Chinese Empire

Early Chinese Dynasties: From the Xia to the Warring States

Before there was an empire called China, there were kingdoms, fiefdoms, and tribal leagues in the Yellow River valley and along the lower Yangzi. The earliest of these polities are remembered as dynasties: the Xia, the Shang, and the Zhou. Together they span almost two millennia, from roughly 2070 BCE to 256 BCE, and they laid down nearly every major feature of Chinese civilisation — the writing system, the bronze ritual tradition, the ancestor cult, the centralised state, the Confucian classics, and the philosophical schools. Understanding these early dynasties is essential for understanding everything that came after, because the imperial dynasties of Qin, Han, Tang, and the rest all claimed to be the legitimate heirs of the Zhou and, before that, of the Xia and Shang.

This section covers the pre-imperial period in three phases. The first phase is the era of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties proper, when the Chinese cultural world was governed by kings who ruled over a network of vassal states. The second phase is the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE), when the Zhou king became a figurehead and a handful of great states fought for hegemony. The third phase is the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), the most violent and most intellectually fertile era in Chinese history before the modern period, which ended with the Qin conquest and the creation of the first unified empire.

The Pre-Dynastic Background

Long before the Xia, China was inhabited by Neolithic farming cultures. In the Yellow River valley, the Yangshao culture (c. 5000–3000 BCE) and the Longshan culture (c. 3000–1900 BCE) developed millet agriculture, painted pottery, and eventually walled towns. To the south, the Daxi and Qujialing cultures grew rice. By 3000 BCE there were large settlements, hierarchical societies, and signs of long-distance trade in jade and turquoise. None of these Neolithic cultures, however, left written records, and historians do not call them dynasties. The dynasty is a Bronze Age phenomenon, dependent on literacy, metal, and a level of state organisation beyond anything the Neolithic villages had achieved.

The Xia Dynasty (c. 2070–1600 BCE)

The Xia is the first dynasty in the traditional Chinese historical canon. It is associated in legend with a sequence of kings beginning with Yu the Great, who allegedly tamed the great flood that had previously ravaged the Yellow River valley by ordering the digging of drainage channels. After Yu, the throne passed to his son Qi, beginning a hereditary line. Subsequent Xia kings — sometimes seventeen in number — ruled a small state in central Henan for about 400 years before being overthrown by Tang of Shang.

For most of the twentieth century, Western historians treated the Xia as mythical, on the grounds that there was no contemporary evidence for it. The discovery and excavation of the Erlitou site (二里頭遺址) in the 1950s and after, however, has changed the picture. Erlitou, located near the modern village of Xia in Henan, is a large urban settlement of about 300 hectares, with palatial foundations, bronze foundries, bronze ritual vessels, and craft workshops. It dates to roughly 1900–1500 BCE. Many Chinese archaeologists now argue that Erlitou is the Xia, or at least a late Xia capital, although this identification is not yet universally accepted. Even if Erlitou is not the Xia, it shows that a state capable of producing bronze ritual vessels on an industrial scale existed in central China by 1900 BCE — earlier than the traditional date of the Shang.

The Xia, real or legendary, set a template that all later Chinese dynasties would imitate: a hereditary kingship, a royal capital, ancestor worship, a flood-control ideology, and a claim to rule “all under Heaven.” For more on this crucial background, see our piece on what came before the Qin.

The Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE)

The Shang is the first Chinese dynasty whose existence can be confirmed by contemporary evidence, and for that reason it is sometimes called the first dynasty of historic China. The Shang kings ruled from a succession of capitals, the last and most famous being Yinxu (殷墟) near modern Anyang in Henan, which has been excavated by Chinese archaeologists since the 1920s. The discovery in 1899 of inscribed oracle bones — used by Shang kings for divination — confirmed the existence of the dynasty, and modern scholars have now deciphered thousands of these inscriptions.

Shang Politics and Society

Shang government was conducted by a warrior king, who stood at the apex of a small aristocratic elite, and who consulted his ancestors on major decisions through divination. A team of scribes would carve a question onto a piece of ox scapula or turtle plastron, apply a hot bronze rod, and interpret the resulting cracks as the ancestors’ reply. The surviving inscriptions deal with weather, harvests, hunting, warfare, the king’s health, childbirth, and ritual matters. Together they give an unmatched picture of late Shang life.

