Page 51 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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The Chou Dynasty

During the last years of the decline of Shang, the vassal state of
Chou on her western frontier had grown so powerful that its ruler
Wen was virtually in control of two-thirds of the Shang territo-
ries. Finally, very probably in 1045 B.C., Wen's son Wu, the Mar-
tial King, captured Anyang, and the last Shang ruler committed
suicide. Under Wu's young successor, Ch'eng Wang, a powerful
regent known to history as the Duke of Chou (Chou Kung) con-
solidated the empire, set up feudal states, and parcelled out the
Shang domains among other vassals, though he took care to per-
mit the descendants of Shang to rule in the little state of Sung so
that they could keep up the hereditary sacrifices to their ancestral
spirits. Chou Kung was chief architect of the dynasty that was to
have the longest rule in China's history, and even though its later
centuries were clouded by incessant civil wars in which the royal
house was crushed and finally engulfed, the Chou Dynasty gave
to China some of her most characteristic and enduring institu-
tions.
There was no abrupt break with Shang traditions; rather were
many of them developed and perfected. Feudalism, court ritual,
and ancestor worship became more elaborate and effective instru-
ments in welding the state together, so effective indeed that from
the time of confusion at the end of the dynasty many conserva-
tives, Confucius among them, came to look back upon the reigns
of Wen, Wu, and Duke Chou as a golden age. Religious life was
still centred in worship of Shang Ti, though the concept of
"heaven" (T'ien) now began to appear and eventually replaced the
cruder notions embodied in Shang Ti. Bronze inscriptions and
early texts indicate the beginnings of a moral code centred in ad-
herence to the will of heaven and in respect for te ("virtue"), both
of which would become fundamental in the teachings of Confu-
cius. The Chou court became the focus of an elaborate ritual in
which music, art, poetry, and pageantry all combined under the
direction of the "master of ceremonies" (pin-hsiang) to give moral
and aesthetic dignity to the concept of the state. The king held au-
diences at dawn and dusk (a custom that survived until 1912); or-
ders for the day were written on bamboo slips, read out by the
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