2 - The Ritual Figuration of the Zhou Kings

Summary

Chapter 2, “The Ritual Figuration of the Zhou Kings” examines the surviving records of a few rare but important ritual techniques that posed symbolic arguments about the relationship of the Zhou king to the social order and the natural world. The details of their implementation, as the chapter shows, reveal an effort to refigure the Zhou kings as qualitatively different from their contemporaries, with a special relationship to the natural world and its products.

Techniques of ancestral worship provided the early Western Zhou kings with a framework for constructing a coherent group identity after the conquest of Shang. Ancestral ritual did not, however, make up the entire ritual program of the Zhou royal house. The Zhou kings supplemented it with ritual techniques framing the royal person against locations, tasks, and other populations. Certain rites performed during the early Western Zhou focused on the reach and potency of the king as a military leader, emphasizing his control over the Zhou sphere of influence. During the middle Western Zhou period, however, new forms of ritual recast the king as the driving force behind the production of key resources, focusing on his centrality to the state’s well-being.

This chapter surveys the extant inscriptional records of three specific royal activities – an elaborate ceremony known as the “Great Rite,” ceremonial ploughing of fields, and the events surrounding the separating of foals from their mothers – that framed Western Zhou kingship against the backdrop of non-devotional ritual. Changes in the symbolic characterization of the king introduced during the middle Western Zhou, the chapter shows, sought to solidify the royal identity as a cultural linchpin, as part of a wider effort to intensify royal control over disparate aspects of the Zhou state. While this ritual program created strong motivations for commitment to the royal house, it also facilitated the crystallization of a Zhou elite identity divorced from royal interests.

Figuring Kingship

The core myth of dynastic kingship is that ultimate executive authority in a state is legitimately vested in a single individual and transferred across generations. In practice, a state large enough to have a king cannot exist without the complicity of additional groups with varying interests in supporting this vision of authority. Building and maintaining a monarchy is thus an ongoing exercise in negotiating the capacities and boundaries of both the royal person and the royal line. The individual designated as king may play a greater or lesser role in this process, depending on the balance of power and distribution of resources among the interests involved.¹

This process of negotiating the real and fictive power of the king – that is, determining both what the king as individual can actually do and what actions will be represented as those of the king, regardless of who or what else is involved – is a fine example of what Latour calls the “figuration of agencies.”² Throughout this chapter, I borrow Latour’s vocabulary to describe the various arguments, explicit and implicit, that particular Western Zhou ritual events posed about the nature and capacities of the king. I do not contend that ritual was the only vehicle for this process; one could undoubtedly study the same phenomenon through official documents and both settlement and mortuary archaeology if enough material were available. Ritual is, however, a particularly effective vehicle for arguments about individual and group identities and the relations between them, and given the emphasis on the ritual heritage of Zhou in early Chinese texts, the efforts of the Zhou in that direction deserve special attention.³

The “Great Rite” (Da Feng 大豐/Da Li 大禮)

In early Chinese received texts, the term li 禮 refers to a broad category of behaviors encompassing everything from massive public sacrifices to individual greetings, as well as their moral implications. In the Western Zhou inscriptions, however, the term li 禮 enjoys nowhere near the breadth of use that it had in these later materials. It does, however, play a significant role in the vocabulary of Western Zhou royal ritual, as part of the name for a ceremony that used the symbolic logic of space to express the extent of Zhou royal ambition.⁴ Considered together, the Mai fangzun 麥方尊 (6015) and Tian Wang gui 天亡簋 (4261) inscriptions provide a relatively complete description of this practice, called da feng 大豐 or da li 大禮 (the “Great Rite”).

The Mai fangzun (6015) is an exceptional vessel in every regard.⁵ Both its décor and its inscription are extraordinarily detailed, and it records a meeting between the king and one of the most powerful nonroyal personages of the early Western Zhou. The vessel’s commissioner, Mai, served the lord (Xinghou 邢侯) of a regional state called Xing as Document Maker (zuoce 作冊) when the latter was appointed to his position by the king.⁶ The Lord of Xing awarded Mai metal on his return from that audience, and Mai recorded the circumstances of his ruler’s meeting with the king, which included an instance of the “Great Rite,” in the inscription of the vessel he subsequently commissioned:

王令辟井(邢)侯出坏, 侯于井(邢), 若二月, 侯見于宗周, 亡𨑫(尤), (會)王京, 祀。若(翌), 才(在)璧(辟)雝(雍), 王乘于舟, 為大豐⁷ (禮), 王射大龏禽, 侯乘于赤旂舟, 從, 死咸 …

The king commanded [Mai’s] sovereign, the Lord of Xing, to come out from Pei⁸ and take up the lordship of Xing. Around the second month, the Lord presented himself at Zongzhou; nothing went wrong. He met the king for a feast at the Pang Capital; a -offering was conducted. The next day, at the biyong pond, the king rode in a boat and conducted a Great Rite. The king shot and bagged (a?) large bird(s?), and the Lord followed in a boat with a red flag; the affair was completed.

(Mai fangzun 麥方尊 [6015])

After receiving his orders to take control over the state of Xing, the newly minted Lord of Xing had an audience at Zongzhou.⁹ During the Lord of Xing’s visit to the Zhou heartland, he attended a feast that the king hosted at Pangjing, another frequent site of Zhou royal activity.¹⁰ The king offered devotions to his ancestors, probably during the feast. The next day, he performed the “Great Rite” in question on the biyong pond, a location described in later texts as a circular body of water with an island at the center.¹¹ In the rite, the Zhou king rode a boat around the pond and shot birds, while the Lord of Xing followed in a boat displaying red flags. Afterward, the Zhou king received the Lord of Xing with unusual warmth, welcoming him into his personal chambers and awarding him gifts that included a chariot worthy of a king.¹²

The inscription of the Tian Wang gui 天亡簋 (4261),¹³ dateable to the reign of King Wu based on its inscription,¹⁴ describes a similar process but provides one additional key detail:

