated by the above divisions), the actual political and social status of the Zhou emperors resulting from it and, resulting in turn from that, the appearance of philosophers (of which Confucius was merely the most successful over time) .