Chapter 1: What led to the chaos of the Warring States period in ancient China?
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You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. It was one of the most revolutionary periods in history. Over two centuries of fighting, when ancient China fragmented into several different powerful kingdoms, each vying for supremacy.
It was an age of industrialized warfare, of total war, where armies in the hundreds of thousands would clash in some of antiquity's bloodiest battles. But it was also a time of philosophy, where the successors of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius would promote their own schools of thought during this tumultuous time.
And yet, for its great significance in shaping what would become China, this warring states period is little known today in the West. We are going to introduce this fascinating period. We'll explore the embers of the chaos, how it emerged from a weakened ruling dynasty whose mandate of heaven was on its last legs.
We'll look into how this turmoil would transform China forever and how it would ultimately pave the way for the rise of China's first emperor. Welcome to the Ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the Warring States.
Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Meyer, professor of history at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York, and the author of To Rule All Under Heaven, a history of classical China from Confucius to the first emperor. Andrew, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you so much. It's really a great pleasure to be here.
You're more than welcome. And what's a topic? The Warring States period, you claim it is one of the most revolutionary periods in not just ancient history, but the entirety of history.
I do. I think a lot of people in my field would agree. We aren't accustomed to thinking of things that happened quite that long ago as revolutions, which we should still consider as impacting the state of our world today. But I would argue that the Warring States merits that kind of consideration.
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Chapter 2: How did Confucian ideas emerge during the Warring States?
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?
The Zhou are almost kind of the figureheads in the middle, but actually the direct control, the amount of territory they control is very little. And they've delegated authority to other figures who are ruling these other key areas of what is now, I guess, is it kind of North and Eastern China today, that kind of area we should be imagining?
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. The range of action got bigger and bigger as these states expanded, not just inwardly, but outwardly too.
Yeah, the Zhou, they had had a kind of decentralized system from the very beginning. They maintained very powerful royal armies, but they had delegated regional authority to about 100 different kinsmen and allies. They had created about 100 different regional states to help them oversee the king's peace. And they were mainly focused on the North China Plain, although they extended
into the region of the Yangtze River Valley too. But by Confucius' lifetime, most of those hundred states had been destroyed. The warrior society that the Zhou presided over were sort of inveterately belligerent. They were warriors who lived to fight, and they fought one another as much as they fought anyone else.
And over the first centuries of Zhou rule, the different states that they had established sort of devoured one another. And so the states tended to get bigger and bigger. Their material power got greater and greater. When the material power of the king was suddenly deflated, then the belligerence between these states got even worse.
And all of those trends of territorial consolidation, the competition between the states got more and more zero-sum. That was contributing to this sense of crisis during Confucius's lifetime. The idea that things keep getting worse and worse, conflict keeps getting more and more destructive. How can we turn back this tide?
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Chapter 3: What were the main rival states during the Warring States period?
That would be shocking enough, but less than 10 years later, one of his own vassals, the ruler of a state called Yue, which was about 100 kilometers away, he destroys the kingdom of Wu.
He rebels against his former sovereign, traps him in his own capital, forces him to commit suicide, burns his temples to the ground, annexes his territory, erases his state from the map, and then has enough power to force the Zhou king to give him the same title that used to be held by the man he just killed. So it's just a completely unthinkable event.
Within the traditional framework of people living in the Joe realm, if you become the Lord Protector, your state should be very powerful and very wealthy and very secure for the next 100, 200, 300 years. So for this southern state, this barbarian state, to become Lord Protector and then get erased from the map and replaced by another barbarian, it was just unthinkable.
And it was a sign that we don't know what's going to happen next. If this can happen, virtually anything can happen.
So you've got Qi to the east. You had Wu to the south. They'd be now taken over by the Yue. And you have Jin, though, still to the north of where the Zhou king is. But Jin...
Well, that's the Third Great Crisis, again, happening within a few decades. The sub-feudal families, the noble clans in Jin are watching what happened in Qi, and they're thinking, well, the regional clans, the sub-feudal clans in Qi, they don't really have to listen to the duke anymore. They're fighting with one another all the time. They're swallowing one another's estates.
