Prefatory Note: This article was produced in collaboration with ChatGPT.

771 BCE, China.

King You of Zhou was defeated and killed near the capital, Haojing. The former Zhou capital and its ancestral temple system suffered severe damage. Shortly thereafter, King Ping of Zhou moved the court east to Luoyi (roughly the area of present-day Luoyang). By convention, 770 BCE is taken as the starting year of the Eastern Zhou.

In the final years of King You’s reign, the Zhou royal house was already in a state of pronounced structural decline. The authority of Haojing rested on a composite security structure formed by four elements: royal-domain lands under direct control (the wangji), clan-based military forces, allied armies from the feudal lords, and the ancestral temple system.

The wangji was the core territory directly controlled by the Zhou king, centered on the capital. Its lands supplied the royal house, the ancestral temples, the army, and ritual activities without mediation by the feudal states. The population of the wangji could be directly conscripted, providing the royal house with its own military force rather than complete reliance on the feudal lords. Once the wangji was encroached upon, fragmented, or weakened in control, royal power immediately faced fiscal exhaustion and military hollowing-out.

Clan-based military forces, meanwhile, were rooted in Western Zhou kinship politics. The royal house was not an “isolated monarch,” but the center of a vast Ji-surname kinship network.

The Zhou people shared the surname “Ji” as a marker of both political and blood affiliation. To be recognized as a Ji clansman meant occupying a clearly defined position within the kinship hierarchy, directly tied to access to land, rank, military obligations, and political voice. The royal house distributed land primarily to same-surname kin and secondarily to a small number of meritorious outsiders; same-surname members were prioritized and formed the backbone. These enfeoffed lords were not independent sovereigns but branch nodes of the Ji kinship network. Within their own states they were supreme rulers, yet in kinship terms they remained juniors, collateral branches, or clan members of the Zhou king, expected to return to the clan center in major political and military affairs. Each clan member held lands and armed retainers and owed blood-and-ritual obligations to the king: to provide troops in war, to rush back to defend the capital in crisis, and to take sides when succession was contested.

As for allied armies from the feudal lords, the point is that the lords were not purely autonomous local rulers. They were embedded in a cycle of “honoring the king—court attendance—campaigns—rewards.” In principle, the king possessed the authority to mobilize feudal armies, especially in cases of foreign invasion or threats to the Zhou heartland. This mechanism, however, depended heavily on credibility: whether the lords believed the royal command to be genuine, urgent, and worth the cost of compliance.

Beyond this stood the ancestral temple system. The legitimacy of royal succession had to be confirmed in the temples; enfeoffments, investitures, and oaths were conducted within their ritual order; and whether the Mandate of Heaven still resided with the Zhou was continually “renewed” through temple sacrifices. Once the temples were damaged, legitimacy could no longer be reliably reproduced—even if armies and lands still existed. King You’s death shattered all four of these systems at once.

The events took place around Haojing in the Zhou heartland. The reigning king was King You. The attacking forces are collectively called the Quanrong in the historical records—tribal groups long active on the northwestern fringes, alternately hostile to and engaged with the Zhou. According to traditional accounts such as the Records of the Grand Historian, a key political and military counterpart to the Quanrong was Marquis Shen, ruler of the state of Shen. Marquis Shen was an important royal in-law: his daughter had been King You’s principal wife, and her son was the legitimate heir under Zhou ritual law. The woman later elevated to queen was Bao Si—by King You’s decision.

Within the kinship order, the principal wife (the legitimate queen) held a clan and political position, representing an institutional alliance between the royal house and an affinal power bloc. To depose the queen and the crown prince was to negate two orders at once: the patrilineal succession order and the structure of affinal alliances.

King You’s decision to depose the queen was not because he failed to grasp the consequences, but because he no longer treated the kinship order as an inviolable constraint. By his time, the Zhou house still retained the title of “Son of Heaven,” but its effective control was declining. Control over the wangji had been eroded over time: some lands were effectively held by clans and nobles, others encroached upon by peripheral powers, reducing the royal house’s direct command over resources. Militarily, the wangji population and mobilization efficiency fell; fissures opened within the clans over enfeoffment, succession, and political judgment; and feudal military participation shifted from an “obligatory reflex” to a cost calculation.

