Ancient China: The Warring States

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The Warring States Period

1:32It was one of the most revolutionary periods in history. Over two centuries of fighting, when ancient China fragmented into several different powerful kingdoms, each vying for supremacy. It was an age of industrialised warfare, of total war,

2:07where armies in the hundreds of thousands would clash in some of antiquity's bloodiest battles. But it was also a time of philosophy, where the successors of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius would promote their own schools of thought during this tumultuous time. And yet, for its great significance in shaping what would become China, this warring states period is little known today in the West.

2:36We're going to introduce this fascinating period. We'll explore the embers of the chaos, how it emerged from a weakened ruling dynasty, whose mandate of heaven was on its last legs. We'll look into how this turmoil would transform China forever, and how it would ultimately pave the way for the rise of China's first emperor.

Welcome to the Ancients

2:58Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the warring states. Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Meyer, Professor of History at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York, and the author of To Rule All Under Heaven, A History of Classical China, From Confucius to the First Emperor.

3:22Andrew, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much. It's really a great pleasure to be here. You're more than welcome. And what's a topic? The warring states period, you claim it is one of the most revolutionary periods in not just ancient history, but the entirety of history. I do. I think a lot of people in my field would agree. We aren't accustomed to thinking of things that happened quite that long ago as revolutions which we should still consider as impacting the state of our world today, but I would argue that the warring states merits that

3:55kind of consideration. I mean, there are so many stories that we can delve into, the sizes of these armies in question, much larger than those of Alexander the Great against the Persian Empire and so on. So for such an important period in ancient history, why is it that the warring states period in China is much less known than, let's say, the Persian Wars or the Punic Wars today here in the West? I think one of the simplest reasons is that there just aren't many sources that readers can turn to

4:26to learn about this. You know, there are some good scholarly treatments in English, English, but there really hasn't been a detailed chronicle of this period made available for general readers. And, you know, people can't really be blamed for not knowing about something that you can't really read about. And there are other reasons, of course, too. There's a general unfamiliarity with some of the details of Chinese culture and Chinese history. And again, there are complex reasons

4:57for that, for why that's so in the English speaking world.

The Warring States Period Explained

5:00So let's set the scene with the warring states period. First off, roughly, because as we'll explore, I'm sure there's not exact dates for it, but roughly how long a period of time are we talking about with this period? I begin the story in 481 BC. All historians are not agreed on that date as a starting point. I cribbed it from Lu Zhu Qian, who's a Chinese literatus from the 12th century. But others have followed him, and I followed him. I started with this coup in the state of Qi that took place just two years before

5:35Confucius died. And then, you know, everyone's agreed on when the warring states end. They end when the first emperor, he's the king of one of the seven great warring states. His state of Qin conquers the other six. And he founds the unified Qin dynasty in 221 BC. So that gives us a sort of a neat timeframe, 481 to 221. That's exactly 261 years.

The Zhou Dynasty

5:59261 years. We're going to do our best to get through as much of that as possible. And I think you highlighted something that no doubt we'll be returning to in this chat, which is the names that we have. You mentioned Qi there, but also Qin. So sounding quite similar, but two very different entities. So let's explore this world right at the end of Confucius's life, as you mentioned there. The world of China, just before this first event, just before 481 BC.

6:30Andrew, what does China look like at that time? I think it's quite surprising to a lot of English language readers. The society of China on the eve of the warring states during the lifetime of Confucius, it doesn't really resemble the imperial society of China that a lot of English language readers are familiar with from literature and film. I think we're accustomed to thinking of the Chinese empire, which was led by this ruling class of very civil minded bookish literati. The world before the warring states is really led by a titled aristocracy

7:07that have much more in common with the aristocracy of 15th century Europe or of medieval Japan than of the later ruling class of the empire. So it's a very different social and political scene in the time prior to the warring states. And it's really the warring states is the crucible in which Chinese society and politics become transformed and move towards the kind of social and political system that we're accustomed to associating with the Chinese empire.

The State of Qi

7:39Well then, who is officially at the top? Who's in charge of the dynasty? And what is the dynasty in charge of China just before the warring states period? Most of the warring states period takes place during the Zhou dynasty, Z-H-O-U. You know, you can call them Zhou. The Zhou dynasty, it's a very important period in Chinese history. Certainly, it plays an outsized role in the kind of cultural memory of China, the longest ruling dynasty. It's a pre-imperial dynasty in the sense that the rulers of the Zhou did not use the title

8:14emperor. That title was invented, literally invented by the first emperor. So the leaders of the Zhou dynasty called themselves kings. And the Zhou dynasty had been founded in about 1045 BCE. So right around the time that King David would have been ruling in ancient Israel. And the Zhou, in the first centuries of the rule, they're very powerful. They exert a great deal of control and they consolidate a unified political system. Their power has great reach across the entire North China

8:46Plain throughout the Yellow River Valley. By the time Confucius is alive, the Zhou kings retain a great deal of cultural prestige. Part of their power had always derived from their religious position. They call themselves the son of heaven. He was the head of a sort of very complex set of religious institutions that brought the collective devotions of the society of the North China playing together to honor the ancestors and sort of placate the gods. And the Zhou kings continued

