Ancient China: The Warring States

How did ancient China plunge into 261 years of chaos, and how did that turmoil forge an empire? Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Andrew Seth Meyer to explore the Warring States period, from collapsing Zhou power and ruthless coups to mass armies, crossbows, and battlefield slaughter. They trace the rise of Confucian ideas, the seven great states, and the brutal climb of Qin toward China’s first emperor To find out more about Andrew's new book To Rule All Under Heaven, head to his website: https://www.andrewsethmeyer.com/ MORE The Romans and China Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/mu/podcast/the-romans-and-china/id1520403988?i=1000760040779 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4q9kcq1A86OBnYA4NFeiW8 The Terracotta Army: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000552068206 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2OS8DvUDisR3eSHz1gsX4G?si=JYhafg0LSfOlMLTWoIshOw Presented by Tristan Hughes. The producer and audio editor is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. 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/subscribe.

• 0:43Tristan Hughes?

  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 industrialised 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'

• 1:26Tristan Hughes?

  period is little known today in the West.

• 1:31Tristan Hughes?

  We're 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.

• 2:16Tristan Hughes?

  Andrew, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. It's really a great pleasure to be here.

• 2:22Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:51Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, there are so many stories that we can delve into, the sizes of these armies in question, much larger than those of Alexander the Great against the Persian Empire and so on. So for such an important period in ancient history, why is it that the Warring States period in China is much less known than, let's say, the Persian Wars or the Punic Wars today here in the West?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I think one of the simplest reasons is that there just aren't many sources that readers can turn to to learn about this. You know, there are some good scholarly treatments in English, but there really hasn't been a detailed chronicle of this period made available for general readers. And, you know, people can't really be blamed for not knowing about something that you can't really read about. And there are other reasons, of course, too. There's a general unfamiliarity with some of the details of Chinese culture and Chinese history. And again, there are complex reasons for that, for why that's so in the English speaking world.

• 3:55Tristan Hughes?

  So let's set the scene with the Warring States period. First off, roughly, because as we'll explore, I'm sure there's not exact dates for it, but roughly, how long a period of time are we talking about with this period?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  I begin the story in 481 B.C. All historians are not agreed on that date as a starting point. I cribbed it from Lu Zucheng, who's a Chinese literatus from the 12th century. But but others have followed him and I followed him. I started with this coup in the state of Qi that took place just two years before Confucius died. And then, you know, everyone's agreeing on when the Warring States end. They end when the first emperor, he's the king of one of the seven great Warring States. His state of Qin conquers the other six. And he founds the unified Qin dynasty in two hundred and twenty one B.C.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  So that gives us a sort of a neat timeframe, four eighty one to two twenty one, that's exactly two hundred and sixty one years.

• 4:54Tristan Hughes?

  Two hundred and sixty one years, we're going to do our best to get through as much of that as possible. And I think you highlighted something that no doubt we'll be returning to in this chat, which is like the names that we have. You mentioned Qi there, but also Qin, so sounding quite similar, but two very different entities. So let's explore this world right at the end of Confucius's life, as you mentioned there. The world of China just before this first event, just before four hundred and eighty one B.C. Andrew, what does China look like at that time?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  I think it's quite surprising to a lot of English language readers. The society of China on the eve of the Warring States during the lifetime of Confucius. It doesn't really resemble the imperial society of China that a lot of English language readers are familiar with from literature and film. I think we're accustomed to thinking of the Chinese Empire, which was led by this ruling class of very civil minded, bookish literati. The world before the Warring States is really led by a titled aristocracy that have much more in common with the aristocracy of fifteenth century Europe

• 6:07Speaker 01

  or of medieval Japan than of the later ruling class of the empire. So it's a very different social and political scene in the time prior to the Warring States. And it's really the Warring States is the crucible. In which Chinese society and politics become transformed and move towards the kind of social and political system that we're accustomed to associating with the Chinese Empire.

• 6:34Tristan Hughes?

  Well, then who is officially at the top? Who's in charge of the dynasty? And what is the dynasty in charge of China just before the Warring States period?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Most of the Warring States period takes place during the Zhou Dynasty. Z H O U, you know, you can call them Zhou. The Zhou Dynasty, it's a very important period in Chinese history. Certainly, it plays an outsized role in the kind of cultural memory of China. The longest ruling dynasty. It's a pre-imperial dynasty in the sense that the rulers of the Zhou did not use the title emperor. That title was invented, literally invented by the first emperor. So the leaders of the Zhou Dynasty called themselves kings. And the Zhou Dynasty had been founded in about 1045 BCE.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  So right around the time that King David would have been ruling in ancient Israel. And the Zhou, in the first centuries of their rule, they're very powerful. They exert a great deal of control and they consolidate a unified political system. 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. 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

• 8:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 9:02Tristan Hughes?

