Bureaucracy and the State: What Do the Contemporaneous Inscriptions Say about the Western Zhou?

Li Feng , Associate Professor of Early Chinese History,  EALAC, Columbia University

During the past fifty years, thousands of bronze vessels have been excavated in China, including a central group the inscriptions of which actually copied official administrative documents used in the Zhou royal court (1045-771 BC). While archaeological research has sufficiently clarified the cultural meaning of the bronzes, a large question remains: What do they tell us about the political system of the Western Zhou state? The talk highlights the author’s decade-long research into these contemporaneous inscriptions to understand the nature of the Western Zhou state and to capture the organizational as well as operational characteristics of its government. While the state can be defined as “settlement-based”, the government, by the mid-Western Zhou, had evidently evolved into a systematized bureaucracy.