9:21to play that kind of religious role in Confucius's lifetime. But most of their material power was gone. They had been driven out of their capital and their base area, which had given them a lot of the resources to maintain large armies. So they didn't really have much material power left. They had an enormous cultural prestige. And during Confucius's lifetime, by the time Confucius was born, the sort of political order that the Zhou had established was falling apart. It was becoming

9:51more and more internally combative and belligerent. And it got more so over the course of his entire life and beyond. So that's sort of the stage. As Confucius's life is ending, the world is in effect falling apart. And he's sort of contemplating, well, how do we put this back together again? The Zhou are almost kind of the figureheads in the middle, but actually the direct control, the amount of territory they control is very little. And they've delegated authority to other figures

The Seven Warring States

10:18who are ruling these other key areas of what is now, I guess, is it kind of North and Eastern China today, that kind of area we should be imagining? Yeah. If you divide China into sort of four quadrants, it's really mainly the Northeastern quadrant of what we think of today as the People's Republic of China. That's the general scope of the warring states, although the scope of the warring states expanded over time from 481 BC to 221. The range of action got bigger and bigger as these states expanded, not just inwardly,

10:50but outwardly too. Yeah, the Zhou, they had had a kind of decentralized system from the very beginning. They maintained very powerful royal armies, but they had delegated regional authority to about 100 different kinsmen and allies. They had created about 100 different regional states to help them oversee the king's peace. And they were mainly focused on the North China plain, although they extended into the region of the Yangtze River Valley too. But by Confucius' lifetime, most of those 100 states

11:23had been destroyed. The warrior society that the Zhou presided over were sort of inveterately belligerent. They were warriors who lived to fight, and they fought one another as much as they fought anyone else. And over the first centuries of Zhou rule, the different states that they had established sort of devoured one another. And so the states tended to get bigger and bigger. Their material power got greater and greater. When the material power of the king was suddenly deflated, then the belligerence

11:55between these states got even worse. And all of those trends of territorial consolidation, the competition between the states got more and more zero-sum. That was contributing to this sense of crisis during Confucius' lifetime. The idea that things keep getting worse and worse, conflict keeps getting more and more destructive. How can we turn back this tide? I guess the power of individual regional lords, if they're gaining more territory from the 100 to fewer but larger states, I'm presuming the power

12:29of those regional lords is more than ever before at the time of Confucius. I noticed in your book how you can compare these states, how they were organised a little different to modern-day crime families. But also at this time, Andrew, we mentioned how the region Chi is central to the beginning of this warring states period. Chi is one region. How many other regions were there at the time? What are the most prominent ones that we should be knowing about? You know, by the time Confucius is alive,

12:59by the time the book opens, in a sense it's hard for us to know because there were regional states that escaped being recorded in the chronicles. So it's hard to know exactly how many states were still left in Confucius' lifetime, probably somewhere between 20 and 30 states. Chi was a very powerful state and it had grown very big. And the other great power in the north was this state of Jin, which was directly to the west of Chi. And Jin and Chi had both grown to these big sizes by swallowing other states.

13:34And, you know, what you would find is that in both Jin and Chi, you had this very complex internal social structure where you had, ostensibly, you had the duke at the top in both states. But honeycomb throughout the states were dozens. It was a simulacrum of the larger Zhou system, where you had the king and a hundred vassals. Each of the regional lords had sort of emulated the Zhou kings in parceling out land and responsibilities to kin and allies. And you would find in a state

14:08like Chi or a state like Jin, you would have all of these regional noble families. The ruler of the regional state, they were called by courtesy duke. Almost all of them, actually, the rank that they held, I translated as marquis. You would find about half of the vassals of this marquis were his cousins, were people who came from his clan. And each of them was given the rank of Viscount. And about half of them would then be allied families. What you found in each regional state is that a process went on that sort of mirrored the larger problem going on in the Zhou dynasty,

14:42which is that all of those regional, those little sub-feudal vassals fought with one another and devoured one another. And in the internecine struggles between them, the internal power dynamics of each state became undermined and subverted and volatile. Long story short, it was a hot mess. I think we've laid the groundwork nicely now to get on to this big date of 481 BC. Because, Andrew, what happens then? China is this great, great power in the East. They had become very powerful over several centuries.

15:17In part, it was the product of the prestige of their ruling clan. The ruling clan was this Liu clan. They had been very close allies of the founding Zhou kings. And the state had grown very large through conquering neighbouring states, and they occupied some of the most fertile land. They were situated right at the point where the Yellow River enters the Pacific Ocean. So they controlled some of the most fertile land in the Zhou realm. And a duke comes to the throne in about 483. And he's

15:51had a very sort of troubled life. He's lived much of his life in exile. He's seen his own father murdered. He's come to the throne after the murder of his own father. He's an interesting character. And one of the things that seems to have happened during his exile, he had spent his exile in the neighbouring state of Lu. And the state of Lu was significant because that was where Confucius lived. And Confucius had for several decades been gathering young men around himself. Confucius was a very low-status aristocrat. He was sort of a figure analogous to Socrates in ancient Greece. And he claimed to have

16:27discovered this Dao or way that he thought could redress all of the problems that were causing society to fall apart. He taught this to his disciples. One of his disciples becomes very close to the man who would ultimately become the Duke of neighbouring Xi. We don't really know what his actual name is. He's called Zaiwa. Zaiwa seems to have been a satirical label that was appended to him. It means make me prime minister. Zaiwa. Zaiwa. Zaiwa. Zaiwa. Okay. Okay. Quite the statement.