  The Zhou almost had 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. What is now, I guess, is it kind of north and eastern China today? That kind of air we should be imagining?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  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 B.C. 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.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  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's lifetime, most of those 100 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.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 11:13Tristan Hughes?

  And I guess the power of individual or regional lords, if they're kind of gaining more territory with, you know, from the hundred to fewer but larger states. I'm presuming the power of those regional laws is, well, they have more than ever before at the time of Confucius. I noted in your book how you can compare these states, how they were organized, a little different to modern day crime families. But also at this time, Andrew, we mentioned how the region Chi is central to the beginning of this warring states period. Chi is one region. How many other regions were there at the time? What are the most prominent ones that we should be knowing about?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  You know, by the time Confucius is alive, by the time the book opens, in a sense, it's hard for us to know. Because there were regional states that escaped being recorded in the chronicles. So it's hard to know exactly how many states were still left in Confucius's lifetime, probably somewhere between 20 and 30 states. Chi was a very powerful state and it had grown very big. And the other great power in the north was the state of Jin, which was directly to the west of Chi. And Jin and Chi had both grown to these big sizes by swallowing other states. And, you know, what you would find is that in both Jin and Chi, you have this very complex

• 12:36Speaker 01

  internal social structure where you had ostensibly, you had the duke at the top in both states. But honeycomb throughout the states were dozens. It was a simulacrum of the larger Zhou system where you had the king and a hundred vassals. Each of the regional lords had sort of emulated the Zhou kings in parceling out land and responsibilities to kin and allies. And you would find in a state like Chi or a state like Jin, you would have all of these regional noble families, the ruler of the regional state, they were called by courtesy duke. Almost all of them, actually, the rank that they held, I translated as marquess. You would find about half of the vassals of this marquess were his cousins, were people

• 13:21Speaker 01

  who came from his clan. And each of them was given the rank of vikang. And about half of them would then be allied families. What you found in each regional state is that a process went on that sort of mirrored the larger problem going on in the Zhou dynasty, which is that all of those regional, those little sub-feudal vassals fought with one another and devoured one another. And in the internecine struggles between them, the internal power dynamics of each state became undermined and subverted and volatile. Long story short, it was a hot mess.

• 13:57Tristan Hughes?

  I think we've laid the groundwork nicely now to get on to this big date of 481 B.C. Because, Andrew, what happens then?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Chi is this great, great power in the east. They had become very powerful over several centuries. In part, it was the product of the prestige of their ruling clan. The ruling clan was this Yu clan. They had been very close allies of the founding Zhou kings. And, you know, the state had grown very large through conquering neighboring states, and they occupied some of the most fertile land. They were situated right at the point where the Yellow River enters the Pacific Ocean. So they controlled some of the most fertile land in the Zhou realm. And a duke comes to the throne in about 483. And he's had a very sort of troubled life. He's lived much of his life in exile.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  He's seen his own father murdered. He's come to the throne after the murder of his own father. He's an interesting character. And one of the things that seems to have happened during his exile, he had spent his exile in the neighboring state of Lu. And the state of Lu was significant because that was where Confucius lived. And Confucius had for several decades been gathering young men around himself. Confucius was a very low status aristocrat. He was sort of a figure analogous to Socrates in ancient Greece. And he claimed to have discovered this Tao or Way that he thought could redress all of the problems that were causing society to fall apart. He taught this to his disciples.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  One of his disciples becomes very close to the man who would ultimately become the Duke of neighboring Qi. We don't really know what his actual name is. He's called Zaihua. Zaihua seems to have been a satirical label that was appended to him. It means make me Prime Minister.

• 15:52Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, okay, quite the statement.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  So why would his fellow disciples call him make me Prime Minister? Because that's exactly what happens to him. This duke is able to return from exile. And when he comes to the throne, he decides, okay, I'm going to put some of Confucius's ideas into practice. So I, as duke, am going to decide that my friend, who I consider very learned, even though he's very low in status, I'm going to make him one of my prime ministers.

• 16:23Tristan Hughes?

