The sixteenth emperor in the Xia lineage seems to have married a queen who treated the people cruelly. Zi Lu, who was known as ‘Tang’ and who founded the Shang dynasty, overthrew this sixteenth and last Xia emperor.
The Shang era lasted from around 1500 B.C. to 1045 B.C. and ended when the Shang were overthrown. One possible hypotheses concerning this dethroning was that the Shang had grown complacent, depending upon the services of smaller allied kingdoms in matters of defense.
If this hypothesis is true, a reasonable comparison could be made to the way in which the Carolingians supplanted the Merovingians. As one history book explains:
Outside the Shang domains were the domains of allied and rival polities. To the west were the fierce Qiang, who probably spoke an early form of Tibetan. Between the Shang capital and the Qiang was a frontier state called Zhou, which shared most of the material culture of the Shang.
The date of 1045 B.C. or 1046 B.C. for the establishment of the Zhou as successors to the Shang is relatively precise, unlike the somewhat more generalized dates for earlier events among China’s imperial dynasties.
Once established, the earlier phase of Zhou history is referred to as the ‘Western Zhou’ due to the location of the imperial capital:
This state rose against the Shang and defeated it. The first part of the Zhou Dynasty is called the Western Zhou period.
The ‘Western Zhou’ phase lasted from 1045 B.C. to 771 B.C., when the capital was relocated. A new capital was established in the East after a Zhou king was assassinated.
Its capital was in the west near modern Xi’an in Shaanxi province (to distinguish it from the Eastern Zhou, after the capital was moved to near modern Luoyang in Henan province.)
While the ‘Eastern Zhou’ manifested increased literacy and cultural advancements, it never attained the military and political strength which the Western Zhou had.
What gave the Western Zhou empire its brawn? One hypothesis is its internal political structure; a competing hypothesis points to its being closer in time to its founding as a tenacious frontier monarchy.
At the center of the Western Zhou political structure was the Zhou king, who was simultaneously ritual head of the royal lineage and supreme lord of the nobility. Rather than attempt to rule all of their territories directly, the early Zhou rulers sent out relatives and trusted subordinates to establish walled garrisons in the conquered territories, creating a decentralized, quasi-feudal system. The king’s authority was maintained by rituals of ancestor worship and court visits.
Perhaps as the decades and centuries went by, the Zhou monarchs forgot their rough origins and the doggedness which came from them. One incident, around 806 B.C., illustrates how political systems worked:
A younger son of King You was made a duke and sent east to establish the state of Zheng in a swampy area that needed to be drained. This duke and his successors nevertheless spent much of their time at the Zhou court, serving as high ministers.
This would have been a mere thirty or forty years prior to the assassination which ended the Western Zhou period. The duke’s presence at court, instead of out supervising work, may be a telling example of the dynasty’s softening. Again, comparisons to the Merovingian-Carolingian succession are invited.
It is not always clear whether to refer to Zhou monarchs are kings or emperors. In either case, a system of delegating oversight of provinces can be compared to Rome’s imperial system.
The texts above are quoted from Pre-Modern East Asia: to 1800 (A Cultural, Social, and Political History), written by Patricia Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James Palais.
