The Rise of Qin and Imperial Unification

Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Tutterburg 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 two. Just visit historyhit dot com slash suubbscribe. 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 etge For its great significance in shaping what would become China, This warring states period is little known today in the West 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 which 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 wararring States Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Mayer Professor of History at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York author of to rule all under heaven a history of classical China F 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 pereriod. 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 warning states merits that kind of consideration. 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? 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 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 notot 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 So let's set the scene with the Wring 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? I begin the story in four hundred and eighty one EC. All historians are not agreed on that date as a starting point. I cribbed it from Lu Zu Chen, who's a Chinese literatist twelfth century, But others have followed him and I follow him I started with this coup in the state of Chi place just two years before Confucius died And then you know, everyone's agreed on when the warrning states end They end when the first emperor, he iss the king of one of the seven great warning states his state of chin conquers the other six. And he founds the unified Qing Dynasty in two hundred and twenty one BC. So that gives us a sort of a neat Tframe four hundred eighty one to two hundred and twenty one, that's exactly two hundred and sixty one years 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 will be returning to in this chat, which is like the names that we have, you mentioned i there but also Chin So it' sounding quite similar, but two very different entities So let's explore this world right at the end of Confucius' life, as you mentioned there The world of China just before. This first event just before four hundred and eighty one BC Andrew, what does China look like at that time? 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 doesn't really resemble the immperial 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 wararring States is really led by a titled aristocracy that have much more in common with the aristocracy of fifteenth century Europe. or of medieval Japan than of the later ruling class of the emmpire So it's a very different social and political scene in the time prior to the warning states. And it's really the wararrning 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 emmpire 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 Wrying States pereriod? Most of the Wrrying States period takes place during the Zhou dynasty, Z H O U, you know, you can call them JZo Jhou Dynasty It's a very important period in Chinese history Certainly it plays an outsiz role in the cultural memory of China. the longest ruling dynasty. pre imperial dynasty. in the sense that the rulers of the Je 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 ten forty five BCE So right around the time that King David would have been ruling in ancient Israel And the Joe, in the first centuries of the 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 plane throughout the Yellow River Valley By the time Confucius is alive The Joe Kings retain a great deal of cultural prestige. Part of their power had always derived from their religious position They call themselves the Son of heaven. He was the head of a sort of very complex set of religious institutions brought collective devotions of the society of the North China plane together to honor the ancestors and sort of placate the gods Joe 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 in 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' lifetime, by the time Confucius was born the sort of political order that the Joe had established was falling apart It was becoming more and more internally combative and belligerent got more so over the course of his entire life and beyond So that's sort of the stage As Confucius' 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 Joe 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 easastern 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 warning states, although The scope of the waring states expanded over time from four hundred and eighty one BC to two hundred and twenty one. The range of action got bigger and bigger as these states expanded not just inwardly but outwardly too Yeah, the Joe, 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 a hundred different kinsmen and allies created about a hundred 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 Yanza River Valley too. By Confucius's lifetime, most of those hundred states had been destroyed. The warrior society that the Joe presided over were sort of inveterately belligerent. They were wararriors who lived to fight and they fought one another as much as they fought anyone else And over the first centuries of Joe 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 them The belligerentnce between these states got even worse. and all of those trends of territorial consolidation The competition between the states got more and more zero su. That was contributing to this sense of crisis during Confucius' lifetime The idea that things keep getting worse and worse conflict keeps getting more and more destructive. How can we turn back this tide And I guess the power of individual regional lords, if they're kind of gaining more territory with, you know from the hundred to fewer but larger states and presuming the power of those regional laws is well they have more than ever before at the time of Confucius. I noticed 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 Reion Qi is central to the beginning of this warring states period Chia is one region. How many other regions were there at the time? What are the most prominent ones that we should be knowing about 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' lifetime, probably somewhere between twenty and thirty states She 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 i Jin and Qi had both grown to these big sizes by swallowing other states And you know, what you would find is that in both gin and i You have this very complex internal social structure where you had ostensibly, you had the Duke at the top in both states Honeycomb throughout the states were Dozens It was a simingulacarum of the larger Joe system where you had the king and a hundred vassals Each of the regional lords had sort of emulated the Joe Kings's in parceling out land and responsibilities Kin and