Duke of Zhou

When King Wu died within a few years of the conquest of Shang, his heir was a child and the new state was held together by nothing but the victory. The Duke of Zhou, Wu's brother, took the regency, faced a rebellion led by his own brothers in alliance with the surviving Shang royal house, campaigned in the east until it was broken, and then, on the tradition's account, handed authority back to King Cheng when he came of age instead of keeping it.

The religious consequence is the argument he is credited with making. The speeches preserved in the Book of Documents defend the conquest by saying that Heaven grants the right to rule on the basis of conduct and withdraws it for misrule, that Shang had held that mandate and forfeited it, and that Zhou now holds it on exactly the same terms. This is a remarkable thing for a victor to say, because it makes his own dynasty conditional and supplies in advance the argument by which it can be replaced. It became the standard justification for every later change of dynasty in China, and also the standard ground of criticism available to a minister, since a mandate that can be lost implies conduct that loses it.

One episode shows how closely the political and the ritual were bound together. The Metal Bound Coffer chapter of the Book of Documents records him praying to the royal ancestors during King Wu's illness and offering his own life in his brother's place, then sealing the prayer away in a box, where it lay until it was found years later and read as clearing him of ever having wanted the throne for himself.

Nearly everything the tradition credits to the Duke of Zhou was written down long after him, and the atlas has to say so. The Rites of Zhou, which lays out an idealised bureaucracy of six ministries and is presented as his design, is demonstrably a much later compilation, and its influence ran the other way: reformers from Wang Mang onward used it as a blueprint precisely because it carried his name. The line statements of the Book of Changes are assigned to him by a tradition that also gives the trigrams to Fuxi and the hexagram judgements to his father King Wen, an arrangement which is a theory of how the text grew rather than a record of who wrote it.

None of that makes the attribution empty. Confucius took him as the model of a minister who serves rather than seizes, and says in the Analects that he must have grown old, because he no longer dreams of the Duke of Zhou. The remark tells you what the figure meant several centuries after the fact. So what the atlas records is a real regent of the eleventh century BCE and a much larger constructed figure built on top of him, and it was the constructed one that shaped how ritual came to be thought about. Separating the two is ordinary work in early Chinese history and it is not finished.