Addendum: The Networked Kingdom of the Western Zhou, China
The emergence of a ritual bureaucracy indicates the professionalisation of the Zhou army
If you are new here, we are reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Catch up and join us Thursdays in 2024. My first slow read here on Substack is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything. These two books showcase his thesis on the development of humanity by looking at how debt evolved and how people organised themselves and their world. Unique among his peers, Graeber still asks the big questions in anthropology.
Dear Reader,
What have you been reading lately? I love the recent crime fiction I have finished by Robert Goddard. It combines my fascination with Japanese history and crime/mystery. Better than his first book.
I’m hoping to finish another one about studying ‘doing nothing.’ (Don’t we all wish?) My dissertation topic (almost!).
It’s a balm as I investigate more on Ancient China. We’re closer to finding the answer…
Stay dry,
Melanie
How a networked kingdom works
The Shang 商 ritual dynasty ended as expected, in the hands of one of its former allies, the Zhou 周, in 1046 BC. Although there were some Zhou oracle bones found, this period is notable for its Bronze ritual vessels used as gifts. This has led Maria Khayutina to propose a network view of the Zhou kingdom.1
Since we talked about opposites previously, the Zhou distinguished itself from the Shang by eschewing a single great capital such as Anyang. Rather, what Khayutina propose is a moving polity wherein the King travels to other parts of his kingdom to meet and honour his allies with gifts. Much of her information comes from inscriptions from bronze ritual vessels rather than historical records written centuries after.
There are about three hundred Western Zhou inscriptions found on these ritual objects that refer to the Western Zhou kings. I found Khayutina’s ‘royal hospitality’ as governance illuminating. This is a strategy in which the King visits and cements his geopolitical territory by moving, conferring, and assigning roles and titles to his allies in different parts of his kingdom. The King’s mobility explains why it was difficult to pin down a single central capital in the Western Zhou.
It had none.
The royal residences would later be called as high (high structure) garrison jing shi 京師 such as Chengzhou. This is an indicator that a dedicated royal army was present.
There were three to four different cities in which the King would receive his guests: Qiyi, Feng/Hao and Luoyi/Chengzhou.2
The Zhou operated under a decentralised system of lords zhuhou 諸侯 governing their domains with the system of communication as their only form of integration. This language is the gift — cowries and bronze objects or other paraphernalia cement his alliances.
These gift-giving receptions were at first displays of hospitality. However, as the Zhou continued its reign, the language gradually shifted towards ‘commands’ and later rites were routinised. This was a distinct difference from the Shang as the seeds of bureaucracy emerged in governance.
Ritual bureaucracy of the Zhou
The language of hospitality excluded the military. Instead, the language of ‘command’ was used consistently through time. Nevertheless, the king gave high military commands gifts of kneepads and slippers and in one instance, a tiger coat for a captain.
By the middle of the Western Zhou period, Li Feng’s research on ‘offices’ revealed the appearance of the term shishi which refers to marshalls or the military servicemen who sit below the king’s appointed high official. These personnel managed the infantrymen below them. Their duties include:
guarding the king
maintaining regional security
participating in military campaigns
The military would sit separately from the offices of ‘ministry’ and ‘secretariat’ and the royal household. The latter offices handled land, construction, horses (for the army), and records. The military division is a separate entity and further divided between the ‘six armies’ liushi and ‘eight armies’ bashi. These army units also had an overlap with the administrative divisions. The office of the sanyousi involved land and forest use connected to the Sixth and Eighth armies.
What do we know
Armies are not all under the king though he has an exclusive coterie around him; for larger numbers, the king has to rely on his allies to mobilise further which is always a dangerous proposition
Ordinary accounts below the military commands were not found. We can surmise that there would be a few full-time skilled warriors and part-time or infantrymen recruited from their lineages. We do not know how these men were paid exactly.
The Six and Eight armies might be full-time legions directly under the King’s command
The Zhou has dramatically evolved its lineage-based system into a mixed hereditary and appointment system. The gift giving ritual shifted towards an elaborate performance to assign a task for bureaucrats. This means that there must be a system of accounting and payments but we have no archaeological evidence just yet.
We do know that there are multiple ‘coins’ found during the Zhou period. However, I suspect that these are ritual-related paraphernalia just like cowrie shells but these are labeled as one of the earliest records of coinage in the Zhou.
We will revisit them for our next post.
Round-Up
The Zhou kingdom continued most of the ritual performances of the Shang but its centrality would diminish. In its place, we see how ritual performances eventually came to be routinised into the beginning of a bureaucracy.
The bronze vessels have memorialised some military structure references. The intricate record of divisions and departments indicates:
meticulous record-keeping and accounts, though we do not know it yet, there were military records kept
payments were made to both the royal armies and the entire logistics division that the king directly controlled
payments were made by sub-lineages to those who entered military service as infantrymen or performed army services (logistics and suppliers)
no records exist yet to shed light on how and what kind of payments or arrangements were made
However, there is an indication that the professionalisation of the army has occurred. I need to find out more about how this happened.
Re-read the previous post
Sources:
I found the work of Dr. Maria Khayutina valuable, especially in her alternative reading of the Zhou relying only on archaeological evidence. See Royal Hospitality and Geopolitical Constitution of the Western Zhou Polity (2010)
The work of Li Feng was very focused on the investigation of the governance structure of the Zhou. See “Offices” in Bronze Inscriptions and Western Zhou Government Administration (2001-2002)
Her main argument is outlined here: Royal Hospitality and Geopolitical Constitution of the Western Zhou Polity (2010)
Over eighty per cent of the inscriptions in Khayutina’s sample indicate place names for the royal receptions.