Professor Andrew Meyer

Their power has great reach across the entire North China Plain, throughout the Yellow River Valley.

By the time Confucius is alive, the Zhou kings retain a great deal of cultural prestige and

Part of their power had always derived from their religious position.

They called themselves the Son of Heaven.

He was the head of a sort of very complex set of religious institutions that brought the collective devotions of the Society of the North China Plain together to

honor the ancestors and sort of placate the gods.

And the Zhou kings continued to play that kind of religious role in Confucius's lifetime.

But most of their material power was gone.

They had been driven out of their capital and their base area, which had given them a lot of the resources to maintain large armies.

So they didn't really have much material power left.

They had an enormous cultural prestige.

And during Confucius's lifetime, by the time Confucius was born, the sort of political order that the Zhou had established was falling apart.

It was becoming more and more internally combative and belligerent.

And it got more so over the course of his entire life and beyond.

So that's sort of the stage.

As Confucius's life is ending, the world is in effect falling apart.

And he's sort of contemplating, well, how do we put this back together again?

Yeah, if you divide China into sort of four quadrants,

It's really mainly the northeastern quadrant of what we think of today as the People's Republic of China.

That's the general scope of the Warring States, although the scope of the Warring States expanded over time from 481 BC to 221.