  So he made make me Prime Minister, Prime Minister?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he makes Zaihua Prime Minister. And he makes him one of two prime ministers. The other man that he makes Prime Minister is this figure, Tianchang, who, very famous, notorious throughout the Chronicles of the Warring States. Tianchang was undisputedly the most powerful of the regional nobles in the state of Qi. He had in effect engineered the succession of this duke to the throne. When the duke's father was murdered, Tianchang had punished the murderers of the duke's father and seen to it that the same line would remain on the throne. So the duke, no, he knows he owes his position to Tianchang, but he wants to assert, right, his own authority.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  So he makes Tianchang and Zaihua both prime ministers at the same time. And, you know, this is one of the first sort of very robust. Institutional responses to the crisis of the deterioration of the Zhou dynasty. This is someone trying to turn back the clock and say, well, I'm going to assert the power that the Dukel House once had. And it doesn't work well. Tianchang predictably hates Zaihua, feels that Zaihua has absolutely no business sharing equal power and status with him. And civil war erupts and in the end is predictable.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Tianchang, I should say, and his brothers, they storm into the Dukel Palace, they take the duke in effect hostage, they kill Zaihua. By the time it's all over, the duke is dead, Zaihua is dead. A young child, one of the youngest sons of the duke is put on the Dukel throne by Tianchang. But the reason it's a significant moment is that Tianchang realizes that this challenge to his authority and to the authority of the kind of hereditary clan that he leads, it can't go uncontested, right? So he makes fundamental changes to the way the entire state is organized. He takes personal control of about half of the arable land in the state of Qi.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, from that point forward, things begin to change very rapidly throughout the entire Zhou realm. Because in effect, it's a kind of reaction response formation. This attempt to try and defend the traditional power of the Dukel House, it pushes the entire state of Qi towards kind of fundamental restructuring that then begins to get mirrored and emulated throughout the Zhou realm.

• 19:01Tristan Hughes?

  And is the Zhou king at that time, when he hears of this, that his duke has been displaced and killed, is he also now not powerful enough to send a force to kind of contest Tianchang in Xi? Does this event also highlight how powerless that dynasty is by this point too?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yes, you know, by the time that Tianchang does this, this has become a very old dance. Lots and lots of sub feudal lords have killed the duke. Put one of the duke's young relatives on the throne. This is an old story and it's been for a while, more than two centuries. The Zhou kings haven't really had much power to do anything directly about this. What the Zhou kings have been able to do in the past is to say, okay, they'll put out an announcement to all of the surrounding regional lords and say, my kinsman has been killed. You all should do something about this for me. And of course, you know, the, the regional lords, the neighbors of a kingdom,

• 20:01Speaker 01

  they're always happy to take advantage of the chaos of one of their neighbors. So now they have a, a license from the king to do something. So generally a usurper like Tian Chong would have been forced to pay a price for having done this. He gets away with it. He gets away with it scot-free. That's really one of the things that makes this so significant. And the reason he gets away with it scot-free is that he now has control of half the arable land of Qi. Right? At this point, he has such a large, critical mass of wealth and power that he's able to buy everybody off. You know, he just basically pays everyone off to say, no, go away. Forget what the king said. And, you know, when the dust settles, he's still the prime minister.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  He's still in control of the Qi court and he passes the prime ministerial seat to his own son. And in effect, the position of prime minister of Qi becomes the hereditary sort of entitlement of his clan.

• 21:00Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so his coup really did pay off, not just for himself, but several generations of his family thereafter. So that's that big event in four hundred and eighty-one B.C. That is seen as kind of one of the first big moments of the Warring States period. But it's not the only one, is it, Andrew? What are these other big events that happens over the following decades? That really sets in motion this period of turmoil that will follow?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  There are three very traumatic events that alert elites throughout the Zhou world that we're living on a different planet now, that we have to seek fundamentally new kinds of solutions. Politics is never really going to work along the old lines again. So the coup in Qi is one. Within less than a decade after the coup in Qi, there's this very, very dramatic. Geopolitical event that happens in the south. There's this southern kingdom called Wu. They're able, in I think 483 BCE, so just a couple of years before the coup in Xi. The ruler of Wu is able to force the Zhou king

