Spring
and Autumn
1. Local Dominance
0770-0632
Introduction. We begin with Spring and Autumn, the period which began with the collapse of the Jou Dynasty in 0771, and continued for about three centuries. Spring and Autumn is the first, and milder, stage of the Chinese pre-Imperial period; the Warring States are the second stage.
The Jou power, which had been centered in the northwest and for several centuries had ruled indirectly over many subordinate or "feudatory" states in what is now North China, was ousted from its homeland in 0771 by powerful enemies, including some non-Sinitic peoples. It was forcibly relocated to what had previously been its eastern capital, near modern Lwoyang in the middle Yellow River valley. The territory around Lwoyang became the new "Royal Domain." It was insufficient to support an army of any consequence, and though the later Jou Kings retained a certain ceremonial position, Jou played no role in practical politics. For that reason, it is misleading to refer to the period after 0771 as the Jou Dynasty; what we have is instead a system of states with no single overall authority. It is better to call it Spring and Autumn, after the chronicle of Lu which recorded events in that period, and that is what we will do in the following pages.
Major events in the period covered in this chapter are:
[to be supplied]
The Major States are best learned from the following map. Those of non-Sinitic culture ("non-Chinese," but that term is an anachronism for the pre-Chin period) are highlighted in blue:
[Outline Map]
Lu occupied a special position among the Sinitic states. Not only was it related to the Ji family (the clan name of the Jou ruling house), but it was descended from the honored Prince of Jou (Jou-gung). Legend had it that Jou-gung had selflessly served as regent for a young Jou King at the very beginning of the Jou Dynasty, but had handed back power when the King reached maturity. Such selflessness was an ideal of later political theory, and we do not dependably know how accurately the later stories may describe the real Jou situation. But Lu at any rate came to regard itself as the special custodian of the highest traditions of Jou. After 0771, when Jou itself no longer wielded real power, Lu gave Jou considerable respect; it continued to use the Jou calendar, and at least twice it went through the ceremony of re-enfiefment when a new ruler succeeded to the throne. For all that formal deference, Lu showed its independence too. A decisive moment came in 0721, on the accession of the ruler whose posthumous name was Yin-gung: it was then that Lu began to compile its own palace chronicle. That chronicle, or the early half of it, is the text which we call the Chun/Chyou or "Spring and Autumn.
The Chun/Chyou (CC) is a season-by-season record of events important to the court. Those events included matters of harvest or sacrifice, the movements of the ruler or his immediate family, conferences and alliances with other rulers, military campaigns, and anything that might be a portent or an omen. These brief entries, sometimes complete to the day, give a fine-grained picture of the actions of Lu and of other states affecting Lu, which is without parallel in any other period of early Chinese history. We have, for instance, no comparable record for the later Warring States centuries, and we must infer even the most important events from their mention in literary texts. But for Spring and Autumn history, particularly in the east, we can follow events themselves. The accuracy of the Chun/Chyou record can be verified by astronomical calculations: its entries for eclipses are not only correct, they are correct to the day. They thus represent actual observations made at the time. Except for a very few entries which may be later intrusions, the CC is trustworthy. We will build our picture of Spring and Autumn almost entirely from that text.
War. Lu was not large, and it was thus not a first-class military power, like Chi in the east (north of the Taishan range) or Jin in the center, or Chin in the west. But it had its advantages and its ambitions, and for a time, it did what it could to extend its influence. The political power of Lu and all the other Sinitic states was concentrated in its ruler, who held that position by right of inheritance (plus a certain amount of intrigue and murder, among the eligible sons or brothers of the preceding ruler). Its military power rested on a group of elite warriors, the shr or "officers," who served the ruler in return for their estates. Their chief weapon was the longbow, and they fought from light horse-drawn chariots. As in the Mesopotamian area, from which the chariot had actually been borrowed a thousand years earlier, the chariot was essentially an archery platform.
On campaign, each chariot would be accompanied by a screen of less skilled foot soldiers, probably in part drawn from the peasants on the individual warrior's estate, who served to protect the chariot from close attack during battle, and did the camp chores at other times. An occasional review by the Prince was probably the occasion for chariot repair or weapon replacement, since these crucial skills seem to have been concentrated in the Lu capital. Perfecting the skills of archery and chariot driving was a lifelong task, for which the warriors on their several estates were themselves responsible.