Allies. And you would find in a state like i 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 Marquis you would find about half of the vassals of this Marquis wereere his cousins, were people who came from his clan And each of them was given the rank of Viscount 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 And in the internacent struggles between them the internal power dynamics of each state became undermined and subverted and volatile. Long story short it was a hot mess I think we've laid the groundwork nicely now to get onto This big date of four hundred and eighty one BC. because Andrew, what happens then? She 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 Y clan They had been very close allies of the founding Joe 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 controlled some of the most fertile land in the Joe Realm and a duke comes to the throne in about four hundred eighty three And he's had a very sort of troubled life. He's lived much of his life in exile 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 Lube 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 aristocrate He was sort of a figure analogous to Socrates in ancient Greece and D claim 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 One of his disciples becomes very close to the man who would ultimately become the Duke of neighboring We don't really know what his actual name is. He's called Ziwa I was seems to have been a satirical label that was appended to him. It means makeake me Prime Minister Okay, okay, cant make the statement. So why would his fellow disciples call him makeake me Prime Minister? Because that's exactly what happens to him. 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' ideas into practice So I as Duke I' 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. So he made makeake me Prime Minister Prime Minister. Yeah, he makes Sywalk prime Minister And he makes him one of two prime ministers The other man that he makes Prime Minister is this figure Tian Chang who very famous, notorious throughout the Chronicles of the Warning States Tian Chang was undisputedly the most powerful of the regional nobles in the state of Chi. He had in effect engineered the succession. of this duke to the throne When the duke's father was murdered, Kian Chang had punished the murderers of the Duke's father and seemed to it that the same line would remain on the throne So the Duke no he knows he owes his position to Tian Chang He wants to assert Right, his own authority So if he makes Kan Chong and Ziwa both Prime ministers at the same time. And you know, this is one of the first sort of veryery 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 the Dual House once had And it doesn't work well. Kan Chang predictably Hates Dywa feels that Ziwa has absolutely no business sharing equal power and status with him. And civil war erupts and the end is predictable. Ken Cha, I should say, and his brothers They storm into the Dual Palace the Duke in effect hostage. they killed Zywalk By the time it's all over Duke is dead, Zya was dead. A young child, one of the youngest sons of the Duke is put on the Dukeal throne by Tian Chang But the reason it's a significant moment is that Tian Jang realizes that this challenge to his authority and to the authority of the kind of hereditary clan that he leads canan't go uncontested, right So he makes fundamental changes to the way the entire state is organized personal control of about half of the Arable land in the state of Chi. And you know from that point forward, things begin to change very rapidly throughout the entire Joe R because in effect, it's a kind of reaction response formation this attempt to try and defend the traditional power of the Dugal House pushes the entire state of Chi towards kind of fundamental restructuring that then begins to get mirrored and emulated in throughout the Jo realalm And is the joking at that time when 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 Xian Chiang In i. doeses this event also highlight how powerless That dynasty is by this point too Yes, you know, by the time that Kensan does this, this has become a very old dance. Lots and lots of subfudal lords have killed the Duke onene 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 Joe Kings haven't really had much power to do anything directly about this. What the Joe Kings have been able to do in the past, is to say, okay 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 regional lords, the neighbors of a kingdom They're always happy to take advantage of the chaos of one of their neighbors, so now they have a license from the king to do something So generally, a usurper like Tan Chang would have been forced to pay a price for having done this. He gets away with it. He gets away with it stock free That's really one of the things that makes this so significant And the reason he gets away with it Scotffrey 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 He's still in control of the Qi court and he passes the prrime mininisterial seat to his own son And in effect, the position of Prime Minister of Qi becomes the hereditary sort of entitlement of his clan 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 BC. That is seen as kind of one of the first big moments of the Woring States period. But it's not the only one, is it, Andrew What are these other big events that happened over the following decades That really sets in motion this period of turmoil that will follow There are three very traumatic events that alert elites throughout the Joe world We're living on a different planet now, that we have to seek fundamentally new kinds of solutions pololitics is never really going to work. along the old lines again So the couu and Chi is one within Less than a decade after the Ku in hi, 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 four hundred eighty three BCE. So just a couple of years before the Ku in Si The ruler of Wu is able to force the Zhou King to grant him this ancient title, called Lord Protector It's almost a figure analogous to the Shogun in medieval Japan The Lord prrotector was One of the regional lords who was given a charter by the Joe King to lead the military forces of the Rem He's in effect, given authority to call up the armed forces of all the regional wards to stave off threats And it's a significant event in four hundred eighty three because the ruler that is given this title one H state has only really been around for a hundred years And the reason it's only really been around for a hundred years is that he and his people aren't really Chinese capital of this state was on the site of the modern day city of Sujou. M Sujo, of course, is a Chinese cityities just west of Shanghai, which is the largest Chinese speaking city in the world During that time, that region south of the Yangza 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 Joe realalm. This ruler was a barbarian And he was given this ancient title