乙亥,王又(有)大豐, 王凡三 方, 王祀于天室, 降, 天亡又王, 衣祀于王不(丕)顯考文王, 事喜(糦饎)¹⁵上帝, 文王德在上, 不(丕)顯王乍(作)省, 不(丕)(肆)王乍(作)(庸), 不(丕)克乞(訖)衣(殷)王祀。丁丑, 王鄉(饗)大宜, 王降。亡¹⁶𧴧爵、退橐, 隹(唯)𦨶(朕)又(有)蔑, 每啟王休于尊(簋)。

On the yihai day (12), the king had a Great Rite (feng/li). The king boated in three directions. The king made offerings in the Hall of Heaven. He descended, and Tian Wang assisted the king in making bountiful¹⁷ offerings to his greatly brilliant deceased father King Wen and in serving food and drink to the High Lord. King Wen’s virtue is on high. The great and brilliant king acts as overseer; the great succeeding king continues [his work],¹⁸ greatly managing to end the sacrifices of the Yin kings.¹⁹ On the dingchou day (14), the king held a feast with a large offering-table.²⁰ The king sent … [?] … down to [Tian] Wang.²¹ I [Tian Wang] had a recounting (of merits) (mie [li]). [I] respectfully illustrate the king’s beneficence²² with a gui-tureen for offerings.

Here two important points about the process are clarified. One is that the king himself rode in a boat to perform the rite; given the use of the term cong 從, “to follow,” in the Mai fangzun inscription, this was likely but had not been explicitly stated. The second is that the king boated around the entirety of the pond, traveling, however, in three rather than four directions. To move across a roughly symmetrical body of water in a boat, a launching point was of course necessary, and the “three directions” mentioned in the narrative of the ceremony probably refer to those from which the king did not launch his vessel.²³ The king would thus have reached the extremes of all four directions of the pond over the course of the ceremony: the three in which he traveled and the one from which he started. The center of Zhou culture was located on the western fringes of the sphere of influence of the Shang, from whom the Zhou adopted much, and textual sources suggest that the Zhou conceived of themselves as “men of the western lands.”²⁴ The procession of the biyong rite in three directions may have been meant to echo the extension of Zhou authority across the lands within the Shang cultural sphere.²⁵

Given the cosmological associations of the biyong pond, we may understand the da feng/li rite to leverage the spatial logic of ritual. By traveling to the extremes of the pond, the king symbolically extended his agency throughout the known world. Adding shooting, as in the Mai fangzun inscription, strengthened and clarified the implications of this act. By bringing down birds in this symbolically significant space, the king stated in ritual form that his military might extended over the entire world. In the instance of the ritual described on the Mai fangzun, the king’s overt proclamation of force must have intimated to the newly installed Lord of Xing – assigned to a distant domain in Hebei, beyond the immediate control of the royal forces – the perilous consequences of flying too high, as it were.²⁶ The Zhou king installed a safety valve in the threat, however, by assigning the Lord of Xing himself a place in the ceremony. Riding behind the king in a boat festooned with red flags, the Lord of Xing was construed as the king’s bannerman, supporting him in military endeavors while also witnessing the symbolically enacted consequences of defying royal authority.²⁷ The king’s warm and beneficent reception of the Lord of Xing after the ceremony – inviting him into the royal chambers and showering him with lavish gifts – was the carrot accompanying the stick of the ceremony.

To my knowledge, these two inscriptions are the only Western Zhou cases in which the term feng/li definitively denoted a specific ritual activity. The common appearance of the modifier da and use of a boat suggest that, in the early Western Zhou, the term da feng/li referred to a specific royal ceremony involving a boat rather than to rites in general. Given how frequently other ceremonies appear in the inscriptions, and given its relatively elaborate setup requirements, the small number of references to this ceremony probably reflects the rarity of its performance rather than a simple dearth of surviving evidence.

The Bo Tangfu Ding Event: An Occurrence of the “Great Rite”?

Another inscription survives that, though it lacks the term da feng/li, records a markedly similar event. The Bo Tangfu ding 伯唐父鼎 (NA0698), recovered from tomb 183 at Zhangjiapo, Chang’an county, Shaanxi, bears an inscription describing activities of the Zhou king on the bi pond (bichi 辟池) at Pangjing, the site of the Mai fangzun ceremony.²⁸ As this inscription contains several problematic points worthy of note, I present it here in its entirety:

乙卯, 王京, 王辟舟、臨舟龍, 咸。白(伯)唐父告備。王各, (乘)辟舟, 臨白 [伯?] 旂, 用射絼、𠩺虎、貉、白鹿、白狼于辟池, 咸。王蔑曆, 易(賜)矩鬯一卣、貝廿朋, 對揚王休, 乍(作)安公寶彝。

On the yimao day, the king feasted at Pangjing. The king conducted an entreaty rite(?)²⁹ toward the bi [yong pond] boat,³⁰ approaching³¹ the boat-dragon.³² When the entreaty(?) was complete, Bo Tangfu announced that [the preparations were] complete. The king entered [the scene] and rode in the bi[yong pond] boat. [He] approached and conducted hui-entreaty(?) [with?] a white (Bo Tangfu’s?) flag;³³ [the king] thereby shot an ox,³⁴ a striped tiger,³⁵ a panther,³⁶ a white deer, and a white wolf on the bi pond.³⁷ When the entreaty was completed, the king performed the recounting of merits, awarding [Bo Tangfu] a you-urn of dark liquor and twenty strings of cowries. [Bo Tangfu?] praises the king’s beneficence in response, therewith making a precious offering vessel for Duke An.³⁸

The process that the Bo Tangfu ding inscription narrates is remarkably similar to that described in the Mai fangzun inscription. The king conducted a feasting event at Pangjing, carried out what may have been ancestral offerings, and then set out on the biyong pond in a boat and shot animals. The Bo Tangfu ding inscription does not specify that the king traveled to the sides of the pond, as does the Tian Wang gui. However, given that the targets of the shooting were all land animals, it is likely that this happened.³⁹ Ceremonial royal shooting of animals on the biyong pond, with elite guests playing a role in the proceedings, thus happened at least once during the early phase of the middle Western Zhou.⁴⁰