The Shang economy was based on millet agriculture in the north, with cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses. Bronze was used for ritual vessels — the famous ding (鼎) tripods, jue wine vessels, and gui food vessels — but the technology was tightly controlled by the royal court. The Shang also practised human sacrifice on a large scale, as the royal tombs at Yinxu demonstrate: hundreds of beheaded skeletons have been found accompanying kings into the afterlife. The Shang population was small in absolute terms, perhaps one or two million people in the late Shang.

Shang Culture and Writing

The Shang invented Chinese writing. The earliest oracle bone inscriptions are recognisably ancestors of modern Chinese characters: pictographic, logographic, and capable of recording both nouns and verbs. The Shang script was used to record the names of kings, the days of the ten-day week, the cycles of the moon, and the names of tribes. The Shang also had a sophisticated bronze-casting technology, with piece-mould casting producing vessels of astonishing complexity.

The Fall of the Shang

The last Shang king, Di Xin (also called Zhou or King Zhou), is described in later sources as a tyrant who indulged in feasting, debauchery, and cruelty. In 1046 BCE, the Zhou ruler Wu (King Wu of Zhou) attacked the Shang at the Battle of Muye. Di Xin set fire to his palace and died in the flames. The Zhou took over the Shang lands and founded a new dynasty.

The Zhou Dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE)

The Zhou is the longest-ruling dynasty in Chinese history, and the period in which most of the basic institutions of Chinese civilisation were elaborated. We treat the Zhou in more depth in our article on the longest Chinese dynasty; here we will focus on its political structure and its evolution.

The Western Zhou (c. 1046–771 BCE)

The Western Zhou kings ruled from a capital near modern Xi’an, surrounded by a network of fiefdoms granted to relatives and allies. The system, called fengjian (封建), was hereditary and explicitly contractual: the king granted land in exchange for military service, ritual subordination, and tribute. At the centre of the ideology was the concept of the Mandate of Heaven (天命): Heaven granted the right to rule to a virtuous king, and withdrew it from a wicked one. This idea, articulated in the Book of Documents, would define Chinese political thought for three thousand years.

The Western Zhou kings also patronised ancestor worship, codified rituals, and developed the so-called Five Rites (五禮) that governed every aspect of aristocratic life. They were successful conquerors: the Zhou had vassals as far as the Yangzi valley, and Zhou bronze vessels have been found across a wide area. By the ninth century BCE, however, the system was straining. The king had limited power to compel distant vassals, and the fiefdoms themselves were growing strong.

The Eastern Zhou (770–256 BCE)

In 771 BCE a coalition of western barbarians and a rebellious vassal attacked the Western Zhou capital. King You of Zhou was killed, and his successor moved east to Luoyang. This event marks the beginning of the Eastern Zhou and the slow disappearance of effective royal power.

The Eastern Zhou is conventionally divided into the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE) and the Warring States period (475–221 BCE).

The Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BCE)

The Spring and Autumn period takes its name from the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋), a chronicle of the state of Lu traditionally attributed to Confucius. During these centuries the Zhou king was a figurehead with religious prestige but no military power. Real power lay in the hands of a small number of large states — Qi, Jin, Lu, Chu, Song, Wey, Zheng, Chen, Cai, Xu — and within each state, in the hands of powerful aristocratic clans.

The period saw several notable developments:

  • Hegemons (霸) emerged. Powerful rulers such as Duke Huan of Qi and his minister Guan Zhong, Duke Wen of Jin, and Duke Xiang of Song would act as leaders of coalitions, convene interstate conferences, and enforce a rough kind of international order.
  • Warfare intensified. Battles grew larger, and the rules of ritual combat — where chariots fought chariots in set-piece battles — began to break down.
  • The Hundred Schools of Thought began to emerge. Confucius (551–479 BCE) was active in Lu, and his disciples spread his teaching. The Daoist tradition associated with Laozi was forming, and various schools of political and ethical thought were debating.
  • Population and wealth grew. Iron began to replace bronze for some implements, and agriculture became more productive.

The Warring States Period (475–221 BCE)

By 475 BCE the number of major states had shrunk to seven: Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, Wei, and Qin. The Warring States period, treated in detail in our article on the Warring States period, was an age of constant warfare, administrative revolution, and philosophical ferment.