of Lord Protector. That would be shocking enough. But less than ten years later One of his own vassals the ruler of a state called Ya, which was about a hundred kilometers away 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 Joe King to give him the same title. used to be held by the man he just killed. So It's just a completely unthinkable event withithin the traditional framework of people living in the Joe R If you become the Lord prrotector 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 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. right? If this can happen, virtually anything can happen So we've got ch. to the east. You had Woo to the south, they'd been now taken over by the U And you have Jin though, still to the north of where the Joel King is But Jin That doesn't last. Well, that's the third great crisis. Again, happening within a few decades The subfudal families, the noble clans in Jin are watching what happened in i. And they're thinking, well The regional clans, these subfudal clans in Xi, 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 Jerk clan replicate the feat that the Tian Can had been able to do in Qi. he tries to establish sort of uncontested hegemony. over the state of Jin. He fails in the wake of these sort of civil wars that he sets off Ge is partitioned So Gin 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 moreore than a thousand city states time that we're talking about this enormous territory that ostensibly was operating as a single polverty 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 Zao, they in effect sort of shrug off the control of the Jinguks They partition the state of Jen And those three states are three of what they call the seeven Titans, 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 Jinnid And this is sort of an object lesson in the importance of reorganization and reform Han Weei and Zaouo 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 terrain So again Very disorienting Paid for Political observers who know the history of the Joe Realm The idea that the state of Jin would no longer exist, that its ancient house would be placed and that it would be partitioned. Each of those states that came out of the partition of the State of Jin would be more powerful than the United State 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 four fifty three You know, those three crises, the couu and Chi The whole saga between Wu and Yu and the South, and then the partition of Jin Every politically literate observer knows that We're in a different universe now. So it's very clear then by four hundred and fifty three BC that this is the time of the Wring States period. There's no lack of clarity now. those three massive events, the reshaping of the political world order at that time that Joe King by this time still has Officially the mandate of heaven, but is very much a lame dark You know, we are now well and truly in This warring states period 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, jo and ' we but also the che So that's four of the seven Interestingly, the UA, those barbarians Not one of the seven. So how do we get to the other three? Well the state that occupied the original home base of the Joe King. So the Joe Kings's got Laced They had occupied a valley formed by one of the tributaries of the Yellow River The Way River Valley And the Way River Valley was an especially sort of powerful Base of operations because Tus through this mountain range. So it was unnaturally screened. It was sccreened 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 Joe Kingsings had been so powerful as long as they were able to maintain their base area there Valley had been taken over by this state called Chin. You know, there are lots of debates over the origins of the ChQin clan They claimed to be the descendants of a family that were originally vassals of the Joe that had kind of defended the Joe Kings as the Joe Kings were retreating And then the Order of the Joe 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. It's just as likely The Chindule family were originally chieftains of the same non Chinese people who had driven the Joe out of the valley 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 They had this enormous advantage of geography. and they became increasingly powerful over time. So they became one of the And in fact, ultimately the most powerful of the seven great states So that's five. So we got the Chin now in the west as you say up the way River We got the chi and the why, o and Han. So we have two others. In the south you have this great Almost a kind of imperial domain S 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 Joe Kings going even before the Joe had overthrown the shab And intermittently they had been recalcitrant vassals. There had been wars between the leaders of the Chu Klan. and the leaders of the joke When the Joe get forced to move east, The tr take advantage of that to migrate south And they establish their capital in one of the tributaries of the Yangza So the whole Yangzer River Valley region It's really alien terrain to most of the elites of the Joe. It's much of it is swamp 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 D differenterent parts of the area are cut off from one another by these very steep limestone ridges a very fragmented terrain. But the Chu clan They established themselves in the Hind River Valley a tributary of Vganza and they slowly expand outward until they basically control virtually the entire Yangza River Valley It's a huge domain in terms of square area But because population density in the south is so low 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 gray warning states The seventh state is a state known as Yen And yet, Yen 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 Yenjing, which means capital of Yen That was sort of alluding to this this early history. likeike the state of Chu in the South They have a very broad territory that 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. At that time, it's much more arid It's not as well watered by the Yellow River and its tributaries So again, they have a very large expansive terrain relatively low population density relative to states like Qi and Han and Zao and Wei. And so We have these seven states. so ChQin in the west, Chiu in the south, Qi in the east Yan in the northeast, JZu in the north and then you've got way and hand in the middle. I've d a map up as well. It's really helpful to get a sense of where they are. So those are 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? 