The animals used in the Bo Tangfu ding event are crucial to both dating the vessel and interpreting the rite it records. The Guoyu, and the Shiji after it, contains an account of King Mu’s military adventures in the western reaches of Zhou territory.⁴¹ In it, the king’s advisors oppose his plans to campaign against the population known as the Quanrong/Xianyun.⁴² The king goes through with it anyway and brings “four white wolves and four white deer” back to the capital.⁴³ The Bo Tangfu ding is of likely King Mu date, and its inscription specifically mentions both white wolves and white deer as shooting targets. It is impossible to confirm that these were the same animals that King Mu supposedly brought to the Zhou heartland. Still, there is no mention of wolves anywhere else in the inscriptions, and deer are mentioned only a few times; they were not part of the usual range of reward items.⁴⁴ At the least, it is likely that wolves and/or deer were associated with the Quanrong/Xianyun population and that King Mu drew upon that connection in his ritual activities on the bi pond. In the case of wolves, the orthography of the terms “Quanrong” and “Xianyun” offers some small support to that assertion.⁴⁵ By placing such animals among the creatures to be killed at the edges of the pond, the king in the Bo Tangfu ding inscription – probably King Mu – strengthened the symbolic value of the rite in two ways: by reinforcing the correspondence between the edges of the pond and the edges of Zhou territory, and by shoring up the argument with tangible evidence of recent military “success” on the borders of the Zhou state.

Ceremonial Ploughing (Jitian/Jinong 籍田/籍農)

Ceremonial ploughing marking the beginning of the planting season is a common element of dynastic ritual.⁴⁶ The Inka, for example, held a rite in which the ruler, his consort, and his entourage tilled the first field of the season by ceremonially fighting and conquering the soil.⁴⁷ The famous Scorpion Macehead from predynastic Egypt (ca. 3000 BCE) (Figures 2.1 and 2.2) shows a king – identifiable from the Crown of Upper Egypt, a standard iconographic element – clutching a hoe, potentially intended for a ritual ground-breaking of irrigation facilities.⁴⁸ And in early China as well, both received texts and inscriptions suggest that the Zhou king conducted ploughing ceremonies as part of state ritual. The limited evidence that Western Zhou bronze inscriptions offer about the practice, however, falls much short of its outsize importance in constructs of Zhou social history, both ancient and modern; and the broader context of Western Zhou royal ritual as portrayed in the inscriptions suggests a different interpretation of its ideological significance.

Figure 2.1 The Scorpion Macehead.

Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. © Ashmolean Museum

Figure 2.2 Detail of the Scorpion Macehead.

Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. © Ashmolean Museum

Ceremonial Ploughing in the Western Zhou Inscriptions

The Western Zhou inscriptions record a single occasion when the king organized an agricultural rite. The inscription of the Ling ding 令鼎 (2803), a vessel discovered in Ruicheng County, Shanxi, and dated by MWX to the reign of King Zhao, reads:⁴⁹

王大耤(藉)農于諆田, 餳 (觴)。王射, 有(司)眔師氏、小子(會)射。王歸自諆田, 王𩣓(馭), 溓(祭)⁵⁰仲⁵¹(僕)令眔奮先馬走, 王曰:「令眔奮乃克至, 余其舍女(汝)臣卅家」。王至于溓(祭)宮, 𢼧, 令拜首, 曰:「小子迺學。」令對揚王休。

The king greatly ploughed the land at the fields of Qi and feasted.⁵² The king held archery, and the Supervisors, the Marshals, and the scions shot together. When the king returned from the fields of Qi, the king drove, Zhai Zhong served as escort,⁵³ and Ling and Fen went in front of the horses [i.e., as the king’s vanguard]. The king said, “Ling and Fen, if you acquit yourselves well [lit., “manage to arrive”], I shall transfer to you thirty households of servants.”⁵⁴ The king arrived at the palace of Zhai and was pleased.⁵⁵ Ling bowed and struck his head, saying, “[I,] the scion, am thus instructed.” Ling praises the king’s beneficence in response.

The key phrase here is jinong 籍農, a verb phrase or verb-object combination meaning that the king “[greatly] ploughed the land.” We may safely assume that the Zhou king did not regularly work as an agricultural laborer; the ploughing in question must have been ceremonial, although the syntax suggests that the king took a direct hand in the process. The situation appears as follows: The king, along with a number of other ranking elites, traveled to Qi and performed a ceremonial ploughing of the fields.⁵⁶ Afterward, the king hosted feasting and archery, in which his entourage participated. On the way back from the ceremony site, a group of people associated with the Zhai lineage handled the king’s transportation needs, likely because the return trip passed through Zhai territory.⁵⁷ Figures called Ling and Fen rode out as the king’s vanguard, for which service the king promised ten households of servants (chen shi jia 臣十家).⁵⁸ Once the royal caravan arrived at the Zhai headquarters, the king expressed his satisfaction with their performance.⁵⁹ Ling appears to have been able to respond to this acknowledgment in person, judging from the expression of gratitude and admiration near the end of the inscription.

On at least this one occasion, then, the king conducted a ceremonial ploughing event. The inscriptions offer limited further evidence that this was a regular practice. One late Western Zhou inscription, on the Zai gui 簋 (4255), records its commissioner’s appointment as Supervisor of Land (situ 司土), with the understanding that he was to “take official charge of the ploughing of fields” (guan si ji tian 官 [司]耤[藉]田).⁶⁰ Despite the clear interest of a Supervisor of Land in the management of agriculture, this statement is generally taken to refer to the royal ploughing rite rather than to the ploughing of fields in general.⁶¹ Given the rarity of the term ji 籍 elsewhere in the inscriptions, I am inclined to agree.⁶² The close dates of the Ling ding and Zai gui inscriptions thus suggest a concerted, multilayered effort to control agricultural land through royally sponsored ritual, beginning probably with King Zhao and extending into the late Western Zhou period.

