Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
admired him. After quelling the Shang rebellion, many people
expected the Duke of Zhou to assume power himself. It is, after all,
rare for people to relinquish power once they have gained it. The
good duke, however, willingly stepped down as soon as King Wu's
successor was old enough to rule on his own, and thereafter lectured
him on how to govern effectively. For this action the Duke of Zhou
is remembered in Chinese history as a paragon of public virtue and
selflessness.
DISINTEGRATION: EASTERN ZHOU
As with the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Zhou seems to have
resulted from a combination of internal decay and external aggression.
Internally, many of the feudal lords had begun to disregard the directives
of the Zhou kings during the 800s B.C. Internal division and weakness
likely made the Zhou a tempting target for all of the “barbarians” who
lived out on the outskirts of the Central States of the Zhou.
These barbarian peoples weakened the Zhou, and at the beginning of
the eighth century B.C. they successfully attacked and sacked the Zhou's
capital city. The Zhou government had to flee far to the east and set up
another capital city, from which it ruled over a territory smaller than
the original Zhou. This defeat marks the distinction between the early
Zhou, sometimes called the “Western Zhou,” and the later, weakened
Zhou, which is known to history as the “Eastern Zhou.”
The Eastern Zhou was only a shadow of the Western Zhou. During
the Eastern Zhou the power and authority of the Zhou king was
drastically reduced, so much so that he eventually became little more
than a figurehead. The feudal domains supposedly under his control
became more or less independent states and were often at war with
one another, and feudal lords more often than not gave him nothing
but lip service. The fighting between the states eventually became so
bad that the Zhou fell in the third century B.C. One of the many states,
the Qin, eventually prevailed against all the others and unified China
(the area once occupied by the Zhou's Central States) in 221 B.C.
CONFUCIANISM
The Eastern Zhou was a time of chaos and moral decline. Accompa-
nying the fighting between states was a decline in public order. Some
young people no longer respected their elders, and crime was on the
rise. Even the feudal lords who contributed to this disintegration