The Warring States saw:

  • Industrialised warfare with mass infantry, cavalry, and crossbows. Battles involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
  • Administrative reform. The states abolished hereditary aristocracies and replaced them with merit-based bureaucracies recruited by examination and rewarded with land and rank. The most thoroughgoing reform was the Legalism of Shang Yang in Qin, which created a state capable of mobilising the entire population for war.
  • Philosophical explosion. The Hundred Schools of thought produced the Mohist emphasis on universal love, the Legalist emphasis on law and state power, the Yin-Yang cosmology, the School of Names (Logicians), the Agriculturalists, the Diplomats, and the Daoist writings later attributed to Zhuangzi and Laozi. Mencius and Xunzi developed Confucianism; Han Feizi synthesised Legalism; Mozi preached universal love and against offensive war.
  • Technological change. Iron weapons and tools, the ox-drawn plough, the crossbow, the water-powered trip-hammer for grain, and the beginnings of metallurgy on a large scale.

The Warring States period ended with the Qin conquest of 230–221 BCE, in which the western state of Qin absorbed the other six and proclaimed a single unified empire. The First Emperor standardised weights, measures, currency, the written script, and the width of cart axles, and burned books that did not conform to the state ideology.

The Intellectual Achievement of the Early Dynasties

It is worth pausing on the intellectual achievement of this long pre-imperial period, because it shaped everything that followed.

The Xia left a legacy of flood-control ideology, the idea that a good king manages the rivers and the harvest.

The Shang left a legacy of ancestor worship, divination, bronze ritual, and — most importantly — the Chinese writing system, which would carry Chinese civilisation across three millennia and a dozen dynasties.

The Zhou left the Mandate of Heaven, the fengjian system, the Rites, the Book of Songs (詩經), the Book of Documents (書經), the I Ching (易經), the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋), and the Zhou Li (周禮) — the canonical texts that would form the basis of Confucian education.

The Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods left the Hundred Schools of Thought — Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, Legalism, Yin-Yang thought, Logicians, Agriculturalists — which provided the philosophical vocabulary in which every subsequent Chinese dynasty would argue. Our article on Chinese philosophy develops this story further.

The Military Dimension

The early dynasties were not peaceful. The Zhou was founded by conquest, the Spring and Autumn period saw near-constant warfare among the great states, and the Warring States period was the most militarised era in pre-modern Chinese history. The major innovations of this period — the crossbow, mass infantry, cavalry, the professional standing army, the fortified walled city, the supply train — are treated in the section on Chinese military history. The Warring States military innovations, especially the Legalist mobilisation of Qin, are also the foundation of the later imperial military system.

The Economic and Social Dimension

The early dynasties saw profound changes in the Chinese economy. The Shang was a small, urban, slave-owning bronze-age polity with a few hundred thousand people. By the Warring States, China had iron tools, the ox-drawn plough, a population in the tens of millions, a money economy, long-distance trade, and a sophisticated division of labour. The Bamboo Annals (竹書紀年) and the Zuo Zhuan (左傳) record prices, taxes, famines, and trade. Our section on the Chinese economy develops this story in detail.

The Cultural and Architectural Dimension

The early dynasties left some of the most striking monuments in Chinese history: the royal tombs at Yinxu, the bronze ritual vessels of the Shang and Western Zhou, the ritual architecture of the Zhou capital, and the walled cities of the Warring States. The tradition of royal tomb building, palace construction, and city planning that begins here would shape Chinese architecture for three thousand years.

Looking Forward

The Qin conquest of 221 BCE was, in a sense, the climax of the long early-dynastic period. The Qin state had absorbed the Legalist reforms, the military innovations, and the bureaucratic apparatus of the Warring States, and used them to unify China. But the Qin dynasty itself lasted only fifteen years; the next dynasty, the Han, would inherit and combine the Qin institutions with the Confucian ideology of the Zhou. From this synthesis, the imperial Chinese state would be born.

To follow the story into the imperial period, see our section on imperial Chinese dynasties, and for the special case of the foreign conquest dynasties, see our section on Mongol and Manchu rule. The Chinese dynasties section home provides the broader overview.

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