17:00Zaiwa. Zaiwa. So why would his fellow disciples call him make me prime minister? Because that's exactly what happens to him. This Duke is able to return from exile. And when he comes to the throne, he decides, okay, I'm going to put some of Confucius's ideas into practice. So I, as Duke, am going to decide that my friend, who I consider very learned, even though he's very low in status, I'm going to make him one of my prime ministers. So he made make me prime minister, prime minister.

17:32Zaiwa. Yeah. He makes Zaiwa a prime minister. But he makes him one of two prime ministers. The other man that he makes prime minister is this figure, Tian Chang, who, very famous, notorious throughout the Chronicles of the Warring States. Tian Chang was undisputedly the most powerful of the regional nobles in the state of Qi. He had, in effect, engineered the succession of this duke to the throne. When the duke's father was murdered, Tian Chang had punished the murderers of the duke's

18:05father and seen to it that the same line would remain on the throne. So the duke knows he owes his position to Tian Chang, but he wants to assert his own authority. So he makes Tian Chang and Zaiwa both prime ministers at the same time. And, you know, this is one of the first sort of very robust institutional responses to the crisis of the deterioration of the Zhou dynasty. This is someone trying to turn back the clock and say, well, I'm going to assert the power that the

18:39ducal house once had, and it doesn't work well. Tian Chang predictably hates Zaiwa, feels that Zaiwa has absolutely no business sharing equal power and status with him. And civil war erupts, and the end is predictable. Tian Chang, I should say, and his brothers, they storm into the ducal palace, they take the duke, in effect, hostage, they kill Zaiwa. By the time it's all over, the duke is dead, Zaiwa is dead, a young child, one of the youngest sons of the duke is put on the

19:16ducal throne by Tian Chang. But the reason it's a significant moment is that Tian Chang realizes that this challenge to his authority and to the authority of the kind of hereditary clan that he leads, it can't go uncontested, right? So he makes fundamental changes to the way the entire state is organized. He takes personal control of about half of the arable land in the state of Chi. And, you know, from that point forward, things begin to change very rapidly throughout the entire Zhou

19:47realm. Because, in effect, it's a kind of reaction-response formation. This attempt to try and defend the traditional power of the ducal house, it pushes the entire state of Chi towards kind of fundamental restructuring that then begins to get mirrored and emulated throughout the Zhou realm. And is the Zhou king at that time, when he hears of this, that his duke has been displaced and killed, is he also now not powerful enough to send a force to kind of contest Tian Chang in Xi? Does this event

20:20also highlight how powerless that dynasty is by this point too? Yes. You know, by the time that Tian Chang does this, this has become a very old dance. Lots and lots of sub-feudal lords have killed the duke, put one of the duke's young relatives on the throne. This is an old story. And it's been for a while, more than two centuries, the Zhou kings haven't really had much power to do anything directly about this. What the Zhou kings have been able to do in the past

20:51is to say, okay, they'll put out an announcement to all of the surrounding regional lords and say, my kinsman has been killed. You all should do something about this for me. And of course, you know, the regional lords, the neighbors of a kingdom, they're always happy to take advantage of the chaos of one of their neighbors. So now they have a license from the king to do something. So generally, a usurper like Tian Chang would have been forced to pay a price for having done this. He gets

21:22away with it. He gets away with it scot-free. That's really one of the things that makes this so significant. And the reason he gets away with it scot-free is that he now has control of half the arable land of Qi, right? At this point, he has such a large critical mass of wealth and power that he's able to buy everybody off. You know, he just basically pays everyone off to say, no, go away, forget what the king said. And, you know, when the dust settles, he's still the prime minister, he's still in control of the Qi court, and he passes the prime ministerial seat to his own son.

21:58And in effect, the position of prime minister of Qi becomes the hereditary sort of entitlement of his clan. Right. So his coup really did pay off, not just for himself, but several generations of his family thereafter. So that's that big event in 481 BC. That is seen as kind of one of the first big moments of the Warring States period. But it's not the only one, is it, Andrew? What are these other big events that happens over the following decades that really sets in motion this period of turmoil

22:30that will follow? There are three very traumatic events that alert elites throughout the Joe world that we're living on a different planet now, that we have to seek fundamentally new kinds of solutions. Politics is never really going to work along the old lines again. So the coup in Xi is one. Within less than a decade after the coup in Xi, there's this very, very dramatic geopolitical event that happens in the south. There's this southern kingdom called Wu. They're able in, I think, 483 BCE, so just a couple

23:08of years before the coup in Xi, the ruler of Wu is able to force the Joe king to grant him this ancient title called Lord Protector. He's almost a figure analogous to the Shogun in medieval Japan. The Lord protector was one of the regional lords who was given a charter by the Joe king to lead the military forces of the realm. He's in effect given authority to call up the armed forces of all the regional lords to stave off threats. And it's a significant event in 483 because the ruler that is given this

23:45title, one, his state has only really been around for 100 years. And the reason it's only really been around for 100 years is that he and his people aren't really Chinese. The capital of this state was on the site of the modern-day city of Suzhou. But Suzhou, of course, is a Chinese city. It's just west of Shanghai, which is the largest Chinese-speaking city in the world. But during that time, that region south of the Yangtze River, the people there were not really Chinese in any meaningful sense of the word.