Ritual Ploughing and Zhou Historiography: The “Thousand Acres”

A constellation of received texts from the Warring States and Han periods recalls Zhou royal ploughing as part of a broader argument about the role of ritual in legitimizing authority. The line of discussion centers around a location called the “Thousand Acres” (qianmu 千畝). This site is connected directly with state ritual in the Guoyu, which specifies it as the venue of the royal ploughing rite, as well as the *Xi nian manuscript from the Tsinghua University slips, which notes that it provisioned state offerings.⁶³ The latter text identifies it with another term, the “Lord’s Ploughing” (Di ji 帝籍), which the Lüshi chunqiu notes as the site of the Zhou royal ploughing ritual.⁶⁴ The Shuowen jiezi entry for the character ji 耤 contains the line: 耤:帝耤千畝也 … (Ji, “ploughing,” refers to the Lord’s Ploughing of the Thousand Acres …); this seems to corroborate the identification.⁶⁵

The Thousand Acres was the location of a decisive battle at the end of the Western Zhou period, and one thread of the early Chinese historiographical tradition connected the management of this ritually significant site to the overall fortunes of the Zhou royal house. The Shiji, the Houhanshu, and the Bamboo Annals all assert the failure of King Xuan, the penultimate king of the Western Zhou, to cultivate the Thousand Acres properly, implying a connection to the subsequent military defeat of the Zhou at the same site.⁶⁶ The *Xi nian manuscript’s opening explores this line of reasoning in detail:⁶⁷

昔周武王監觀商王之不龏= (上帝), 禋祀不(寅), 乃乍(作)帝𢼎(籍), 以(登)祀= (上帝)天神, 名之曰【一】千(畝), 以克反商邑,尃(敷)政天下。 =(至于)=王=(厲王, 厲王)大(虐)于周, 卿 (士)、者(諸)正、萬民弗刃(忍)于氒(厥)心,【二】乃歸 (厲)王于(彘), 龍(共)白(伯)和立。十有四年, (厲)王生洹=王=(宣王,宣王)即立(位), 龏(共)白(伯)和歸于宋(宗)。洹 (宣)【三】王是, (始)弃(棄)帝(籍)弗畋(田), 立(卅)(三十)有九年, 戎乃大敗周(師)于千(畝)。【四】

Of old, King Wu of the Zhou observed that the king of Shang did not revere the High Lord and that his offerings were not respectful. Then [King Wu] made the Lord’s Ploughing,⁶⁸ in order to present offerings to the High Lord and the spirits of Heaven/the Sky.⁶⁹ [He] named it “the Thousand Acres,”⁷⁰ using [it] to greatly rebel against the city of Shang and to extend [his] governance over [all] beneath Heaven/the Sky.

Eventually, King Li came along. King Li was greatly tyrannical to Zhou. The high ministers, the many lesser officials, and the myriad people [could] not bear it in their hearts. [They] then sent⁷¹ King Li to Zhi, [and] Gongbo He was established.⁷²

In the fourteenth year, King Xuan, born of King Li, took the throne.⁷³ Gongbo He returned to [his] ancestral temple/house.⁷⁴

King Xuan then first abandoned the Lord’s Ploughing and did not cultivate it. [He] was established (i.e., occupied the throne) for thirty-nine years. The Rong then greatly defeated the Zhou armies at the Thousand Acres.

According to the *Xi nian, the Thousand Acres facility was established to support the ritual needs of the Zhou in the early years of the dynasty, providing a material basis for the sacred legitimation of the Zhou state. Its cultivation continued uninterrupted through the reigns of the first nine kings, only to be disrupted by the chaos surrounding the ousting of the tyrannical King Li, the regency of Gongbo He, and the installing of King Xuan.⁷⁵ Failure to cultivate this land constituted a lapse in the ritual responsibilities of the Zhou kings, placing them in the same position as the Shang rulers they replaced during their rise to power. The military consequences of this lapse then played out in the very territory the neglect of which caused them.

As exemplified by the *Xi nian passage, this line of reasoning thus ties the historically situated story of the battle of the Thousand Acres to a broader conversation on the connection between royal ritual and the well-being of the state. The most detailed received account of a Zhou royal ploughing rite, appearing in the Guoyu, unfolds against the background of this vision of Zhou state ritual. That account has formed the basis for some problematic conclusions concerning the social history of Zhou kingship.

Ritual Ploughing in the Guoyu

The Guoyu account appears in the “Zhou yu – shang” 周语上 chapter, under the pretext of a memorial submitted to King Xuan protesting its cancellation; the common historical event referred to in the aforementioned texts thus serves as a framing device for a fuller account of the ploughing process. In his volume on the history of the Western Zhou period, Yang Kuan devotes a full chapter to this rite and his vision of its role in the exploitation of the populace by the Western Zhou elite.⁷⁶ Yang argues that the phrase jitian 籍田 originally denoted fields held and worked in common at the village level to provide emergency aid and support ritual offerings. As state-level organizations emerged, he suggests, the fruits of these fields were diverted to support elite interests. The term ji 籍 thus became a code word for the organized exploitation of common labor by aristocrats, and the jitian or jili 籍禮 ceremony was the ritual framework through which that practice was justified and maintained.⁷⁷ Based on the Guoyu account, Yang describes the rite in stages: its initial scheduling by royal officials; a preliminary round of drinking, in which hierarchical relations between the participants were set; the formal rite itself, in which the king ploughed a single furrow, the next grade of aristocrats ploughed three, the next nine, and so on until commoners completed the work on the allotted space; a round of feasting after the rite’s completion; and, finally, an extensive examination of the work done and exhortation of the aristocracy to ensure its quality and completeness. This last portion is the key to Yang’s argument, showing, he argues, how severely the Zhou elite appropriated the labor of the populace to support their interests.⁷⁸

Early though it may be compared to the ritual books, the Guoyu chapter probably still postdates King Xuan by several hundred years.⁷⁹ Using it as a source on Western Zhou social history calls for extreme caution, especially since the earliest strata of received texts are silent on the topic of royal ploughing.⁸⁰ I would note two points of departure between the Ling ding account and Yang’s description. First, the Guoyu-based account makes no mention of ceremonial archery, which the Ling ding inscription explicitly observes. Second, there is no trace of a quality-control phase – that is, an inspection of the ploughing and address toward responsible elites – in the Ling ding narrative. This difference is key, as such a process would have involved praise or criticism of elites, likely accompanied by awards, and would therefore spur the production of bronzes. Had the king’s ploughing event included such a phase, it would be of intrinsic interest to an elite audience and therefore likely be mentioned in the inscription. That it does not appear suggests that it was not part of the events associated with the ploughing rite.