• 22:09Speaker 01

  to grant him this ancient title called Lord Protector. He's almost a figure analogous to the Shogun in medieval Japan. The Lord Protector was one of the regional lords who was given a charter by the Zhou king to lead the military forces of the realm. He's in effect given authority to call up the armed forces of all the regional lords to stave off threats. And it's a significant event in 483 because the ruler that is given this title, one, his state has only really been around for 100 years. And the reason it's only really been around for 100 years is that he and his people aren't really Chinese.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  The capital of this state was on the site of the modern day city of Suzhou. But Suzhou, of course, is a Chinese city. It's just west of Shanghai, which is the largest Chinese speaking city in the world. But during that time, that region, south of the Yangtze River, the people there were not really Chinese in any meaningful sense of the word. They didn't speak Chinese. So in the minds of elites in the Zhou realm, this ruler was a barbarian and he was given this ancient title of Lord Protector. 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.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  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 Zhou realm. If you become the Lord Protector, your state should be very powerful and very wealthy and very secure for the next hundred, two hundred, three hundred years. So for this southern state, this barbarian state to become Lord Protector and then get erased

• 24:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:30Tristan Hughes?

  So you've got Qi to the east, you had Wu to the south, they've been now taken over by the Yue. And you have Jin though, still to the north of where the Zhou king is. But Jin, that doesn't last.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  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 Jir 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 the, these sort of civil wars that he sets off, Jin is partitioned.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  So Jin had been a single state, would have 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,

• 26:10Speaker 01

  the seven most powerful states of the subsequent warring states period. So the irony is that each of those states individually becomes vastly more powerful than the unified state of Jin had been. And this is sort of an object lesson in the importance of reorganization and reform, that Han Wei and Zhao all begin to emulate some of the kinds of internal reforms that the Tian clan was doing in chief. And through this internal reorganization, through this institution of new mechanisms of control, each of those three states is individually more powerful. They can draw more deeply on the human and material resources of their

• 26:52Speaker 01

  terrain. So again, very disorienting, right, for political observers who know the history of the Zhou realm, the idea that the state of Jin would no longer exist, that its ancient house would be displaced, and that it would be partitioned, and that each of those states that came out of the partition of the state of Jin would be more powerful than the United States of Jin had been. All of this is very disorienting. And so by the time that happens, which is in the middle of the fifth century, by about 453, you know, those three crises, the Ku and Xi, the whole saga between Wu and Yuan, the South, and then the partition of Jin, every politically literate observer knows that we're in a different universe now.

• 27:34Tristan Hughes?

  So it's very clear then by 453 B.C. that this is the time of the warring states period. There's no lack of clarity now. Those three massive events, the reshaping of the political world order at that time, the Zhou king by this time still has officially the mandate of heaven, but is very much a lame duck. Yeah, we are now well and truly in this warring states period.

• 28:07Speaker 02

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• 28:57Tristan Hughes?

  If we go on to the seven main states that come to define this warring states period, and I believe we've mentioned four of the seven already, the three successors to Jin, the Han, Zhao and Wei, but also the Chi. So that's four of the seven. Interestingly, the Yue, those barbarians, not one of the seven. So how do we get to the other three?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Well, the state that occupied the original home base of the Zhou kings. So the Zhou kings got displaced. They had occupied a valley formed by one of the tributaries of the Yellow River, the Wei River Valley. And the Wei River Valley was an especially sort of powerful base of operations because it cut a pass through this mountain range. So it was a naturally screened. It was screened by mountains in the east and mountains in the south. So it was almost a kind of natural fortress. That was one of the reasons that the Zhou kings had been so powerful as long as they were able to maintain their base area there.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  That valley had been taken over by this state called Qin. You know, there are lots of debates over the origins of the Qin clan. They claimed to be the descendants of a family that were originally vassals of the Zhou that had kind of defended the Zhou kings as the Zhou kings were retreating. And then at the order of the Zhou kings had fought their way back into the valley and taken it over. That was their claim. Many historians feel that it's probably more complicated than that, that it's just as likely that the Qin Dukel family were originally chieftains of the same non-Chinese people who had driven the Zhou out of the valley

• 30:43Speaker 01

  and who had just sort of converted themselves into a new type of clan. And at the beginning of this period, during Confucius's lifetime, nobody really took them seriously. It was considered something of a backwater. But they had this enormous advantage of geography and they became increasingly powerful over time. So they became one of the, in fact, ultimately the most powerful of the seven great states.

• 31:10Tristan Hughes?