24:16They didn't speak Chinese. So in the minds of elites in the Zhou realm, this ruler was a barbarian, and he was given this ancient title of Lord Protector. That would be shocking enough. But less than 10 years later, one of his own vassals, the ruler of a state called Yue, which was about 100 kilometers away, he destroys the kingdom of Wu. He rebels against his former sovereign, traps him in his own capital, forces him to commit suicide, burns his temples to the ground, annexes his territory,

24:51erases his state from the map, and then has enough power to force the Zhou king to give him the same title that used to be held by the man he just killed. So it's just a completely unthinkable event. Within the traditional framework of people living in the Zhou realm, if you become the Lord Protector, your state should be very powerful and very wealthy and very secure for the next hundred, 200, 300 years. So for this southern state, this barbarian state to become Lord Protector and then

25:24get erased from the map and replaced by another barbarian, it was just unthinkable. And it was a sign that we don't know what's going to happen next. If this can happen, virtually anything can happen. So you've got Qi to the east, you had Wu to the south, they'd be now taken over by the Yue. And you have Jin though, still to the north of where the Zhou king is. But Jin, that doesn't last... Well, that's the third great crisis. Again, happening within a few decades. The subfeudal

25:55families, the noble clans in Jin are watching what happened in Qi. And they're thinking, well, the regional clans, the subfeudal clans in Qi, they don't really have to listen to the duke anymore. They're fighting with one another all the time. They're swallowing one another's estates. This one clan called the Zhir clan replicate the feat that the Tian clan had been able to do in Qi. He tries to establish sort of uncontested hegemony over the state of Jin. He fails. But in the wake of

26:28these sort of civil wars that he sets off, Jin is partitioned. So Jin had been a single state, would have been an enormous state, larger than the modern state of Greece. Which, you know, if you think about that in terms of the ancient world, the modern state of Greece housed more than a thousand city-states at the time that we're talking about. So this enormous territory that ostensibly was operating as a single polity, it gets divided in three. Three of dozens of clans that

27:00had been the vassals of the Jin dukes, the Han, the Wei, and the Zhao, they in effect sort of shrug off the control of the Jin dukes. They partition the state of Jin. And those three states are three of what they call the seven titans, the seven most powerful states of the subsequent warring states period. So the irony is that each of those states individually becomes vastly more powerful than the unified state of Jin had been. And this is sort of an object lesson in the importance of reorganization

27:34and reform, that Han, Wei, and Zhao all begin to emulate some of the kinds of internal reforms that the Tian clan was doing in chief. And through this internal reorganization, through this institution of new mechanisms of control, each of those three states is individually more powerful. They can draw more deeply on the human and material resources of their terrain. So again, very disorienting. For political observers who know the history of the Zhou realm, the idea that the state of Jin would

28:07no longer exist, that its ancient house would be displaced, and that it would be partitioned, and that each of those states that came out of the partition of the state of Jin would be more powerful than the United State of Jin had been. All of this is very disorienting. And so by the time that happens, which is in the middle of the fifth century, by about 453, you know, those three crises, the Ku and Xi, the whole saga between Wu and Yuan in the South, and then the partition of Jin, and every politically literate observer knows that we're in a different universe now.

The Rise of the Qin

28:40So it's very clear then by 453 BC that this is the time of the warring states period. There's no lack of clarity now. Those three massive events, the reshaping of the political world order at that time, the Joel King by this time still has officially the mandate of heaven, but is very much a lame duck. You know, we are now well and truly in this warring states period.

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29:48Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal, and Society, twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the award-winning network, History Hit. If we go on to the seven main states that come to define this warring states period, and I believe

30:20we've mentioned four of the seven already, the three successors to Jin, the Han, Zhao, and Wei, but also the Chi. So that's four of the seven. Interestingly, the Yue, those barbarians, not one of the seven. So how do we get to the other three? Well, the state that occupied the original home base of the Joe King, so the Joe Kings got displaced. They had occupied a valley formed by one of the tributaries of the Yellow River,

30:51the Wei River Valley. And the Wei River Valley was an especially sort of powerful base of operations because it cut a pass through this mountain range. So it was a naturally screened, it was screened by mountains in the east and mountains in the south. So it was almost a kind of natural fortress. That was one of the reasons that the Joe Kings had been so powerful, as long as they were able to maintain their base area there. That valley had been taken over by this

31:22state called Chin. You know, there are lots of debates over the origins of the Chin clan. They claimed to be the descendants of a family that were originally vassals of the Joe that had kind of defended the Joe Kings as the Joe Kings were retreating. And then at the order of the Joe Kings had fought their way back into the valley and taken it over. That was their claim. Many historians feel that it's probably more complicated than that, that it's just as likely that the Chin Ducal family were

31:54originally chieftains of the same non-Chinese people who had driven the Joe out of the valley and who had just sort of converted themselves into a new type of clan. And at the beginning of this period, during Confucius' lifetime, nobody really took them seriously. It was considered something of a backwater. But they had this enormous advantage of geography and they became increasingly powerful over time. So they became one of the, in fact, ultimately the most powerful of the seven great

