Chapter 20: Chapter 19 Prosperity

In the discussion, Lin Feng saw how unfair general Qing Huan was. General Qing Huan only promoted people with good backgrounds or good backings.

Lin Feng was eighteen years old man with a lean toned body. His muscles were defined but not in bulk. He was not as manly as Ying Zheng or as handsome as Ying Zheng in fact his face was the opposite of Ying Zheng's. If Ying Zheng's face was manly handsome Lin Feng's face would be elegant handsome with a great touch of feminine beauty. In fact, he could be said to be more boyfriend or husband material than Ying Zheng while Ying Zheng was a lady killer as in one-night stands.

Although Lin Feng was not mentally retarded he did not know when to stand up and when to bow.

...

Ying Zheng came to know this world is exactly the same as his previous world except for a few details like how the humans the beasts and the plant life are different than his previous world or life. At this point in time, Ying Zheng had two hypotheses about this world. One was it was not his original world but the second is this is his normal world and he just traveled back in time.

Everything was exactly in order but there were a few suspicious events that Ying Zheng could not understand. Like how could the Zhou dynasty hold on to power?

For your information, the land of Zhou was a vassal state of the Shang Dynasty. A powerful leader of the Zhou named Wen Wang began to plan to overthrow the Shang Dynasty. It took many years, but finally, Wen Wang's son, Wu Wang, led an army across the Yellow River to defeat the King of the Shang Dynasty. King Wu established a new dynasty, the Zhou Dynasty.

The rulers of the Zhou displaced the Shang and legitimized their rule by invoking the Mandate of Heaven, the notion that the ruler (the "son of heaven") governed by divine right (granted by the Supreme God of Heaven) but that his dethronement would prove that he had lost the mandate. The doctrine explained and justified the demise of the Xia and Shang dynasties and at the same time supported the legitimacy of present and future rulers.

The Zhou dynasty was founded by the Ji family and had its capital at Hào. Sharing the language and culture of the Shang the early Zhou rulers, through conquest and colonization, gradually extended Shang culture through much of China Proper north of the Yangtze River.

According to the Zhou, the Shang had ruled unethically, squandering the resources of the kingdom. The mandate required rulers to rule justly. Each succeeding generation had to justify the dynasty's continued claim to hold the mandate. Negligence and abuse could revoke the mandate. The will of the people, ultimately, sanctioned the king's rule.

Before the Zhou was the Shang Dynasty which overthrew the Xia dynasty, claiming it had become tyrannical, and the Shang leader, Tang then stabilized the region and initiated policies encouraging economic and cultural advances. The Shang made the most of the fertile soil on the banks of the Yellow River to produce abundant harvests, providing more food than required, the surplus of which then went toward trade. The resulting prosperity allowed for the development of cities, (some on a large scale, such as Erligang ), arts, and culture.

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The Shang were expert masons, jewelers, and metallurgists, creating masterpieces in bronze and jade, as well as producing high-quality bolts of silk. They developed a calendar, divination through oracle bones, writing, music, and musical instruments, the concept of ancestor worship, Taoism, and the religious concept of the Mandate of Heaven which claimed the monarch ruled by the will of the gods.

The gods' approval of a king was evident in the prosperity of the land and the general well-being of the people. Any decline in either was interpreted as a sign the monarch had broken his contract with the gods and should be deposed. The last Shang King, Zhou (also given as Xin), became as tyrannical as the earlier Xia kings had been. He was challenged by King Wen of Zhou and was overthrown by Wen's second son, King Wu, who reigned for around three years as the first king of the Zhou Dynasty.

King Wu at first followed the paradigm of the Shang in establishing a central government on either side of the Feng River known as Fenghao. Wu died shortly afterward, and his brother, Dan, the Duke of Zhou, took control of the government as regent for Wu's young son, Cheng. The Duke of Zhou is a legendary character in Chinese history as a poet-warrior and author of the famous book of divination, the Yi Jing. He expanded the territories eastward, and ruled respectfully, abdicating when the son of Wu came of age and took the throne as King Cheng of Zhou. Not every region under Zhou's control admired their policies, however, and rebellions throughout the vast realm broke out, inspired by factions wishing to rule themselves.

A centralized government could not maintain the large territory that had been conquered and so the ruling house sent out trusted generals, family members, and other nobles to establish smaller states which would be loyal to the king. The policy of fengjian ("establishment") was instituted which decentralized the government and allotted land to nobles who acknowledged the supremacy of the Zhou king. The fengjian policy established a feudal system and social hierarchy which ran, top to bottom: King Nobles Gentries Merchants Laborers Peasants

Each noble formed his own separate state with its own legal system, tax code, currency, and militia. They paid homage and taxes to the Zhou king and provided him with soldiers when necessary. In order to strengthen the king's position, the Mandate of Heaven concept was more fully developed. The king made sacrifices at the capital on behalf of the people and the people honored him with their loyalty and service.

The fengjian policy was so successful, producing such an abundance of crops, that the resultant prosperity validated the Zhou as possessing the Mandate of Heaven. The wealth that was generated encouraged the so-called well-field system which divided lands between those cultivated for nobility and the king, and those worked by and for the peasantry.

The Zhou culture, naturally, flourished with this kind of cooperation. Works in bronze became more sophisticated and the metallurgy of the Shang, overall, was improved upon. Chinese writing was codified and literature developed, as evidenced in the work known as Shijing, one of the Five Classics of Chinese literature. The poems of the Shijing would have been sung at court and were thought to encourage virtuous behavior and compassion for members of all social classes.

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End of chapter.

By the way, everything I wrote is true or at least that is what I learned from the Internet. Today I learned more about the Zhou dynasty than I ever learned by the way I am not lazy or procrastinating I just think I should build on what is already there. I won't be changing the land or history much at least before the Qin dynasty.

This is a cultivation novel I am just trying to kingdom build just to build a solid character foundation for Ying Zheng before the cultivation arc. Hopefully what he learns in these chapters will prepare him for the future road of cultivation and immortality.

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