So, today we're going to be actually starting the course of our passage through Chinese history starting with the first period of paradigm shift, which is called the period of the Warring States 戰國. In just a moment, we'll look at the dates of that period, but I want to remind you, first of all, that this means that we're in the first set of volumes on <i>Early Chinese Religion</i> covering the period from the Shang 商 dynasty, which is the first dynasty in which writing appears. We'll talk in a moment. There's a so-called Xia 夏 dynasty, but this is prehistorical— there's been no writing found from that period and so we entered history with the Shang dynasty. And I want to add immediately that the Shang dynasty starts around 1600 BC or BCE, but on the book cover if you look closely you can see that it says 1250 BC and then to 220 AD, the end of the Han 漢 dynasty. Now, why is that? Well, the reason is that we don't have writing before 1250 BC, so these <i>jiaguwen</i> 甲骨文 or these oracle bones which are basically all we know about what we're going to talk about the pantheon, for example, in the early period of Chinese history. All of it comes from these oracle bones and they only start in or around 1250 BC, so that's why we don't cover in fact the entire Shang dynasty but only that period, in fact only the reign of one king, as will be seen. Anyway, now the other thing I want to say is that in this book there are 24 essays, and we're going to be talking only about 6 or 7 of them and each time as we go along, I'll be introducing at least the name of the author of the individual essays. And today, the first and most important essay is by a scholar from Taiwan, from the Academia Sinica, called Lin Fu-shih or Fu-shih Lin, who is the world specialist of <i>wu</i> 巫, that is what we've already agreed to call shamans or spirit mediums, so his essay is going to be the main focus of this first chapter on the attack on shamanism. As we've said, the whole idea is that, as you go from one period of Chinese history to another, that transitional period, the period of the Warring States, is a period when the old religion is pushed off center stage and a new form of religion, particularly among the elite, the ruling elite, comes into being. So, Fu-shih Lin's article, the chapter is called, "The Image and Status of Shamans in Ancient China." Now, to understand that of course we need a little bit background. And the first background is just to give you some idea of the dates of what we're talking about. So, the Warring States is a part of what we called the Eastern Zhou 東周 period and it goes from 481 to 256 BCE. That's the time of transition. That's the time of paradigm shift. When we go from the Shang dynasty, which, as I just said, begins around the year 1600 and goes to around —there are debates of exact dates —but around 1046 BCE. Then the Zhou dynasty, which goes from the 1045 to 256 BCE, that is to say the end of the Warring States and marks also the end of the Zhou dynasty. And then we have the first empire, the Qin 秦 empire. The famous First Emperor with his tomb and his soldiers in Xi'an 西安 that everybody in the world knows about, so this First Emperor, Qinshi huangdi 秦始皇帝, founds the first —we're going to call it a bureaucratic empire—in the year 221 BCE and it falls very quickly after his death. And so in 205 [206] BCE, we have the founding of the Han dynasty, which itself split into a Western Han 西漢 and an Eastern Han 東漢, both of them are about 200 years long. Now, there's the dates, but what are we talking about in this transition? We're transitioning from what we called the royal period of Chinese history to the imperial period. The word for king in Chinese is <i>wang</i> 王. The word for emperor in Chinese is Di 帝 or Huangdi 皇帝. Okay? Note that very carefully, Di, because we're going to talk about that in just a moment and so the way this transition is described is: we go from a royal "kinship-based patrimonial organization" to the first bureaucratic empires. We'll talk more about the bureaucratic empires in a moment but what we want to first [talk about is] kinship-based patrimonial organization. "Patrimonialism is a form of governance in which all power flows directly from the leader." And that's what we saw: the Son of Heaven and his family members, but all power is associated with the Son of Heaven and with his ancestors, so: "in which all power flows directly from the leader. This constitutes essentially the blending of the public and private sector." Again, very important and we'll come back to this all the way through this entire course—the public and the private. We saw for example that the intellectuals saw themselves as representing public interest as opposed to private selfish greed or whatever it may be. Okay? So: the blending of the public and the private —because how do you distinguish between the governing leader and his private interests when the private and the public are completely confounded?