Given the hereditary nature of the warrior elite, replacements for the losses in a Sinitic chariot force might thus be a slow process: a younger brother of a dead warrior might take over the estate, but so might the son, and in the latter case, a time gap would occur. Battle casualties were thus a matter of great concern, and battles as such were on the whole avoided; most of them turned out badly for at least one of the forces engaged. More profitable was the unopposed raid into the territory of another state, before that state's forces could be summoned and gathered, and the recorded military events of Spring and Autumn are for the most part unopposed engagements; the tendency of some modern investigators to describe them as "wars" is a mistake. They were instances of more or less organized state piracy, used for intimidation or for temporary domination (such as an intervention in support of a given candidate for the rulership of a nearby state).
In this type of warfare, size was not inevitably an advantage. Even a small state might catch its larger neighbor off guard, by concentrating its small force against those of the larger state's warriors who happened to be located in the area of the attack. And the small chariot force had other advantages. Unlike the huge infantry armies of later times, it could forage off the land it passed through without devastating that land, and thus it did not need to carry extensive supplies with it. This made for mobility and speed while on campaign.
A Problem of History. With that much by way of introduction, we should now go on to read the Chun/Chyou, and simply watch Spring and Autumn history happen. This is what we will presently do. But first we must notice a problem. Traditional ideas of what happened in the Spring and Autumn period (from the 08th through the 06th centuries) are based, not on the Chun/Chyou, but on an 04th century interpretive commentary to the Chun/Chyou, the Dzwo Jwan ("the Commentary of Dzwo," so called because it is conventionally but wrongly attributed to one Dzwochyou Ming). Reading the Dzwo Jwan leads to major misunderstandings, since it inserts into those centuries features that were not there, and projects back into those centuries innovations that took place only later, most of them in the 04th century when the Dzwo Jwan itself was written. There are two major reasons for these distortions.
- Chinese political theorists hate a sovereignty gap, and the Spring and Autumn centuries, with their powerless Jou remnant, are a huge sovereignty vacuum. Theory thus asserts that Jou still governed during that period, by delegating its power of enforcement to some especially virtuous vassal state, the two chief examples being Chi and Jin. This is the supposed hegemon system. In fact, the strongest vassal states simply exerted power, and compelled the powerless Jou to acknowledge them.
- The Chinese state, and the Chinese army, underwent extensive modifications during the 05th and 04th centuries; the result was a large bureaucratic state supporting a large infantry army. The revolution in state structure was first accomplished in Chi, and was effectively complete for all the major states by the middle of the 04th century. It was at this thme that Chi won the first long-distance battle between new-style states, defeating Ngwei in the year 0343. A legal system also emerged at this time, as a necessary tool of the long-range exercise of state power. But Chinese sensibility on the whole dislikes innovation. It prefers to think of reviving a previously existing scheme of things. Accordingly, these and other 04c innovations are located by the Dzwo Jwan in the Spring and Autumn period, thus significantly obscuring the real history of that period.
So as we dip into the Chun/Chyou, we will not only be looking at samples of what really happened, but also at series of events which prove that the Dzwo Jwan constructed view of things could not have happened.
The Style of the Chronicle includes diplomatic but also ritual events, and was probably kept by a permanent member of the Lu palace staff who had charge of ritual observances, and who was also called in when any event required supernatural sanction (such as a marriage or an alliance) or interpretation (like an eclipse or uncanny natural event). Here are some samples of entries of this type:
1. Visits
The Domain of Lu. Text
The Foreign Policy of Lu. Text
10. Lu and Chi
11. Syi-gung and CommunicationsLarger Issues. Text
12. The Appearance of Chu
13. The Campain Against Chu
14. The Battle of Chvngpu
15. The Phony Hegemony
The new world ushered in by the dominance of Jin will be explored in the next chapter.
The Hundred Voices is Copyright © 1994- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
27 July 2007 / Contact The Authors / Exit to Contents Page