This one clan called the Zhi clan replicate the feat that the Tian clan had been able to do in Qi. He tries to establish sort of uncontested hegemony over the state of Jin. He fails. But in the wake of these sort of civil wars that he sets off, Jin is partitioned. So Jin had been a single state.
It had been an enormous state, larger than the modern state of Greece, which, you know, if you think about that in terms of the ancient world, the modern state of Greece housed more than a thousand city-states at the time that we're talking about. So this enormous territory that ostensibly was operating as a single polity, it gets divided in three.
Three of dozens of clans that had been the vassals of the Jin dukes the Han, the Wei, and the Zhao, they in effect sort of shrug off the control of the Jin Dukes. They partition the state of Jin, and those three states are three of what they call the seven titans, the seven most powerful states of the subsequent Warring States period.
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Chapter 4: How did the Zhou Dynasty's decline impact the Warring States?
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's a very interesting development. This is one of the reasons why I always make this claim that if Alexander's army had reached China, his army would have been destroyed by the weakest of the warring states, by the smallest Han. One of the reasons one can fairly confidently make that claim is the crossbow.
If you've got thousands of infantrymen armed with crossbows who are all trained to sort of move in formation, well, nothing that Alexander could deploy was really going to beat that. The crossbow, we know, wouldn't be invented in Europe until the second millennium.
And the crossbow, you know, it doesn't quite have the range of a musket, but at least a close range, it has much of the deadly power of a musket. So that's one of the reasons why... The interstate warfare by the fourth century BC, it's become very destructive, very sort of, and the stakes get very, very high.
A misstep, a strategic misstep is very, very costly in this realm where political leaders have access to that kind of power.
By what you mean when you're saying a mistake could be very, very costly, do you mean if one of these states decides to send their large army with this modern weaponry, all this industry behind them, creating all of these crossbows and weapons and so on, if they decided to send their army into battle against another army with that...
level of weaponry, the battle that follows, it could be absolutely devastating casualties wise. The misstep could be going into a battle against one of these neighbouring powers and losing a massive chunk of your army.
That's the simplest of them, right? Of course, that's always a concern. But then there are so many different balls in the air. There are so many different moving parts. If your army is intact, but you lose critical terrain that is necessary to the support of your army. If you've got an army, but you can't supply them anymore.
If you walk into a situation where initially you have the advantage, but all of a sudden the advantage disappears because your enemy makes an advantageous alliance. that outflanks you. And there are all of these contingencies that are very, very difficult to keep track of. So the situation becomes very fraught.
It really does feel that this warring states period, given how long a period it is as well, is one of these early ancient examples of total war.
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Chapter 5: What role did warfare play in the political landscape of the Warring States?
One of the questions that gets deliberated and that gets struggled over throughout the warring states is, what should the role of educated people be in government? And the consensus that emerges from the warring states is largely that No government can be legitimate that does not somehow institutionalize a way of sharing power with the educated.
There are lots of different ways that that can happen, and that leaves lots of room for disagreement. But down to the present day, and I think if you look at the way the People's Republic of China and other places where Chinese-speaking people live, that becomes absolutely sort of central to the fabric of the political economy, not just of China, but really of greater East Asia.
And those are effects that we're still living with today.
Andrew, this has been such a fascinating chat. Last but certainly not least, you have written the book that covers the entirety of the Warring States period and it lays it out for us to explore at our leisure, it is called?
To Rule All Under Heaven, A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor.
Fantastic. Andrew, just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
Thank you, sir. This has really been a pleasure. Thank you, Tristan.
Well, there you go. There was Professor Andrew Meyer introducing you to the fascinating Warring States period of ancient China. I really do hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. We will have to do more episodes on ancient East Asia in the future. All have fascinating stories to tell that we need to cover on the podcast, and we will.
Once again, thank you so much for listening. Now, if you're enjoying the show, please make sure to follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that.
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