Визуальный самоучитель работы на ноутбуке. Алексей Знаменский

the Mandate had passed from the Shang to ‘the Zhou people’, not just their king, and in particular to those Zhou people who, like himself, advised and instructed the king in the ways of virtue. This has been taken as a plea for a meritocracy – rule by those of proven ability and character – and it could imply greater empowerment of the bureaucracy and of enfeoffed officialdom. But it was not accepted by the Duke’s colleagues, who trumped it with a reference to divination. Since only the king could consult Heaven directly, only he could enjoy the Mandate. As the chosen son of the senior Zhou lineage, he already, in a sense, embodied ‘the Zhou people’. In the familial terms so dear to Confucianists he was both his people’s father and ‘Heaven’s Son’, a formulation that like the Mandate itself would be adopted by all subsequent rulers.

      Yet whether this uniquely privileged status should be seen as a charter for autocracy, or whether as a check to it, would continue to be debated – and still is. If Heaven’s Son was accountable only to Heaven, he could afford to ignore advice. If, however, the Mandate depended on the virtue with which it was exercised, he needed to be more circumspect. Virtue was assessed in terms of the welfare of the state and its people. ‘Heaven’s love for the people is very great [says a character in the third-century BC Zuozhuan]. Would it then allow one man to preside over them in an arrogant and wilful manner, indulging his excesses and casting aside the nature Heaven and Earth allotted them? Surely it would not!’⁷ Hence, were the ruler (after warnings in the form of portentous defeats, civil discontent or natural disasters) not to mend his ways, the Mandate would automatically slip from his grasp. It could then legitimately be claimed by someone else. Under such circumstances it could be construed not as a charter for absolutism but as an invitation to revolt. Whether or not that was his intention, the Duke of Zhou had opened a can-shaped ding of constitutional worms.

      King Cheng, delivered at last from his ducal uncle’s machinations, ruled uneventfully for over thirty years (c. 1035–c. 1003 BC). As his dying testament he left an admonition that would be long cherished and might usefully serve as an epitaph for the early Zhou: ‘Make pliable those distant and make capable those near. Pacify and encourage the many countries, large and small.’⁸ King Kang (r. c. 1003–c. 978 BC), Cheng’s son and a contemporary of the biblical King David, heeded the advice, and while more inclined to encouragement than pacification, presided over a vast and flourishing kingdom. It was not until the reigns of his son and grandson, Kings Zhao (r. c. 977–c. 957 BC) and Mu (r. c. 956–c. 918 BC), that Zhou authority would experience its first setbacks.

      Unfortunately for the historian, although avid diviners, the Zhou rarely troubled to inscribe their fire-cracked turtleshells with a written summary of ‘charge’ and response. But such information may have been recorded on less durable materials, for this was almost certainly the case with oracular communications conducted using a new and increasingly preferred medium. Kinder to turtles, the new medium involved a random disposition of sticks, which could be reused. The sticks were stalks of the yarrow plant or milfoil, and they were cast, perhaps like spillikins, six at a time, so that they fell to form hexagrams (six-sided figures) that the diviner then interpreted. Much lore, some art and some mathematics were involved; but it is safe to assume that the results were written down because the ‘reading’ of hexagrams provided the inspiration for ‘The Book of Changes’ (Zhou yi or Yijing, I-ching). This classic text, recorded in the ninth century BC, consists of verses that incorporate divinatory terms plus images that may have been those that the diviner ‘read’ in the hexagrams.

      They also employ a technique typical of Chinese verse, and indeed literature and art as whole, which engages the reader by juxtaposing, or correlating, naturalistic images with human concerns to delightfully subtle, if sometimes obscure, effect. The same associative technique appears in another near-contemporary (but non-divinatory) classic. This is ‘The Book of Songs’ (Shijing, also called ‘The Book of Odes’), on which Confucius is supposed later to have worked. The first of the ‘Songs’ – mostly ritual hymns, heroic verses and pastoral odes – provides a standard example of the correlational technique. The mewed call of an osprey is juxtaposed with a marriage proposal to convey, through terse imagery, onomatopoeia and pun (all largely lost in translation), a heavy sense of sexual expectation.

      Guan, guan cries the osprey

      On the river’s isle.

      Delicate is the young girl:

      A fine match for the lord.⁹

      (More than two millennia later, this same poem remained part of an educated person’s repertoire. In The Peony Pavilion, a play written in 1598, the demure heroine experiences a sexual wanderlust when her tutor introduces her to it; or as her maid puts it to the tutor in a delightful English translation: ‘Your classical exegesis/Has torn her heart to pieces.¹⁰)

      Classics like the Shijing and Yijing reveal aspects of ritual practice and social life in early first-millennium BC China as well as the prevalence and development of literary culture. Historians, of course, would prefer something more factual and, as if to oblige, the Zhou compensated for their inarticulate oracle shells by incorporating inscriptions on their bronzes. Some of these are of considerable length and feature events or personalities known from other textual sources. They have been of great assistance in extending the chronology of the Zhou, which is famously anchored on an eclipse recorded in the texts and identified astronomically as occurring in 841 BC, ‘the first absolute date in Chinese history’.

      Most of the bronze inscriptions describe, or simply record, the bestowal of gifts, honours, offices, commands or lands. Taken in conjunction with stylistic changes in the bronzes themselves, with their archaeological setting and its wide distribution, and with later textual information, they confirm that, in the words of Jessica Rawson, ‘the Zhou achievement was truly remarkable’. Although ‘too little considered…[it] imprinted itself indelibly, not only on its own day, but on all succeeding generations’.¹¹

      LESS SPRING THAN AUTUMN

      Painstaking analysis of Zhou mortuary sites and buried hoards, both of them rich in bronzes, has led Rawson to another conclusion: that an extraordinary change, indeed ‘a revolution’, overtook Zhou ritual practice in the first years of the ninth century BC. Quite suddenly bronze vessels became larger and more standardised in form, and they often comprised sets of identical items; their designs betrayed an interest in recreating archaic forms; their inscriptions were much more formulaic than previously; and they were accompanied by a new repertoire of bronze bells and jades.

      It was a ritual ‘revolution’ to the extent that these changes implied a grander, noisier and more staged liturgy under firmer central control and involving greater public spectacle. Its standardisation throughout the northern ‘Central Plain’ must have owed something to better communications; cultivation was evidently being extended and neighbouring fiefs were beginning to abut. Moreover, the inscribed bronzes were apparently doubling as archival records, like the Shang’s oracle bones, and being collected, displayed and hoarded as prestigious family heirlooms. But since they recorded royal favours, those who cherished them, and who in some cases had actually had them cast, were not their royal donors but their recipients, some of comparatively humble origin. The Zhou, in other words, were broadening their base of support while enhancing their own precedence.

      Far from being a spent force then, by the early 800s BC Zhou authority, at least in ritual matters, was being projected more effectively than Shang authority had ever been. Rawson takes this to mean that the Zhou kings not only saw themselves as the successors of a unitary Shang state but ‘believed…that the natural condition of China was such a single state’ and proclaimed this political model with tenacity, despite the tensions it generated, ‘within the more naturally fragmented Chinese region’.¹²

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