Judging from the Ling ding inscription, then, the focus of the Zhou king at the ceremonial ploughing event was not on maintaining the quality of local agricultural activities. Comparison with similar phenomena in other cultures may shed some light on the motivations behind the rite.

The Coercive Implications of Ritual Ploughing

All three examples of royal ploughing with which this discussion opened – from pre-dynastic Egypt, the Inka state, and the Western Zhou – share a symbolic association with war. Thanks to early ethnographic records, this connection is particularly well recorded for the Inka case, wherein songs of triumph were sung and the tilling of the earth was referred to as “disemboweling.”⁸¹ The scene on the Scorpion Macehead includes bows, an element symbolizing Egypt’s military opponents, and a number of dead birds that have been interpreted to represent defeated populations.⁸² The Ling ding inscription records that an archery competition was held in conjunction with the jitian/jinong rite; archery played a key symbolic role in the ideology of Zhou royal power. These chronologically and geographically disparate regimes all found that the king’s performance as ceremonial “prime tiller” benefited from concurrent expressions of military might.

Yang’s approach might suggest that in the Zhou case, the connection of the rite with military activities spelled out the consequences for any locals failing to conform to the elite appropriation of their formerly shared institution. Commoners of the Western Zhou period undoubtedly experienced frustration at the need to work on behalf of others.⁸³ The existence of a former public institution such as Yang asserts is, however, impossible to prove, as little evidence of non-elite ritual practices survives from the Western Zhou and before.

The records of the jitian/jinong rite derive from sources serving elite interests, however, and one can certainly consider how the rite may have helped manage relations between aristocrats. In this context, the king’s performance of ploughing must have served as a reminder of the reach of royal authority, since the host area of Qi was apparently held by a non royal lineage. The ploughing rite in the Ling ding inscription gave the king an opportunity to keep up relations with the local elites controlling Qi. The act of ploughing itself, here as among the Inka, ritually instantiated royal control of the local land and depicted the king as the starting point and source of agricultural activities.⁸⁴ The accompanying archery meet, in which royal representatives such as the Supervisors demonstrated their martial abilities, would have reinforced the coercive implications of this argument.⁸⁵

The king’s subsequent honoring of the representatives of the Zhai lineage provided a carrot to go with the stick, soliciting the loyalty of a local power group. The gift of thirty households of servants was quite substantial by Western Zhou standards and must have materially strengthened the Zhai lineage, helping ensure that royal interests were represented in the area. Connecting this gift with the ploughing rite motivated locals to accept the understanding of the Zhou state that it promoted, in which the king enjoyed ultimate control over the land and was the necessary source of the resources it produced.

The Seizing of Foals (Zhiju 執駒)

The Zhou king also conducted a ceremonial “seizing of foals” (zhiju 執駒). Several vessels discovered over the course of the second half of the twentieth century have furnished relatively rich records on this ceremony. First and most distinctive was the Li juzun (6011), a middle Western Zhou vessel found in Mei county, Shaanxi.⁸⁶ Its full inscription appears below:

隹(唯)王十又二月, 辰才(在)甲申, 王初執駒于, 王乎(呼)師豦召(詔)盠, 王親旨(指)盠駒易(賜)兩。拜𩒨首曰:王弗望(忘)氒(厥)舊宗小子, 皇盠身。盠曰:王倗下, 不(丕)其則邁(萬)年保我邁(萬)宗。盠曰:余其敢對揚天子之休, 余用乍(作)朕文考大中(仲)寶(尊)彝。盠曰:其邁(萬)年世子孫孫永寶之。

It was the king’s twelfth month, on the jiashen day, [when] the king first performed the seizing of foals at An.⁸⁷ The king called on Marshal Ju to summon Li, and the king personally pointed out foals to Li and awarded him two.⁸⁸ [Li] bowed and struck his head, saying, “The king does not forget his scion of the old ancestral line/temple, but honors Li himself.”⁸⁹ Li said, “The king is friendly to his subordinates. May he then for ten thousand years greatly protect our ten thousand ancestral lines/temples!” Li said, “May I dare to respond by praising the beneficence of the Son of Heaven. I therewith make a precious sacrificial vessel for my cultured deceased father Da Zhong.” Li said, “May [my] generations of sons and grandsons’ grandsons eternally treasure it for ten thousand years.”

Unfortunately, no concrete details on the seizing of foals itself appear. Presumably, the process involved corralling the newest colts in the royal herds and breaking them to the harness.⁹⁰ As with the spring ploughing rite, the king’s role was clearly demonstrative; others must have carried out the bulk of the actual work.⁹¹ The ceremony provided an opportunity, however, for the king to distribute resources and prestige through the established network of Zhou aristocratic kinship. Li, recipient of two foals and commissioner of this inscription, phrased his thanks to suggest that the gift fulfilled an expectation of royal patronage connected with Li’s ancestral line/temple (zong 宗).⁹² Li evidently placed special importance on the nature of the king’s gift or the context in which he received it – so much so that he made the unusual choice to commission the vessel in the realistic shape of a horse (Figure 2.3).⁹³ Given this fact, and since the king summoned Li through the intermediary Marshal Ju rather than calling him directly, it seems likely that Li himself was involved in the care or training of horses and that the gift was meant to reward his performance during the foal-seizing rite. This possibility raises further questions about the relationship between the developing ritual apparatus of the Zhou and the royal kinship group.

Figure 2.3 The Li juzun.