32:25states. So that's five. So we've got the Chin now in the west, as you say, up the Wei River. We've got the Chi and the Wei, Zhao and Han. So we have two others. In the south, you had this great, almost a kind of imperial domain called Chu. And Chu is a very, very interesting and unique place. As far as we know, the ruling clan of Chu had actually been vassals of the Joe Kings going even before the Joe had overthrown the Shang. And intermittently,

32:57they had been recalcitrant vassals. There had been wars between the leaders of the Chu clan and the leaders of the Zhou. When the Zhou get forced to move east, the Chu take advantage of that to migrate south. And they established their capital in one of the tributaries of the Yangtze. So the whole Yangtze River Valley region, it's really alien terrain to most of the elites of the Zhou. Much of it is swampland at this time. There's a lot of mosquito-borne illness, a lot of malaria,

33:30a lot of the terrain of this region is sort of cut off. Different parts of the area are cut off from one another by these very steep limestone ridges. It's a very fragmented terrain. But the Chu clan, they established themselves in the Han River Valley, a tributary of the Yangtze. And they slowly expand outward until they basically control virtually the entire Yangtze River Valley. It's a huge domain in in terms of square area. But because population density in the south is so low, they don't really

34:05have that many more people than some of the territorially smaller states in the north. So that's the sixth of these great warring states. The seventh state is a state known as Yen. And Yen, Yen is situated around the area of the capital today of Beijing. So they occupy the area that centered on Beijing. In fact, Beijing means northern capital. One of the alternate names is Yenjing, which means capital of Yen. And that was sort of alluding to this early history. Like the state of Chu in the south,

34:37they have a very broad territory. It extends throughout much of what we think of as Manchuria, even goes as far as the border, even over the border of what we think of as Korea. But at that time, it's much more arid. It's not as well watered by the Yellow River and its tributaries. So again, they have a very large, expansive terrain, but relatively low population density relative to states like Qi and Han and Zhao and Wei. And so we have these seven states, so Qin in the west,

35:09Chu in the south, Qi in the east, Yan in the northeast, Zhu in the north, and then you've got Wei and Han in the middle. I've got a map up as well. It's really helpful to get a sense of where they are. So those are the big seven of this period, almost. And what do we know about their relations between each other? Are they always at war with one another? Are they always warring? I mean, what do we know about that? They were constantly at war, if we think in terms of hot and cold war. There was this mutual hostility. The interesting thing is that at this point,

35:41with these seven great regional states, much of what we think of as China was balkanized in a manner that we associate with kind of post-Westphalian Europe. Each of these seven great regional states have very robust control over their territory, very autonomous direction over both domestic and foreign affairs. They begin to conduct what we would effectively call foreign affairs with one another. By the time we get to the end of the fourth century BC, the rulers of these seven great

36:15warring states and two others sneak into the club through the back door. But they usurp the title king. The Zhou kings last all the way down to 256, so they exclusively hold the title son of heaven, really till almost the end of the warring states. But in 334 BC, two of the rulers in the north, the ruler of Xi and the ruler of this new state of way that had formed from the partition of Jin, they come together in a conclave and they recognize one another as kings. The idea being,

36:51well, it's silly for us to pretend that we're the vassals of the Zhou son of heaven anymore. We're his peers. He doesn't have any kind of sovereign power to intercede in our affairs anymore. The buck stops here. Initially, everyone's shocked. This is a big scandal. But eventually, the logic of this is so clear that all of the seven great states follow suit. They declare themselves kings. Two other states also call themselves kings. And from that point forward, these seven great states, they begin to

37:24treat with one another as sovereign peers. And they begin to conduct a kind of very robust diplomacy that resembles kind of what we see going on between diplomats even in the 21st century. You know, and that's internal to what we think of as China. So that's a very interesting development. Andrew, the similarities with the wars of the successors and the taking of the kingship in the decade and a half after Alexander the Great's death. There's so many similarities here

37:56in the fact that for so long, they don't take the title of king, a few of those generals. But when it's clear that Alexander's bloodline is being killed off and they have the real power and they decide just to make that leap and call themselves kings. And it's really interesting that kind of transition from dukedoms into kingdoms, into kingship with these figures in China as well at around roughly the same time, maybe half a century difference. So as that has all been going on,

Warfare in the Warring States

38:26I mean, there has been fighting during this period to ensure that these states are still around in this new world that's forming. Do we know much about the nature of warfare and how they would have fought at that time? Andrew We know a great deal. You know, one of the things that's changing most rapidly and most intensely is the nature of warfare. And of course, one of the monumental testaments to this is this text that many people in the English-speaking world are familiar with, The Art of War by Master Sun.