  So that's five. So we got the Qin now in the west, as you say, up the Wei River. We've got the Qi and the Wei, Zhao and Han. So we have two others.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  In the south, you had this great, almost a kind of imperial domain called Chu. And Chu is a very, very interesting and unique place. As far as we know, the ruling clan of Chu had actually been vassals of the Zhou kings going even before the Zhou had overthrown the Shang. And intermittently, they had been recalcitrant vassals. There had been wars between the leaders of the Chu clan and the leaders of the Zhou. When the Zhou get forced to move east, the Chu take advantage of that to migrate south. And they establish their capital in one of the tributaries of the Yangtze.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  So the whole Yangtze River Valley region, it's really alien terrain to most of the elites of the Zhou. It's much of it is swamped land at this time. There's a lot of mosquito borne illness, a lot of malaria. A lot of the terrain of this region is sort of cut off. Different parts of the area are cut off from one another by these very steep limestone ridges. It's a very fragmented terrain. But the Chu clan, they established themselves in the Han River Valley, a tributary of the Yangtze. And they slowly expand outward until they basically control virtually the entire Yangtze River Valley. It's a huge domain in terms of square area, but because population density in the south is so low,

• 32:48Speaker 01

  they don't really have that many more people than some of the territorially smaller states in the north. So that's the sixth of these great warring states. The seventh state is a state known as Yan. And Yan, Yan is situated around the area of the capital today of Beijing. So they occupy the area that centered on Beijing. In fact, Beijing means northern capital. One of the alternate names is Yanjing, which means capital of Yan. And that was sort of alluding to this, this early history. Like the state of Chu in the south, they have a very broad territory. It extends throughout what much of what we think of as Manchuria, even goes as far as the border, even over the border of what we think of as Korea. But at that time, it's much more

• 33:32Speaker 01

  arid. It's not as well watered by the Yellow River and its tributaries. So again, they have a very large expansive terrain, but relatively low population density relative to states like Chi and Han and Zhao and Wei.

• 33:48Tristan Hughes?

  And so we have these seven states. So Qin in the west, Chu in the south, Chi in the east, Yan in the northeast, Ju in the north, and then you've got Wei and Han in the middle. I've got a map up as well. It's really helpful to get a sense of where they are. So those are the the big seven of this period almost. And what do we know about their relations between each other? Are they always at war with one another? Are they always warring? I mean, what do we know about that?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  They were constantly at war. If we think in terms of hot and cold war, there was this mutual hostility. The interesting thing is that at this point with these seven great regional states, much of what we think of as China was Balkanized in a manner that we associate with kind of post Westphalian Europe. Each of these seven great regional states have very robust control over their territory, very autonomous direction over both domestic and foreign affairs. They begin to conduct what we would effectively call foreign affairs with one another. By the time we get to the end of the fourth

• 34:55Speaker 01

  century B.C., the rulers of these seven great warring states and two others sneak into the club through the back door. But they usurp the title king. The Zhou kings last all the way down to 256. So they hold the exclusively hold the title son of heaven, really till almost the end of the warring states. But in 334 B.C., two of the rulers in the north, the ruler of Chi and the ruler of this new state of Wei that had formed from the partition of Jin, they come together in a conclave and they recognize one another as kings.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  The idea being, well, it's silly for us to pretend that we're the vassals of the Joe, son of heaven anymore. We're his peers. He doesn't have any kind of sovereign power to intercede in our affairs anymore. You know, the buck stops here. You know, initially, everyone's shocked. This is a big scandal. But eventually, the logic of this is so clear that all of the seven great states follow suit. They declare themselves kings. Two other states also call themselves kings. And from that point forward, these seven great states, they begin to treat with one another as sovereign peers. And they begin to conduct a kind of very robust diplomacy that resembles kind of what we see going

• 36:18Speaker 01

  on between diplomats, even in the 21st century. You know, and that's internal to what we think of as China. So that's a very interesting development.

• 36:29Tristan Hughes?

  Andrew, the similarities with the wars of the successors and the taking of the kingship in the decade and a half after Alexander the Great's death, there's so many similarities here in the fact that for so long, they don't take the title of king, a few of those generals. But when it's clear that Alexander's bloodline is being, it's being killed off, and they have the real power, and they decide just to make that leap and call themselves kings. And it's really interesting, that kind of transition from dukedoms into kingdoms into kingship with these figures in China as well at around roughly the same time, maybe half a century difference. So as that has all been going on, I mean, there has been fighting

• 37:12Tristan Hughes?

  during this period to ensure that these states are still around in this new world that's forming. Do we know much about the nature of warfare and how they would have fought at that time?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  We know a great deal. You know, one of the things that's changing most rapidly and most intensely is the nature of warfare. And of course, one of the monumental testaments to this is this text that many people in the English speaking world are familiar with, The Art of War by Master Sun.

• 37:40Tristan Hughes?