King You still occupied the “highest position,” but that position lacked sufficient material backing, coercive capacity, and institutional credibility. He appears to have been standing on a sinking platform—perhaps knowingly—making ever more dramatic personal moves in an attempt to prove that “I can still decide everything.” At that moment, he may have been less a ruler of a state than a gilded canary in a cage—this is my conjecture. In response, Marquis Shen allied with the Quanrong, opening on the western flank of the royal domain a security valve that had previously been held shut by internal politics.

King You’s death near Haojing proved that the Zhou heartland was no longer defensible as a capital. The Son of Heaven, as both supreme ritual officiant and arbiter, was killed by external force on his own soil. Under such conditions, the royal house’s first priority was no longer revenge or the restoration of authority, but preventing a rupture in the royal line. A rupture would have stripped all feudal titles, successions, and legitimacies of their anchor, plunging the system into immediate collapse. With the backing and escort of the feudal lords—especially figures like Marquis Shen—King You’s son was installed as the new king, King Ping of Zhou. This process was highly symbolic: royal succession no longer occurred autonomously within the royal house but depended on feudal military and political support. Institutionally, this step declared that the king was no longer a coercive superior over the lords, but a center jointly sustained by them.

The new king abandoned the exposed and indefensible Zhou heartland and moved the capital to Luoyi. This was not a simple tactical retreat, but a forced structural downgrade. Luoyi lay amid denser feudal powers and better transport routes; its security derived from being “surrounded,” not from inherent defensibility. In other words, the Zhou house shifted from “defending the center through its own depth and force” to “existing within a feudal network and surviving by balance.” As a result, the wangji shrank drastically; royal finances and manpower declined further; and the ancestral temple system of the old capital was left in the west or could not be fully rebuilt. The physical center of ritual order fractured. Kings could be replaced, protected, and relocated—but no longer unilaterally dictate feudal behavior.

770 BCE marks King Ping’s eastward move to Luoyi and the beginning of the Eastern Zhou; 722 BCE, the first year of Duke Yin of Lu and the opening year of the Spring and Autumn Annals, marks the start of the Spring and Autumn period. In between, although the royal line continued and feudal titles, boundaries, and successions still “made sense,” practice told a harsher story: kings could be killed, capitals breached, and the royal house could survive only by relying on feudal escorts. Before Eastern Zhou, disputes among lords were in principle adjudicated by the king; by the early Spring and Autumn, this function shifted to inter-feudal alliances. Alliances were not mere diplomacy but a new mechanism for generating order: whoever could convene, preside over, and enforce an alliance temporarily became the center of order.

The enfeoffment order formed under Western Zhou had to be recalculated after King You’s death. Which lords were trustworthy, which borders required self-defense, which alliances needed rebuilding—there were no ready answers. Feudal behavior in this phase was distinctly tentative: lords neither openly denied the Zhou king nor responded unconditionally. Warfare and conflict existed but on a limited scale, aimed more at reestablishing relative positions than at annihilating opponents. I would call this a textbook of strategic gaming.

During this transition, adjudicative authority hung in suspension. The question was not “who decides,” but “what do we do if no one decides.” Early responses were provisional: personal ties, short-term coalitions, and moral slogans. These were unstable, but they paved the way for the later alliance system. The language of honoring the king and adherence to ritual were not hypocrisy but genuine attempts. Many lords did not wish to plunge immediately into naked power politics, which would have raised insecurity for all. For this reason, the Spring and Autumn order—power wrapped in ritual language—required time to be accepted.

By around 722 BCE, several things became clear at once: the Zhou king was no longer expected to solve problems; the lords tacitly accepted alliances, hegemonic leadership, and coordination as the means of order; and historical writing began to center on feudal actions rather than royal judgments. At that point, the world ceased trying to return to Western Zhou and learned to operate without a true common sovereign.

Confucius was born into precisely this age of disorder.