38:56Andrew The Art of War. Andrew It's really an artifact of the warring states, and it really, in effect, encapsulates many of the biggest sort of changes to the culture and the political economy of the warring states. Andrew During Confucius's lifetime, the transition was already beginning in the sense that at the founding of the Zhou dynasty, warfare was an aristocratic affair, right? That was sort of the basis of aristocratic power was that the only people who really had the skills and the means to

39:27conduct war were aristocrats. And generally, the most powerful combat units on any battlefield were these teams of charioteers. So, you know, learning how to drive a chariot required leisure that common people didn't have. And then the material to construct a chariot was something that only the wealthy could really bring together. So, in this age of aristocratic chariot warfare, engagements tended to be much smaller. They tended to be limited in scope and impact. But as the

40:03competition between these states became more and more zero-sum, each of the regional leaders began to experiment more and more with deployments of infantry. And if you're trying to protect yourself from chariots, the best kind of infantry that you can deploy are archers. And, you know, with archers, the more archers you put on the field, the better, right? How much training you're going to be able to give any of your archers, how accurately they're going to shoot, right? So, the more, the better. Again, this very material and person-intensive. So, this requires you to bring more and more common

40:37people into the realm of warfare and developing the institutions by which you can recruit common people, lots of them, equip them, and then maintain them on the battlefield through longer and longer engagements. So, really, by the late 5th, early 4th century BC, warfare has been completely transformed. It's no longer really the province of aristocrats. Most of the people doing the fighting are common infantrymen. And by the 4th century BC, these common infantrymen are all armed with crossbows.

41:12Crosbows. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's a very interesting development. I mean, this is one of the reasons. I always make this claim that if Alexander's army had reached China, his army would have been destroyed by the weakest of the warring states, by the smallest Han. One of the reasons one can fairly confidently make that claim is the crossbow. If you've got thousands of infantrymen armed with crossbows who were all trained to sort of move in formation, well, nothing that Alexander could deploy was really going to

41:42beat that. The crossbow, we know, wouldn't be invented in Europe until the second millennium. And the crossbow, you know, it doesn't quite have the range of a musket, but at least a close range, it has much of the deadly power of a musket. So, that's one of the reasons why the interstate warfare, by the 4th century BC, it's become very destructive, very sort of, and the stakes get very, very high. A misstep, a strategic misstep is very, very costly in this realm where political leaders

42:16have access to that kind of power. By what you mean when you're saying a mistake can be very, very costly, do you mean if one of these states decides to send their large army with this modern weaponry, you know, all this industry behind them, creating all of these crossbows and weapons and so on. If they decided to send their army into battle against another army with that level of weaponry, the battle that follows, it could be absolutely devastating casualties-wise. The misstep could be going into a battle against one of these neighbouring powers and losing a massive chunk of your army.

42:49That's the simplest of them, right? Of course, that's always a concern. But then there are so many different balls in the air, there are so many different moving parts. You know, if your army is intact but you lose critical terrain that is necessary to the support of your army. If you've got an army but you can't supply them anymore. If you walk into a situation where initially you have the advantage, but all of a sudden the advantage disappears because your enemy makes an advantageous alliance

43:19that outflanks you. And there are all of these these contingencies that are very, very difficult to keep track of. So the situation becomes very fraught. It really does feel that this Warring States period, given how long a period it is as well, it's one of these early ancient examples of total war. I think that's fair. And sort of that's one of the reasons that The Art of War by Master Sun has had such, you know, durable influence. Is that, yes, right? In other words, a society, an era that's

43:52sort of accustomed to total war, can find interesting things in The Art of War by Master Sun because it was written in that milieu. It was written in a society that was, in effect, experiencing total war. And that kind of political strategic formation becomes, in effect, the norm, not just for China, but really for much of East Asia for the next two millennia and a half. That's one of the remarkable things. And one of the reasons why I say that this really is a revolution with world-transforming implications.

44:26Andrew, let's move briefly on to philosophy, because this is also a massive period for philosophy. Yes,

Philosophy in the Warring States

44:32it's after the period of Confucius. But alongside these warring states, you do see lots of different schools of thought emerging. Andrew, that's absolutely correct. And really, that's what drew me to the warring states. I think of myself, first and foremost, as an intellectual historian. And I first fell in love with these sources. I took a course on, it was called The Foundations of Chinese Religion, but it was, in effect, a course about the philosophical and religious texts that were being produced,

45:04primarily in the warring states and in the eras just preceding it. And I have found the literature that this period produced so fascinating that it's absorbed me my entire life. And I think that one of the things that's so intriguing when one looks at this period, and one of the reasons it's mesmerized me so much, I've always felt that consciousness matters. It's that quality of people's thought has a kind of historical impact. I mean, I know thinkers like Marx would say, well, you know,

45:36consciousness is really epiphenomenal. It arises from whatever your material situation is. I've never quite bought that. I've always felt that people's capacity to imagine a new way of doing things can begin to reshape the material conditions of their world. And I think that The Warring States provides good examples of that. That a lot of the kind of changes that we're talking about would not have been possible unless and until people could imagine new ways of doing things and new ways of seeing things.

46:10Right. So is it not the case like Confucius when kind of trying to think of getting back to the old way with these new philosophers? It's, you know, they've lived through this experience of these states warring against each other. They're trying to visualize a path for the future. It's not looking backwards now. It's looking forwards to what they envisage in future years. That's absolutely true. And I think one of the misconceptions that people in Europe and America sometimes have about China is that it's this hidebound, just sort of irredeemably conservative,

46:44backward-looking society. And I think The Warring States shows that that's simply not true. That all of the figures that we're looking at in The Warring States, you know, they're looking to the past. I think the deep insights of the discourse of The Warring States more generally is that in human terms, for human beings, there is no thinking about the future in the absence of thinking about the past. You're not really seriously imagining the future if you're not taking into consideration the past. So someone like Confucius, obviously the past is sacred to him, but he's thinking about the future.