  The Art of War.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  It's really an artifact of the warring states, and it really, in effect, encapsulates many of the biggest sort of changes to the culture. And the political economy of the warring states. During Confucius' lifetime, the transition was already beginning in the sense that at the founding of the Zhou Dynasty, warfare was an aristocratic affair. Right? That was sort of the basis of aristocratic power was that the only people who really had the skills and the means to conduct war were aristocrats. And generally, the most powerful combat units on any battlefield were these teams of charioteers. So, you know, learning how to drive a chariot

• 38:26Speaker 01

  required leisure that common people didn't have. And then the material to construct a chariot was something that only the wealthy could really bring together. So in this age of aristocratic chariot warfare, engagements tended to be much smaller. They tended to be limited in scope and impact. But as the competition between these states became more and more zero sum, each of the regional leaders began to experiment more and more with deployments of infantry. And if you're trying to protect yourself from chariots, the best kind of infantry that you can deploy are archers. And, you know, with archers, the more archers you put on the field, the better.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Right? How much training you're going to be able to give any of your archers, how accurately they're going to shoot. Right? So the more, the better. Again, this very material and person intensive. So this requires you to bring more and more common people into the realm of warfare and developing the institutions by which you can recruit common people, lots of them, equip them, and then maintain them on the battlefield through longer and longer engagements. So really, by the late fifth, early fourth century B.C.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Warfare has been completely transformed. It's no longer really the province of aristocrats. Most of the people doing the fighting are common infantrymen. And by the fourth century B.C., these common infantrymen are all armed with crossbows.

• 39:56Tristan Hughes?

  Crossbows, interesting, okay.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a very interesting development. This is one of the reasons, but 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.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  So that's one of the reasons why the interstate warfare by the fourth century B.C. 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.

• 41:01Tristan Hughes?

  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, you know, 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 neighboring powers and losing a massive chunk of your army.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  That's the simplest of them, right? Like that's, 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. You know, 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, these contingencies that are very, very difficult to keep track of. So the situation becomes very fraught.

• 42:11Tristan Hughes?

  It really does feel that this warring states period, given how long a period it is as well, it's one of these early ancient examples of total war.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  I think that's fair. And sort of that's one of the reasons that The Art of War by Master Sun has had such, you know, durable influence is that, yes, right? In other words, a society, an era that's sort of accustomed to total war can find interesting things in The Art of War by Master Sun because it was written in that milieu. It was written in a society that was in effect experiencing total war. And that kind of political strategic formation becomes in effect the norm, not just for China, but really for much of East Asia for the next two millennia and a half. That's one of the remarkable thing. And one of the reasons

• 43:02Speaker 01

  why I say that this really is a revolution with world transforming implications.

• 43:10Tristan Hughes?

  Andrew, let's move briefly on to philosophy because this is also a massive period for philosophy. Yes, it's after the period of Confucius, but alongside these warring states, you do see lots of different schools of thoughts emerging?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  That's absolutely correct. And really, that's what drew me to the warring states. I think of myself first and foremost as an intellectual historian, and I first fell in love with these sources. I took a course on, it was called the Foundations of Chinese Religion, but it was, it was in effect a course about the philosophical and religious texts that were being produced primarily in the warring states and in the eras just preceding it. And I have found the literature that this period produced so fascinating that it's absorbed me my entire life. And I think that one of the things that's so intriguing when one looks at this period, and one of the reasons it's mesmerized me so much, I've

• 44:07Speaker 01

  always felt that consciousness matters, that quality of people's thought has a kind of historical impact. I mean, I know thinkers like Marx would, would say, well, you know, Consciousness is really epiphenomenal. It arises from whatever your material situation is. I've never quite bought that. I've always felt that people's capacity to imagine a new way of doing things can begin to reshape the material conditions of their world. And I think that the Warring States provides good examples of that, that a lot of the kind of changes that we're talking about would not have been possible

• 44:46Speaker 01

  unless and until people could imagine new ways of doing things and new ways of seeing things.

