Zhou Dynasty

The longest dynasty in Chinese history and the one that supplied the vocabulary every later one used. The Zhou were a western people who overthrew the Shang around 1046 BC, and they justified it with an idea that outlasted them by three thousand years: the Mandate of Heaven, under which the right to rule is conditional on ruling well and can be withdrawn. It legitimised their own conquest and every rebellion afterwards. King Wen laid the ground and did not live to make the conquest, which is why Chinese political writing keeps returning to him - the ruler whose virtue earned a mandate his son collected. The early Zhou distributed territory to relatives and allies as hereditary fiefs, a system that worked while the royal house was strong. It was not, after 771, when the capital was sacked and the court moved east to Luoyang. From then the kings reigned and the states fought: the Spring and Autumn period, then the Warring States, five centuries in which a nominal sovereign presided over a system of independent powers that grew steadily fewer and larger. That long disorder produced the classical Chinese philosophies. Confucius, Mozi, Laozi, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Xunzi and the Legalists were all answering the same question - how order can be restored - and their disagreement is the foundation of Chinese thought. Qin extinguished the Zhou in 256 BC and unified everything in 221, using Legalist methods against a Confucian ideal, and the argument between them ran for two millennia.

• Existed: 1046 BCE – 256 BCE
• Type: Dynasty
• Government: Feudal monarchy
• Capital: Haojing, later Luoyang