47:18He's thinking about a way out of the current crisis. How do we get out of this dilemma? And, you know, for all that he was a conservative and there's plenty of criticism of Confucius, the answers that he produced in the face of that crisis were so profound and so persuasive that they resonate even today. As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast,

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48:47We don't have time to delve into the various philosophies of all these schools of thought that emerge in the warring states. But I think for this episode, more overarching on the warring states, we'll go down to the end of the Joel dynasty, which aligns, Andrew, with the rise of that power in the west, which it feels like up to this time, you know, has been a bit on the sidelines. This is the time of the rise of the Chin. That's absolutely true. And the Chin, they were a backwater at the beginning of

49:22the warring states. Really, for much of the warring states, the action, the driving impetus of reform is from this central power known as Wei. There are lots of leaders and developments in Wei that drive change throughout the warring states. Xi, the eastern power, is also a very major player. And it takes people a long time to take Chin, the western power, seriously. But by the end of the fourth century, Chin has become a very powerful player. And then over the course of the third

49:54century BC, they become uncontestably dominant. So that by the time we get to the end of the Zhou dynasty itself, when the Zhou kings are finally displaced, it's clear to everyone that Chin is the winner. And it still takes another 30 years. Really, Chin emerges as the uncontestably dominant power who will definitely be the author of whatever system that comes out of all of this. In 260 BC, there's this Battle of Chongping. Yes, this feels like we need to talk about this. This is a

50:26massive, massive moment from what I can gather. Yes. The Battle of Chongping, I call the chapter in which I discuss it, the duel, because by the time it occurs, the only one of the Seven Kingdoms that can really mount any kind of real challenge to Chin is Chin's neighboring state of Zhao. Zhao had become very, very powerful because they had, in effect, allied themselves with the people of the Inter-Asian Steppe. They had found ways of incorporating very, very powerful cavalry units

50:57made up of or trained by the people of the Inter-Asian Steppe into their military. They become a really dynamic force. So, Chin and Zhao, they sort of square off. The Chin commanders are very clever. They're able to maneuver the armies of Zhao into a situation in which their cavalry are effectively rendered powerless. It's called the Battle of Chongping, but it's really a war. It's a war that goes on over months, these trench lines that extend over dozens of kilometers where you have hundreds

51:28of thousands of soldiers facing off. It looks something like World War I, but it ends catastrophically for Zhao. It ends with the destruction of most of Zhao's army. And from that point forward, you know, that's 260 BC. It's clear, Chin is going to be the supreme power. And it still takes until 221, and it has to do with questions of social organization and internal problems within the kingdom of Chin itself, and sort of residual powerful forces within the Eastern states,

51:59that by in 221, what's remarkable is that Chin is able to accomplish something that I think most political observers living throughout the former Joe realm would not have believed could happen, which is that, you know, most people, even when they acknowledge that Chin is going to be the victor, they believe that Chin will be forced to tolerate the continued existence of the other states. That Chin will be declared the new son of heaven. Some kind of institutions will be established to

52:30formally, materially institutionalize Chin's hegemony over all of the other states. But these other regional states, they're much too powerful, they're much too deeply entrenched to completely disappear. Beginning in 228, and it takes only about eight years, the ruler of Chin, this Ying Zheng who ultimately becomes the first emperor, he conquers the other six warring states, he wipes them out, he erases them from the map, and he imposes a kind of centralized, unified control over the entire

53:04former Joe realm, which no one I think would have been able to predict was possible. And it's a remarkable feat of political consolidation, really unprecedented in the annals of the world and rarely replicated in subsequent periods. The story of Ying Zheng and the powerful Qin that he inherits, he will ultimately become the first emperor of China, but the Qin have done a lot of work before then. And we will certainly delve into his story in much more depth another time. But Andrew, one last thing to finish it off. So if we go to the

53:38250s, let's finish with the Zhou dynasty, the official end of it. The Qin, the balance of power is permanently very much in their favor now. And is there very much an official, a ceremonial end to the Zhou dynasty in its aftermath? I've got a fascinating thing, the nine cauldrons, but I don't know what that is. The Zhou had regalia, like any royal family, and the most sacred and the most famous of their regalia were these nine cauldrons. Within the ancestral cult of the aristocracy of the ancient Chinese world,

54:12ritual bronze vessels played a very, very important role. So the nine cauldrons were huge tripod cauldrons made of bronze with very elaborate decorations on them that were used in preparing ritual meals for the ancestors of the Zhou. And they were considered special regalia, they were considered special talisman, materially embodying the Zhou dynasty's possession of the mandate of heaven. And, you know, there's lots and lots of machinations that happened throughout the

54:45warring states, different states and rulers trying to take possession of the nine cauldrons. Everyone felt that this would be an enormously consequential sort of expression of soft power. If you could get a hold of those nine cauldrons, that would create the expectation that even if you weren't the son of heaven now, that you were destined to become the son of heaven. One of the incidents I talk about early in the book, the ruler of Qin, he's still calling himself king, but he gets special

55:16permission of the Zhou son of heaven to go into the sacred chamber where the nine cauldrons are kept. And he loved to have strong men around him. So he points to one of his entourage who's famous strong men. He says, let's have a contest. Let's see which of us can lift one of these cauldrons. And the cauldrons were so heavy that he couldn't have been trying to lift it off the ground. It was probably just about getting one leg of one of these cauldrons to come off the ground. And he tries so hard to get one of these cauldrons to get off the ground that he has an aneurysm and he dies.