• 44:54Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so is it not the case like Confucius when kind of trying to think of getting back to the old way? With these new philosophers, it's, you know, they've lived through this experience of these states warring against each other. They're trying to visualize a path for the future. It's not looking backwards now, it's looking forwards to what they envisage in future years.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  That's absolutely true. And I think one of the misconceptions that people in Europe and America sometimes have about China is that it's this hidebound, just sort of irredeemably conservative, backward-looking society. And I think the Warring States shows that that's simply not true, that all of the figures that we're looking at in the Warring States, you know, they're looking to the past. I think the deep insights of the discourse of the Warring States more generally is that in human terms, for human beings, there is no thinking about the future in the absence of thinking about the past. You're not really seriously imagining the future if you're not taking into consideration the past. So someone like Confucius, obviously, the past is sacred to him.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  But he's thinking about the future. He's thinking about a way out of the current crisis. How do we get out of this dilemma? And, you know, for all that he was a conservative and there's lots, plenty of criticism of Confucius, the answers that he produced in the face of that crisis were so profound and so persuasive that they resonate even today.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:21Tristan Hughes?

  We don't have time to delve into the various philosophies of all these schools of thought that emerge in the Warring States, but I think for this episode, more overarching on the Warring States, we'll go down to the end of the Zhou Dynasty, which aligns, Andrew, with the rise of that power in the West, which it feels like up to this time, you know, has been a bit on the sidelines. This is the time of the rise of the Qin.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  That's absolutely true. And the Qin, they were a backwater at the beginning of the Warring States. Really, for much of the Warring States, the action, the driving impetus of reform is from this central power known as Wei. There are lots of leaders and developments in Wei that drive change throughout the Warring States. Xi, the eastern power, is also a very major player. And it takes people a long time to take Qin, the western power, seriously. But by the end of the fourth century, Qin has become a very powerful player. And then over the course of the third century BC, they become... Uncontestably dominant, so that by the time we get to the end of the Zhou Dynasty

• 48:34Speaker 01

  itself, when the Zhou kings are finally displaced, it's clear to everyone that Qin is the winner. And it still takes another thirty years. Really, Qin emerges as the uncontestably dominant power who will definitely be the author of whatever system that comes out of all of this. In two sixty B.C., there's this Battle of Changping.

• 48:56Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, this feels like we need to talk about this. This is a massive, a massive moment from what I can gather.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yes, the Battle of Changping, I call the, the chapter in which I discuss it, the duel, because by the time it occurs, the only one of the seven kingdoms that can really mount any kind of real challenge to Qin is Qin's neighboring state of Zhao. Zhao had become very, very powerful because they had, in effect, allied themselves with the people of the Inner Asian steppe. They had found ways of incorporating very, very powerful cavalry units made up of or trained by the people of the Inner Asian steppe into their military. They become a really dynamic force. So Qin and Zhao, they sort of square off. The Qin commanders are very clever. They're able to maneuver the armies of Zhao into

• 49:45Speaker 01

  a situation in which their cavalry are effectively rendered powerless. It's called the Battle of Changping, but it's really a war. It's a war that goes on over months. These trench lines that extend over dozens of kilometers where you have hundreds of thousands of soldiers facing off one. It looks something like World War One, but it ends catastrophically for Zhao. It ends with the destruction of most of Zhao's army. And from that point forward, you know, that's two hundred and sixty B.C. It's clear Qin is going to be the supreme power. And it still takes until two twenty one, and it has to do with questions of social organization and internal problems within the Kingdom of Qin itself and sort

• 50:28Speaker 01

  of residual powerful forces within the eastern states that by, in two twenty one, what's remarkable is that Qin is able to accomplish something that I think most political observers living throughout the former Zhou realm would not have believed could happen, which is that, you know, most people, even when they acknowledge that Qin is going to be the victor, they believe that Qin will be forced to tolerate the continued existence of the other states, that Qin will be declared the new son of heaven, some kind of institutions will be established to formally materially institutionalize Qin's hegemony over all of the other states. But these other regional states, they're much too powerful, they're

• 51:12Speaker 01

  much too deeply entrenched to completely disappear. Beginning in 228, and it takes only about eight years, the ruler of Qin, this Ying Zheng, who ultimately becomes the first emperor, he conquers the other six warring states, he wipes them out, he erases them from the map, and he imposes a kind of centralized, unified control over the entire former Zhou realm, which no one, I think, would have been able to predict was possible. And it's a remarkable feat of political consolidation, really unprecedented in the annals of the world, and rarely replicated in subsequent periods.

• 51:51Tristan Hughes?

