Professor Andrew Meyer

It was probably just about getting one leg up.

of one of these cauldrons to come off the ground.

And he tries so hard to get one of these cauldrons to get off the ground that he has an aneurysm and he dies.

But the whole idea was that if he could have done this, it would have created this stir throughout the Joe world, a kind of omen, oh, if he's powerful enough to lift one of the nine cauldrons, he's obviously going to be the next son of heaven.

As it turned out, that's not what happened.

But the interesting thing is that the Joe dynasty, it kind of ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

in that by the time that the Zhou dynasty finally ends, the Zhou royal domain had been broken up into two portions.

There was a royal domain in the east that was under the control of the king and the royal court, and there was this kind of duchy of West Zhou, which was under the hereditary control of a sort of cadet branch of the royal clan.

So in 256 BC, the prime minister of Qin, a man named Lu Buwei, he decides he's going to get rid of the leaders of this state of Western Zhou.

They get into a plot to try and wage war on the state of Qin.

Lu Buwei punishes them by wiping out that Western state.

Because the nine cauldrons were there at the time.

That puts the nine cauldrons in the possession of the state of Qin.

That effectively ends the Zhou dynasty.

A couple of years later, the last Zhou king, a man named King Nan of Zhou, who had lived for an incredibly long time, I think his reign was something like 56 years, when he dies, nobody is enthroned in his place.

So that's kind of it.

When he dies, the Zhou dynasty ends.

But there is no formal ceremony.

There is no abdication.

I mean, this is one of the things that vexes the Qin when they ultimately do conquer the other states.