55:53But the whole idea was that if he could have done this, it would have created this stir throughout the Zhou world, a kind of omen. Oh, if he's powerful enough to lift one of the nine cauldrons, he's obviously going to be the next son of heaven. You know, as it turned out, that's not what happened. But the interesting thing is that the Zhou dynasty, it kind of ends with a whimper rather than a bang in that by the time that the Zhou dynasty finally ends, the Zhou royal domain had been broken up into two

56:23portions. There was a royal domain in the east that was under the control of the king and the royal court. And there was this kind of duchy of West Zhou, which was under the hereditary control of a sort of cadet branch of the royal clan. So, in 256 BC, the prime minister of Qin, a man named Liu Buwei, he decides he's going to get rid of the leaders of this state of Western Zhou. They get into a plot to try and wage war on the state of Qin. Liu Buwei punishes them by wiping out that Western state

57:00because the nine cauldrons were there at the time. That puts the nine cauldrons in the possession of the state of Qin. That effectively ends the Zhou dynasty. A couple of years later, the last Zhou king, a man named King Nan of Zhou who had lived for an incredibly long time. I think his reign was something like 56 years. When he dies, nobody is enthroned in his place. So, that's kind of it. When he dies, the Zhou dynasty ends. But there is no formal ceremony. There is no abdication. I mean,

57:30this is one of the things that vexes the Qin when they ultimately do conquer the other states. There really has been no formal transfer of power. And so, the Qin are sort of left holding the bag. Ying Zheng, when he's become the first emperor of Qin, he's kind of left trying to figure out ways that he can ritually broadcast to the world that this transition has really happened and it's really legitimate. And that sort of becomes a problem that he struggles with for his entire reign. Well, Andrew, this has been a fascinating chat, exploring more than a couple of centuries of

58:06ancient Chinese history. What a period. What would you say is the long-term significance of the warring states? Why should we care about it today? That's a $68,000 question. I forget what the name of the old game show was called. Because I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Well, how does one end this book? Because I really do feel that we should understand this as a revolution. What are the long-term consequences of this revolution that continue to resonate so powerfully? In the simplest terms, the warring states leads to the foundation of the Chinese empire. Ying Zheng becomes the first

58:40emperor. That's his title, but he literally is the first emperor. He invents the title Huangdi, which we translate as emperor. The territorial system that he institutionalizes lays down the norm for subsequent imperial governments down to the year 1911. So, you know, the normative shape of the Chinese empire emerges from the warring states. And a political system that controlled about a fifth and a quarter of humanity at any given time, that's very consequential. And that understanding the

59:11origins of that system is obviously important. To me, two of the biggest impacts of the warring states, really, we wouldn't have a unified nation of China today, but for the empire that emerges from the warring states. So that's very consequential. The warring states, one of the things that happens is a very profound social revolution. All the way down to the end of the warring states, really until the end of the Qin dynasty in 210 BC, so even beyond the warring states. This society is led by a titled

59:45aristocracy. So this aristocracy that resembles the hereditary aristocracy of medieval Europe, they are in control. By the time that the Qin dynasty falls, that aristocracy is gone, and they never come back. That's enormously consequential, right? If you think about how different Europe would be, meritocracy over aristocracy. And it's not that the notion of aristocracy and hereditary authority and hereditary status disappear completely. That's not true.

1:00:16People still think of birth and pedigree or whatever. But the empire that succeeds the Qin, the Han empire, it's founded by a farmer. The first emperor of the Han, Liu Bang, he's born a common farmer. And that poses absolutely no impediment to his exercise of control, or his founding a dynasty that lasts for 400 years. That's only possible because of the warring states. And those energies that are unleashed by that revolution resonate in China down to the present day. The other consequence

1:00:48I'll rush to talk about, you know, part of that revolution, one of the questions that gets deliberated and that gets struggled over throughout the warring states is, what should the role of educated people be in government? And the consensus that emerges from the warring states is largely that no government can be legitimate that does not somehow institutionalize a way of sharing power with the educated. There are lots of different ways that that can happen and that leaves lots of room for disagreement. But down to the present day, and I think if you look at the way the People's Republic of

1:01:23China and other places where Chinese-speaking people live, that becomes absolutely sort of central to the fabric of the political economy, not just of China, but really of greater East Asia. And those are effects that we're still living with today. Andrew, this has been such a fascinating chat. Last, but certainly not least, you have written the book that covers the entirety of the warring states period, and it lays it out for us to explore at our leisure, it is called. To rule all under heaven, a history of classical China from Confucius to the first emperor.

1:01:58Fantastic. Andrew, just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you, sir. This has really been a pleasure. Thank you, Tristan.

1:02:09Well, there you go. There was Professor Andrew Meyer introducing you to the fascinating warring states period of ancient China. I really do hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. We will have to do more episodes on ancient East Asia in the future. All have fascinating stories to tell that we need to cover on the podcast, and we will. Once again, thank you so much for listening. Now, if you're enjoying the show, please make sure to follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts.

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