  The story of Ying Zheng and the powerful Qin that he inherits, he will ultimately become the first emperor of China, but the Qin have done a lot of work before then, and we will certainly delve into his story in much more depth another time. But Andrew, one last thing to finish it off. So if we go to the 250s, let's finish with the Zhou dynasty, the official end of it. The Qin, the balance of power is permanently very much in their favor now. And is there very much an official, a ceremonial end to the Zhou dynasty in its aftermath? I've got a fascinating, the nine cauldrons, but I don't know what that is.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  The Zhou had regalia, like any royal family, and the most sacred and the most famous of their regalia were these nine cauldrons. Within the ancestral cult of the aristocracy of the ancient Chinese world, ritual bronze vessels played a very, very important role.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  So the nine cauldrons were huge tripod cauldrons made of bronze with very elaborate decorations on them that were used in preparing ritual meals for the ancestors of the Zhou. And they were considered special regalia, they were considered special talisman materially embodying the Zhou dynasty's possession of the mandate of heaven. And you know, there's lots and lots of machinations that happened throughout the Warring States, different states and rulers trying to take possession of the nine cauldrons. Everyone felt that this would be an enormously consequential sort of expression of soft power.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  If you could get a hold of those nine cauldrons, that would create the expectation that even if you weren't the son of heaven now, that you were destined to become the son of heaven. One of the incidents I talk about early in the book, the ruler of Qin, he's still calling himself king, but he gets special permission of the Zhou son of heaven to go into the sacred chamber where the nine cauldrons are kept. And he loved to have strong men around him. So he points to one of his entourage, who's famous strong man, he says, let's have a contest, let's see which of us can lift one of these cauldrons. And the cauldrons were so heavy that he couldn't have been trying to lift it off the ground.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  It was probably just about getting one leg 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 Zhou 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. You know, as it turned out, that's not what happened. But the interesting thing is that the Zhou 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.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  There was a royal domain in the east that was under the control of the king and the royal court. And there was this, a 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 B.C., the Prime Minister of Qin, a man named Lubuwei, 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. Lubuwei 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.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  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, there really has been no formal transfer of power. And so the Qin are sort of left holding the bag. Yingzhang, when he's become the First Emperor of Qin, he's kind of left trying to figure out ways that he can ritually broadcast to the world

• 56:26Speaker 01

  that this transition has really happened and it's really legitimate. And that sort of becomes a problem that he struggles with for his entire reign.

• 56:33Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Andrew, this has been a fascinating chat, exploring more than a couple of centuries of ancient Chinese history. What a period. What would you say is the long-term significance of the warring states? Why should we care about it today?

• 56:48Speaker 01

  That's the $69,000, $68,000 question. I forget what the name of the old game show was called because I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Well, how does one end this book? Because I really do feel that we should understand this as a revolution. What are the long-term consequences of this revolution that continue to resonate so powerfully? In the simplest terms, the warring states leads to the foundation of the Chinese Empire. Yingzhang becomes the First Emperor. That's his title, but he literally is the First Emperor. He invents the title Huangdi, which we translate as Emperor. The territorial system that he institutionalizes lays down the norm for subsequent imperial governments down to the year 1911.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  So you know, the normative shape of the Chinese empire emerges from the warring states. And a political system that controlled about a fifth and a quarter of humanity at any given time, that's very consequential and that understanding the origins of that system is obviously important. To me, two of the biggest impacts of the warring states, really, we wouldn't have a unified nation of China today, but for the empire that emerges from the warring states. So that's very consequential.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  The warring states, one of the things that happens is a very profound social revolution, all the way down to the end of the warring states, really until the end of the Qin Dynasty in 210 B.C., so even beyond the warring states. This society is led by a titled aristocracy. So this aristocracy that resembles the hereditary aristocracy of medieval Europe, they are in control. By the time that the Qin Dynasty falls, that aristocracy is gone and they never come back. That's enormously consequential, right? If you think about how different Europe would be, meritocracy over aristocracy, and it's

• 58:42Speaker 01

  not that the notion of aristocracy and hereditary authority and hereditary status disappear completely, that's not true. People still think of birth and pedigree or whatever. But the empire that succeeds the Qin, the Han Empire, it's founded by a farmer. The first emperor of the Han, Liobang, he's born a common farmer. And that poses absolutely no impediment to his exercise of control or his founding a dynasty that lasts for 400 years. That's only possible because of the warring states. And those energies that are unleashed by that revolution resonate in China down to the present day. The other consequence I'll rush to talk about, you know, part of that revolution, one of

• 59:25Speaker 01

  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 institutionalise 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

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  living with today.

• 1:00:12Tristan Hughes?

  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

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China From Confucius to the First Emperor.

• 1:00:31Tristan Hughes?

  Fantastic. Andrew, just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Thank you. So this has really been a pleasure. Thank you, Tristan.

• 1:00:42Tristan Hughes?

  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. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.