— and then the definition concludes, "these regimes are autocratic or oligarchic and exclude the upper and middle classes from power." Now, why is that important? Well, if you have a patronage system and a whole political system which is based on blood ties, blood relationship, family ties and you go then to a bureaucratic empire, where it is the office that counts and presumably the merit that an official has in order to fulfill that function, that office. We're obviously in a totally different world, a totally different world. So, it's about that transition from a royal "kinship-based patrimonial organization" to the first bureaucratic empire. Now, this transition is accompanied by many other transitions. For example, we go from the Bronze Age—the Shang and the Zhou—to the Iron Age. This means a complete change in the structure of society, in the way warfare is engaged. For example, we see in the period of Warring States as all these little states are gobbled up by larger, ever larger states. We'll show a map in a moment. We see how warfare has become based on iron and mass armies instead of the aristocratic elite-based warfare of the earlier period. So, China's size and population over this period —we're going to be looking at maps in a moment— changes dramatically, very slowly at the beginning and then very quickly with the founding of empire. So you have an expansion of territory. You have a multiplication of urban centers during the Warring States. You have an increased secularization of the practice of government. I underline that word secularization in our introductory talk. We talked about rationalization, interiorization, secularization as characteristic not only of <i>xiandaihua</i> 現代化, of modernization, but characteristic of every period of paradigm shift. So the fact that government becomes more secularized in its practice, that is to say less directly associated with sacrifices. We'll talk about that in detail. And above all, the rise of peripheral states. The rise of peripheral states, and that now we can take a look at by looking at some maps. So here we have, first of all, the Shang dynasty and then if we move to the Zhou dynasty, you can see immediately that it's enlarged somewhat, not a whole lot. It still doesn't occupy anywhere near even the quarter of present-day China. But then look at the next map and here you see that same space no longer as a unified space but with huge peripheral states. These are these huge peripheral states that I was referring to, who don't belong to the family, the Zhou family. So this huge state of Chu 楚, this other state of Qin, and the state of Qi 齊 which is now today Shandong 山東. These are the three large peripheral states that are swallowing up all these little states that were related to the Zhou dynasty, and in the end it will be the Qin dynasty that swallows up of everybody else. Okay? So: that's why it's called the period of Warring States, because it's a period when all of these little states are being swallowed up, one after the other by these large peripheral states, and the most important thing is that they are not related to the ruling Zhou family. What does it mean? Well, we'll see in a moment that what characterizes the Shang and the Zhou is the centrality in their political religion, the religion of the state, the centrality of ancestor worship. But, obviously, if these people are no longer related to the Zhou ancestors, we have a problem. And so, for example, the Qin say that they're descended from not the Zhou ancestor but from someone we've already talked about called Da Yu 大禹. Big Yu. And he is one of the so-called three sages. Yao 堯, Shun 舜, and Yu 禹 that we'll talk about in a moment again. But let's just finish looking at the map. So this is the Warring States before the Qin takes over, but then when the Qin collapses, it's in fact the state of Chu, Liu Bang 劉邦, who comes from the state of Chu, who conquers. So these two large southern states, already on the southern periphery of the Zhou kingdom, they're the ones who then found the two empires, the Qin and the Han that we'll be talking about later. So after the period of Warring States, we move on to the Qin dynasty and there you can see a huge expansion in the size of what we now call China, but then look at the next one, so just 15 years later, with the founding of the Han. The Han dynasty expands to the area of basically what we call the traditional 18 provinces of China. And you can see that it goes all the way down into what is now northern Vietnam. And it even goes up a little bit up towards the Korean Peninsula, and it goes out towards the Gansu 甘肅 corridor, which of course is the basis of the Chinese side of the Silk Road. Okay? So: that is one of the basic things that's also happening. It's not just that we're shifting from a "patrimonial kinship-based organization" of the empire to a bureaucratic empire, we're also talking about a huge expansion of Chinese territory. Okay? But still way smaller than China is today and as we said I think the last time the China that we see today is primarily the result of two non-Chinese conquests, that is to say the Mongols and then the Manchus. Okay? So: the present contours of China are essentially related to the conquest of China by two northern tribal groups—the Mongols and the Manchus.