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 point with these seven great regional states much of what we think of as China was valkanized in a manner that we associate with kind of post West Fal in Europe eachach 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 century BC The rulers of these seven greatreat warrning states and two others. sneak into the club through the back door U They usurp the title king. Joe Kings last all the way down to two hundred fifty six. so They hold the exclusively hold the title Son of heaven. really till almost the end of the warring states But in three hundred thirty four BC, two of the rulers in the North The ruler of and the ruler of this new state of way that had formed from the partition Jim. They come together in a conclave and they recognizeed one another as kings The idea being, well, it's silly for us to pretend that we're the vassals of the Jo 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 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, theseese 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 K of what we see going on between diplomats even in the twenty first century You know, and that's internal to what we think of as China So that's a very interesting development 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' 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 Juds 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 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 We know a great deal. You know, one of the things that's changing most rapidly and most intensely is the nature of warfare 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 Son. The Art of war. It's really an artifact of the wararring States and it really in effect, encapsulates manyany of the biggest sort of changes to the culture and the political economy of the warring states. During Confucius's lifetime, the transition was already beginning in the sense that at the founding of the Zhou Dynasty Warfare was an aristocratic affair. That was sort of basis of aristocratic power was that The only people who really have the skills and the means to conduct war We're aristocrats and generally the most powerful Cbat units on any battlefield were these teams of charioteers. So, you know, learning how to drive a chariot. 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 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. R? 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 deeveloping 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 BC 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 BC These common infantrymen are all armed with crossbows. Crossbows. Interesting. Okay Yeah, that's a very interesting develop. I mean, this is one of the reasons 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 were all trained to sort of move in formation Well, Nothing that Alexander could deploy was really going to beat that the crossbar windel 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 At least at close range, it has much of the deadly power of a musket. So that's one of the reasons why Instate warfare by the fourth century, BC, it's become very destructive veryer 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 goingo into a battle against one of these neighbouring powers and losing a massive chunk of your army 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 If your army is intact, but you lose critical terrain 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 outflank youers. and there are all of these these contingencies that are very, very difficult to keep track of. So the situation becomes very fraught really does feel that this wararring states period, given how long a period it is as well, it's one of these eararly ancient examples of Total war. 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 accustomed total war can find interesting things in the Art of War by Master Sin because it was written in that milia. 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 why I say that This really is a revolution with worldor transforming implications. Andrew, let's move briefly ono Philosophy becausecause 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 thought emerging 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 releligion, but 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 always felt that Consciousness matters, right quality of people's thoughts. has a kind of historical impact. I mean, I know thinkers like Mx 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 wararning States provides good examples of that. A lot of the kind of changes that we're talking about would not have been possible unless and until People could imagine new ways of doing things and new ways of seeing things 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 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 envision in future years 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 hide bound just sort of irredeemably conservative backward looking society And I think the warning states shows that that's simply not true 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 You're not really seriously imagining the future if you're not taking into consideration the past So some of my confus is obviously. past is sacred to him 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 you know For all that he was a conservative and there's lots plenty of criticism of Confuciis the answers that he produced in the face of that crisis were so profound and so persuasive that they resonate even today. We don't have time to delve into the various philosophies of all these schools of thought that emerge in the bring states. I think for this episode more overarching on the wararring states will'll go down to the end of the JZhou dynasty Wh Alligns 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 chin That's absolutely true and the chin 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 Weay There are lots of leaders and developments in a way that drive change throughout the warring states. She, the Eastern power is also a very major player And it takes peopleople a long time to take in, the Western p seriously By the end of the fourth century Chin 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 itself when the Zou Kings are finally displaced It's clear to everyone that Chin is the winner. and it still takes another thirty years. really Chin emerges as the uncontestably dominant power who will definitely be the author of whatever system that comes out of all of this two hundred and sixty BC, there's this battle of Changping. Yes, this feels like we need to talk about this. This is a massive, massive moment from what I can gather Yes, The Battle of Chang Ping, I call 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 Chin is Chin's neighboring state of Zao Zao had become very, very powerful because They had, in effect, allied themselves people of the Unner Asian step They had found ways of incorporating very, very powerful cavalry units made up of or trained by people of the Inner Asian step into their military They become a really dynamic force. il and jao they sort of square off The Qin commanders are very clever. They're able to maneuver the armies of Zao into a situation in which their cavalry are effectively reendered 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 