Image courtesy of the National Museum of China.

The excavations at Zhangjiapo, Fufeng county, Shaanxi, in the 1980s uncovered a set of three vessels with identical inscriptions recording a second occurrence of the foal-seizing rite:⁹⁴

隹(唯)三年五月既生霸壬寅, 王才(在)周, 執駒于滆, 王乎巂趩召達,王易(賜)達駒, 達拜𩒨(稽)首, 對 揚(揚)王休, 用乍(作)旅盨。

It was the third year, the fifth month, the jishengba moon phase, and the renyin day. The king, at Zhou, conducted the seizing of foals at the Li 滆 Residence. The king called on Sui Yi to summon Da. The king gave Da a foal. Da bows and strikes his head, praising the king’s beneficence in response. [He] therewith makes a xu-vessel for display.

Zhu Fenghan has suggested dating these vessels, known collectively as the Da xu 達盨 (NA0692–4), to the reign of King Xiao (ca. 892–886 BCE) based on calendrical criteria; this accords with general knowledge about vessels of the xu type.⁹⁵ Their inscription offers us a few new tidbits of information on the rite’s circumstances. It records the time of year when the rite was performed – late spring or early summer, judging from its assignment to the fifth month. It informs us that the venue, the “Li Residence” (liju 滆居), fell within the overall location of Zhou; this means in turn that the Li Residence was seen as a facility or a sub-site rather than a location in its own right. But two commonalities between these inscriptions and the Li juzun account are perhaps most significant: first, that the king made contact with the vessel commissioner through an intermediary who “summoned” him; and second, that the commissioner received a foal, presumably one of those caught in the process. Despite the different location, then, there was a degree of continuity between the manifestations of patronage and reward in the Li juzun and Da xu foal-seizing events.

It has been suggested that Da was the name of Jingshu 井叔, the occupant of the tomb from which the Da xu were recovered.⁹⁶ It so happens that the inscription of the Chi zhi 趩觶 (6516) records an appointment ceremony in which a Jingshu serves as the sponsor to a figure called Chi 趩, the same name borne by the sui 巂 in the Da xu foal-seizing event. That event took place in the third year of King Xiao’s reign, according to Zhu Fenghan; the Chi zhi inscription does not contain a year record, but it has been dated to the reign of King Yih, though not by all.⁹⁷ If the Chi zhi is in fact a King Yih-era vessel, it is entirely possible that the Chi mentioned in the Da xu inscription was the commissioner of the Chi zhi, and that the Jingshu who served as sponsor at Chi’s appointment was the Da whom Chi later summoned to receive a foal from the king.⁹⁸ If, as I suspect, that is the case, then the two vessels provide us with a rare glimpse into relations of reciprocity between non royal elites at work beneath the surface of royal patronage.

One more pair of vessels – the Zuoce Wu he 作冊吳盉 (NB1215), a vessel in a private collection in Hong Kong, and the Zuoce Wu pan 作冊吳盤 (NB1336), held by a private collector – directly mentions the foal-seizing process.⁹⁹ The dating of the former vessel in particular has engendered both interest and debate. According to previous models, its high year-count would seem only to fit with the reigns of King Mu or King Xuan, though King Li has been proposed as well.¹⁰⁰ Recently, however, both Han Wei and Zhu Fenghan have proposed, based on a broad range of inscriptional, paleographical, and art-historical criteria, that the Zuoce Wu he is a late King Gong bronze and that King Gong’s reign did, in fact, extend for long enough to accommodate a thirtieth-year date.¹⁰¹ Briefly put, I find the evidence that Han and Zhu marshal to be convincing, and so I follow the King Gong dating.

Beyond the significance of its possible dates, the Zuoce Wu he inscription again adds some details:¹⁰²

隹(唯)卅年四月既生霸壬午, 王在(在), 𡙕(執)駒于南林。初執駒, 王乎巂召作冊吳立唐門。王曰, “易(賜)駒。” 吳拜稽首, 受駒以出。吳敢對揚天子不(丕)顯休, 用作叔姬般(盤)盉。

It was the thirtieth year, the fourth month, the jishengba moon phase, the renwu day. The king was at X.¹⁰³ The seizing of foals was held at the Southern Forest of X. When the seizing of foals was first¹⁰⁴ performed, the king called on Gui He(?)¹⁰⁵ to summon Document Maker Wu to stand at the Tang Gate.¹⁰⁶ The king said, “[I] award [Wu] a foal.” Wu bowed and struck his head, received the foal, and left with it. Wu dares in response to praise the great and brilliant beneficence of the Son of Heaven, therewith making a basin-ewer¹⁰⁷ for Shu Ji.

The seizing of foals at which Document Maker Wu was rewarded occurred not at the site of either of the previous examples, but at a third location called . It would seem that the ceremony moved from place to place, perhaps to allow the king to distribute the privilege (or burden) of hosting between different groups. The party called upon to summon the reward recipient bore the title gui 巂; this was so in the Da xu case but not the Li juzun case, in which Marshal Ju did the honors. Perhaps most interestingly, the inscription specifies that Wu received the foal right away rather than as a later disbursement, taking it with him as he left; this may suggest that this instance of the ceremony took place in a location suitable for livestock.¹⁰⁸ Finally, the ceremony was conducted in the thirtieth reign-year, suggesting that the king was of relatively advanced age at the time. Zhu has suggested that the king’s seizing of foals was probably symbolic.¹⁰⁹ The late reign-year of the Zuoce Wu he inscription lends some oblique support to that assumption.