Zao's army. And from that point forward, you know, that's two hundred and sixty BC. It's clear Chin is going to be the suupreme 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 Chin itself and sort of residual powerful forces within the Eastern states that by In two hundred twenty one, what's remarkable is that Chin is able to accomplish something that I think most political observers living throughout the former Joe Rome would not have believed could happen. which is that You know, most people, even when they acknowledge that Chin is going to be the victor, They believe that Chin will be forced tolerate the continued existence of the other states. The Chin will be declared the new Son of heaven some kind of institutions will be established to formally materially institutionalized Chsation's hegemony over all of the other states these other regional states, they're much too powerful, they're much too deeply entrenched to completely disappear Beginning in two hundred twenty eight and it takes only about eight years The ruler of Chin this Ying Jiang who ultimately becomes the first emperor. 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 Joe Ram, 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 The story of Yang Jun and the powerful Qin that he inherits He would ultately become the first emperor of China, but the Chin 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 two hundred and fiftyies, let's finish with the Joe Dynasty, the official end of it The Chin, the balance of power is permanently very much in their favour now And is there very much an official a ceremonial end to the Zou Dynasty in its aftermath. I've got some fascinating the nine cauldrons, but I don't know what that is that Joe had regalia, like any royal familyil and the most sacred and the most famous of their regalia were these nine cauldrons. withithin the ancestral cult of the aristocracy of the ancient Chinese world Ritual bronze vessels played a very, very important role 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 Joe And they were considered special regalia. They were considered special talismen cheerally embodying Jou Dynasty's possession of the mandate of heaven. And you know, there's lots and lots of machinations that happen throughout the warring states different states and rulers trying to take possession of the nine clds. Everyone felt that This would be an enormously consequential sort of expression of soft power 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 Chin He's still calling himself King G special permission of the Jo Son of heaven go into the sacred chamber where the nine cauldrons are tpped. And He loved to have strong men around him So he points to one of his entourage, who's famous strawmen. 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. It was probably just about Hitting 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 Joe world kind of omen, o 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 The interesting thing is that Jo Dynasty, it kind of ends with a whimper rather than a bang in that by the time that the Zhou dynasty finally ends The Joe 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 in the royal court And there was this a kind of Dutchy of West Joe which was under the hereditary control of a sort of cadet branch of the Royal clan. So two hundred and fifty six BC the Prime Mister of Chin, a man named Luuei He decides he's going to get rid of the leaders of his state of Western Joe They get into a plot to try and wage war on the state of Chin Lubuay punishes them by wiping out that Western state becausecause the nine cauldrons were there at the time puts the nine caauldrons in the possession of the State of Chun. that effectively ends the Zhou dynasty A couple of years later, the last Joe King, a man named King Non of Joe who had lived for an incredibly long time. I think his reign was something like fifty six years. When he dies, nobody is enthroned in his place. So that's kind of it. when he dies as the Jo Dynasty ends But there is no formal ceremony. there is no abdication. I mean, this is one of the things that vexes the chin when they ultimately do. conquer the other states. There really has been no formal transfer of power. And so the chin are sort of left holding the bag Ying Jang, when he's become the first emmperor of ChQin He's kind of left trying to figure out ways that he can ritually broadcast to the world This transition has really happened then it's really legitimate And that sort of becomes a problem that he struggles with for his entire reign 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? That's a sixty nine sixty eight thousand dollars question. I forigure what the name of the old game show is called. Be I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Well, how does one end this book Be 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 warning States leads to the foundation of the Chinese Empire Ying Jhongg becomes the first emperor That's his title, but he literally is the first emperor. He invents the title Pang Di, which we translate as emmperor the territorial system that he institutionalizes lays down the norm for subsequent imperial governments down to the year nineteen eleven. 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 wararning states, really, we wouldn't have a unified nation of China today but for the empire that emerges from the warring state. So that's very consequential Warren states one of the things that happens is a very profound social revolution all the way down to the end of the warrant states Really until the end of the Qin dynasty in two hundred and ten. BC or even beyond the warning 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 God and they never come back. That's enormously consequential, right? If you think about different Europe would be meritocracy over aristocracy. And it's 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. The empire that succeeds the Qin, the Han Empire It's founded by a farmer the first emperor of the Han, Lo Bang born a common farmer And that poses absolutely no impediment to his exercise of control. or his founding a dynasty that lasts for four hundred years That's only possible because of the warning 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 part of that revolution. One of the questions that gets deliberated and it gets struggled over throughout the waring 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 does not somehow institutionalize a way of sharing power with the educator There are lots of different ways that that can happen and that leaves lots of room for disagreement. downown 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. 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, so, this has really been a pleasure. Thank you, Tristan Well there you go. there was Professor Andrew Meyer introducing you to the fascinating wararring 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