Since, as these inscriptions show, the seizing of foals was performed with some regularity, one might expect that the royal house would establish infrastructure to support it. One source hints at this possibility. The Ninth-year Qiu Wei ding 九年衛鼎 (2831) records the king’s receipt of an emissary sent by Mei’ao, a figure known also from the Guaibo gui 乖伯簋 (4331), at a location called the “Zhou Foal Palace” (Zhou Ju gong 周駒宮).¹¹⁰ Li Feng has suggested that this location might have been dedicated to the ritual seizing of foals mentioned in the Li juzun inscription.¹¹¹ Without additional evidence, this cannot be stated with certainty; in fact, the inscriptions suggest that different instances of the foal-seizing were held in different locales. However, the general use-pattern of the place-name suffix gong 宫 suggest that the Foal Palace probably did host events associated with horsemanship or charioteering.¹¹²

The Foal-Seizing Rite and the Management of Horseflesh in Early China

Like the Shang before them, the Zhou practiced chariot warfare – possibly on a much greater scale than the Shang, in fact.¹¹³ Inscriptions like that of the Duoyou ding (2835) confirm that the Zhou fielded large numbers of chariots on campaign, as did some of their opponents.¹¹⁴ Possession and use of horses was a key element of elite military endeavor and, by extension, of status among the Zhou. The king distributing horses to client elites was not simply a material expression of patronage; it also marked individuals as participants in the upper echelons of Zhou elite culture.

By celebrating the king’s role in the husbandry of horses, the seizing of foals emphasized provision, rather than demonstration, of military strength. As a counterpoint to the spring ploughing rite, it portrayed the king as the ultimate source of all resources, both agricultural and military. Naturally, to justify that portrayal, the king had to distribute the resources in question; and indeed, the inscriptions mentioning the seizing of foals all commemorate royal gifts of foals. The regular performance of the ceremony would have promoted its traditionalization and lent the vision of the king as resource arbiter a sense of inevitability and “inherited value,” to borrow Baudrillard’s term.¹¹⁵

How the seizing of foals related to the overall management of horseflesh under the Zhou is still unclear. Given how often chariot-and-horse teams appear as royal gifts in the inscriptions, the Zhou kings must have required a ready supply of trained horses; certainly, the existence of the Foal Palace shows that the royal house created some infrastructure to supply them.¹¹⁶ It is possible that all of the places where foal-seizing ceremonies took place were home to royal herds – An in Mei county, Li 滆, and – and that their management provided occasions for the Zhou king to acknowledge subordinate elites and confer gifts. Since each foal-seizing took place at a different location, however, it is equally possible that local lineages maintained the herds and that the king simply claimed some of them for his own purposes, whether personal use or redistribution to favored recipients.

The king’s performance of the foal-seizing rite would then appear in much the same light as the ploughing rite – a ritual effort to figure the Zhou king as an “obligatory passage point” in local production activities, remind local elites of the reach of royal authority, and renew and maintain relations with valued allies on the king’s own terms. Although the foal-seizing rite positioned the king as the ultimate source of equine resources, however, the involvement of an intermediary admitted indirect trajectories of patronage. Thus, alongside the king’s present of foals to Li, which appeared (at least to Li himself) as an expression of favor and fulfillment of obligations to royal kin, we have the Da xu case, in which a lineage potentate was called to his royal reward by the same functionary whose appointment he previously sponsored.

The Seizing of Foals in the Ritual Texts

The term zhiju 執駒 appears a few times in later received texts, mainly in the ritual compendia.¹¹⁷ The “Xia guan – Sima” 夏官司馬 (“Summer Offices – Master of Horse”) chapter of the Zhouli discusses it under the sections on xiaoren 校人 and souren 廋人:

春祭馬祖。執駒。夏祭先牧。頒馬攻特。秋祭馬社。臧僕。冬祭馬步。獻馬講馭夫。

In the spring, [he] made offerings to the Horse Ancestor and seized the foals (zhiju). In the summer, [he] made offerings to the Former Herdsman and distributed horses for training in specialties. In the fall, [he] made offerings at the Altar of Earth of the Horses(?)¹¹⁸ and took in servants.¹¹⁹ In the winter, [he] made offerings to the Horse Gait,¹²⁰ presented horses, and instructed the drivers.¹²¹

廋人掌十有二閑之政。教以阜馬佚特。教駣。攻駒。及祭馬祖。祭閑之先牧。及執駒散馬耳。圉馬。

The souren held responsibility for the governance of the twelve enclosures. [He] instructed [those concerned] in making the horses abundant and breaking them to specialties;¹²² [he] instructed the three-year-olds and trained the foals;¹²³ [he] also made offerings to the Horse Ancestors and the Former Herdsmen of the enclosures; [he] seized the foals, let loose the horses, etc.; and stabled the horses.¹²⁴

This study cannot rely on the Sanli to corroborate the existence or details of a particular rite, since one of its main goals is to establish a baseline understanding of Western Zhou ritual to which later ritual texts can be compared. As linguistic sources, however, the later texts do help support the basic assumption that the phrase zhiju 執駒, “seizing foals,” referred to breaking off young foals from the herds for training. The first passage, in particular, suggests an understanding of zhiju as the first point in the life cycle of the horse as work animal. The “Xia xiao zheng” chapter of the Da Dai Liji offers further detail:

執陟攻駒。執也者, 始執駒也。執駒也者, 離之去母也。陟, 升也, 執而升之君也。攻駒也者, 教之服車數舍之也。

“To seize, advance, and train the foal”: “To seize” is to first seize the foal. To seize the foal is to separate it from its mother. “To advance [it]” is to present it upward; it is seized and presented to the ruler. “To train the foal” is to teach it to bear a cart for several she.¹²⁵

Its gloss attests that “foal-seizing” involved removing the foals from their mothers’ care and entering them into training, as well as that by the later Han, at least, the term referred to carrying out this process on a ruler’s behalf.¹²⁶

The use of the term zhiju in the inscriptions, then, seems to conform well with its meaning in the later ritual texts as far as the basic details go. This is hardly surprising, as the exigencies of large-scale animal husbandry probably changed little over the six hundred years or so between Li’s era and the Han dynasty. It is important, however, not to read too much into the similarity. The Zhouli passages pose a particular danger of this, with their detailed description of the ritual calendar of horse husbandry and their frequent references to supernatural forces associated with horses. None of these supernatural figures (the Horse Ancestors [Mazu 馬祖], the Former Herdsman [Xian Mu 先牧], the Earth Altar of Horses [Ma She 馬社], and the Horse Gait [Ma Bu 馬步]) appear in the bronze inscriptions, nor do they feature in any pre-Qin or Han-era received text other than the Zhouli.¹²⁷ Neither am I aware of any direct evidence that the Zhou venerated horses in a capacity beyond their value as prestige goods, military tools, and markers of elite status. The figures in the Zhouli passage portray a peculiar understanding of the ritual practices associated with horse husbandry that cannot be verified for the Western Zhou period – nor, for that matter, for any period up through the Han dynasty.¹²⁸

Conclusion: Figuring and Refiguring the Zhou King

Latour identifies four points of entry for inquiry into the formation of groups: (1) the designation of spokespeople to carry out the ongoing work of group definition; (2) the specification of “out-groups” to contrast with the “in-group”; (3) the demarcation of boundaries distinguishing the group from other threatening identities; and (4) the involvement of social scientists in establishing and perpetuating a definition for the group.¹²⁹ This last type of “trace” he associates with modern societies; we may leave it behind for now, although it may shed some light on Spring and Autumn–era approaches to the ritual component of Zhou identity.¹³⁰ The former three, however, provide a valuable framework for interpreting the ritual practices considered in this chapter. After the conquest of Shang, the new royal house leveraged its ritual prowess to promote a coherent group identity among its adherents. To maintain their position of ascendancy, however, the Zhou kings sought also to distinguish themselves as spokespersons, to borrow Latour’s term, for a shared group membership.¹³¹ The rites considered here may be read as steps toward this goal; the particulars thereof – especially those of the “Great Rite” – show traces of an effort to define the borders of Zhou identity and the role of the king within it.

Historical traditions emphasize that the Zhou kings rose to power at the head of a military coalition responding to oppression at the hands of a central, theocratic authority.¹³² The Western Zhou repertoire of royal ritual framings conforms well to this model. Rather than propitiating natural spirits, as often seen in the Shang oracle bone inscriptions, the ritual framings of the Zhou kings against the surrounding world bore strong traces of military organization – even the single recorded instance of the spring ploughing rite happened in conjunction with an archery meet – and argued for the supremacy of human institutions over non-human forces, including land, animals, and even non-Zhou populations. Generally speaking, rites figuring the Western Zhou kings evoked specific geopolitical interests inherent to the establishment of the infrastructure of Zhou power – the founding of Chengzhou; the control of the borders of Zhou territory; the counterbalancing of delegated authority over outlying areas; the maintenance of control over the strategic chokepoint of Qi.

Outside the realm of ancestral offerings, the bronze inscriptions record one ritual technique that framed the image of the early Western Zhou kings against the surrounding world – the ceremonial boating called the “Great Rite.” Like much of Zhou ritual, the kings inherited certain aspects of this practice from their Shang predecessors, particularly the habit of shooting on a body of water.¹³³ The Zhou “Great Rite,” however, introduced innovations that emphasized the symbolic aspects of royal boating and shooting. By conducting it on the regularly shaped, cosmologically significant biyong or bichi pond, the Zhou kings made a statement about the extent of royal authority and its role in the new, post-Shang order.

The effectiveness of the “Great Rite” lay in its formulation of the Zhou state as a geographically delimited territory within which the king, assisted by elite followers, exercised the power of life and death. This idea took hold in both the governmental and ritual strategies of the Zhou kings from the earliest stages of the period. Li Feng has noted that, while the Zhou kings conceived of their state in territorial terms, their efforts to control it consisted of the delegation of administrative functions to regional rulers, together with the assumption that the king could carry out defensive military actions anywhere within the overall territory of the state.¹³⁴ The biyong pond rites neatly depict this state of affairs, portraying the king’s ability to kill effectively in any direction within the known world. Limiting the activity of accompanying participants ritually counterbalanced the delegation of authority that was inherent to the composition of the early Zhou state. The king’s ritual shooting of animals would have further reminded participants of the limitless reach of royal military power.

Cases of the da feng/li rite reach across the early Western Zhou and into the early stages of the middle Western Zhou, with the last one dating probably to the reign of King Mu (ca. 956–918). Further records, however, portray the introduction of new ritual models of the place of the king in the world around the beginning of the middle Western Zhou. The first case of the ritual ploughing of the earth by the king, and the only case of which a definite record survives, happened probably during the reign of King Zhao (ca. 977–957). Either King Gong’s (ca. 917–900) or King Mu’s reign saw the first recorded case of the seizing of foals, a ceremonial tradition repeated under later kings. Between them, these two rites moved toward depicting the Zhou king as the source and arbiter of the key resources of the Zhou state, both agricultural and military; they refigured the king as foundation as well as center. Over the course of the middle Western Zhou period, changes in the political and military situation shifted royal priorities, motivating the Zhou kings to intensify their control over various aspects of state operation.¹³⁵ The assignment of responsibility for “spring ploughing” in the Shi Zai gui inscription, and the existence of a “Foal Palace” as seen in the Ninth-year Qiu Wei ding inscription, show that this broadening repertoire of framing rituals accompanied changes in the institutional structure of resource control.

Though these new rites portrayed the king as a fundamental, indispensable player in vital production activities, evidence from the Da xu and Chi zhi inscriptions shows that they could also afford room for patronage relations originating outside, if still flowing through, the royal house.¹³⁶ In all likelihood, similar relations played out behind the curtain of official appointment rituals, royally sponsored archery meets, and other ritual activities arbitrated by the king but requiring intermediaries for their completion. By itself, this does not necessarily imply the subversion of royal authority. A “ruler” as a political individual is always a figuration of agencies, and to maintain its integrity, that figuration can and must constantly be reformulated to reconcile concurrent and competing visions of the group.¹³⁷ If the negotiated identity of the king can incorporate multiple interests, however, then some among those interests may have the opportunity to leverage the definition of royal authority for their own purposes.¹³⁸ The ritual refiguring of the king thus created powerful new motivations for allegiance, while, by emphasizing the qualitative distinction between the king and other Zhou elites, it also fostered the possibility of a Zhou elite identity separate from the ruling house.