Feb 4
Western Zhou Dynasty and the Right to Rule
(WARNING: Spoilers for Arcane)
Years after being betrayed by his old friend Vander, who renounces their revolutionary means to oppose the oppression of Piltover onto their home of Zaun and becomes a collaborationist, the future crime lord and villain of the series Silco reminisces on the moment in episode 3 of Arcane.
Ever wondered what it’s like to drown? Story of opposites. There’s peace in water. Like it’s holding you, whispering in low tones to let it in. And every problem in the world will fade away.
But then, there’s this thing… in your head, and it’s raging. Lighting every nerve with madness. To fight. To survive.
And all the while this question lingers before you: ‘Have you had enough?’
It’s funny. You could pass a lifetime without ever facing a choice like that. But it changes you forever. For that, I thank you…Old friend.
This scene is an example of the brilliant writing of Arcane. Drawing heavy inspiration from the Zhou dynasty (周朝), Silco views Vander as having lost the Mandate of Heaven (天命) which bestowed the latter the rightful ruler of him and Zaun as a whole. Silco’s drowning in water alludes to the history of floods along the Yellow River which served as the primary natural disaster catalyzing domestic revolts throughout Chinese imperial history. Likewise, the imagery of the urge to fight and survive to escape the water reflects a famous saying of Jiang Ziya (姜子牙), the legendary noble who helped Kings Wu and Wen of Zhou (周武王 and 周文王) overthrow the Shang Dynasty after claiming the Mandate of Heaven for themselves, who told fish that if they wanted to live they could gulp a bait-less hook themselves. The framing of the rhetorical question “have you had enough” emphasizes Silco’s ambition to both literally escape the water by taking the hook and figuratively take over Zaun from Piltover’s oppression. However, the apotheosis of Silco’s monologue’s genius is his opening line, suggestive of his peace and tranquility within the water derived from patience. Jiang Ziya famously fished without a hook for months in order to catch the attention of King Wen (then Count Ji Chang), saying that “those who want to get caught will get caught,” which was always actually a metaphor for the King and not the fish itself. Indeed, this allusion and notion of patient strategy becomes apparent in the later arcs of Arcane in which Silco’s strategy to liberate Zaun by waiting for Piltover to concede to the terrorist attacks of Jinx and the shimmer trade comes into action. While the original quote by Jiang Ziya frames the dichotomy of the restless fish and Count to his own unwavering patience, the quote from Arcane frames the dichotomy of Silco’s impatience and frustration in the past to his now calm and collective ambition in the present.
I guarantee you none of this is a coincidence. So I will discuss a bit about Zhou dynasty geopolitics to inspire your own future cinematic masterpieces.
So just like the Xia and Shang dynasties, we don’t really know too many details about how the Zhou dynasty really started. The general consensus is that the takeover began with Count Ji Chang (侯姬昌), who controlled the state of Zhou, which was part of the Shang, along the Wei River (a tributary of the Yellow River) valley in western Shaanxi. After allying himself with former noble Jiang Ziya, who happened to be a military genius, Count Ji Chang planned to overthrow the final King of Shang, King Zhou. After dying partway through the takeover by allying with various other nobles, the count’s son King Wu completed the plan with Jiang Ziya and defeated the Shang at the Battle of Muye sometime around 1046 BCE. They then set up their capital at Fenghao on the Wei River near Xi’an.
Jiang Ziya was a pretty interesting guy who had a lot of legends written about him long after he died, such as that story about how he hooked like my gold iv bronze thresh supports trying to catch something to get the Count of Zhou’s attention. He’s a bit of a legendary figure now with his own animated movie (Jiang Ziya) and alleged authorship of a book on military tactics that was definitely not written by him (Six Secret Teachings 六韬).
I don’t think the Battle of Muye actually involved a fox demon and a giant volcano monster, but it’s probably about as accurate as all the traditional stories about Jiang Ziya anyways.
Now if you listen to all of the legends, it sounds like a nice story, and it’s always pretty fun to overanalyze why people think they’re right. Silco justifies his brutal drug trade as a means to grant autonomy to the people of Zaun since Piltover is corrupt and doesn’t treat them well. Oldest play in the book. King Zhou of Shang was a cruel tyrant and he wasted time drinking and gambling instead of being a good ruler 3500 years ago. No one really knows whether or not he actually did do anything wrong except lose, but at this point, the rulers of Zhou needed to convince their subjects that them taking over was a good idea.
While if you recall the Shang worshipped the supreme god Shangdi, the Zhou believed in Tian (天), or heaven. They’re pretty much the same thing with a different name, but there is a little bit of nuance in the rebranding. The Shang king appealed to Shangdi in order to ensure that everything went smoothly and a flood wouldn’t kill everyone in his kingdom. The Zhou invented the idea that they were the proper rulers because Tian said they were. As long as there were no disasters that meant that the gods were cool with their rule, since clearly they weren’t doing anything to punish them, and that had heaven’s will (The Mandate of Heaven) to rule. Obviously this mantra was all talk: if you build your civilization on a fertile floodplain, it will flood a lot whenever it wants to.
Floods along the Yellow River have been weaponized politically and militarily for a while. Here are intentionally caused floods in 1938 greatly inconveniencing Japanese invaders. Source: https://environmentalchina.history.lmu.build/group-page-theme-2-water-control/individual-fabio-cabezas/
The Zhou invention of this idea is also why a lot of people doubt the existence of the Xia dynasty, since setting the precedent of the Shang overthrowing a previous dynasty would be great propaganda for legitimizing their own Mandate of Heaven and direct line of succession. The Zhou also were the first to explicitly write about the Xia, although keep in mind this could very well be because of the state of archaeology isn’t complete and that the Zhou just simply wrote a lot more than the Shang did(more on this later). Pretty much every future prospective ruler of China (until we get to the modern, post imperial era) tried to use the Mandate of Heaven as justification for revolution. It wasn’t just my opinion that you sucked, the gods themselves are telling you so by sending floods, plagues and domestic revolts!
In practice the actual system of ensuring rule was kinda boring. After taking over the Shang, King Wu died just 3 years later, leading his younger brother, the Duke of Zhou, being in charge of the government as a regent. Since the Zhou had gained power in the first place by allying with other nobles, and had way too much land to centrally to handle by itself, the Zhou granted large swaths of land to their vassals in exchange for loyalty. Since farmland was perhaps the most valuable resource at the time, this kept the vassals happy and still very powerful. If you are well versed in theory, you might also remember that giving up your means of production is a terrible idea. While some people equate this system as feudalism, there wasn’t much of a code of chivalry that underpinned the loyalty between the Zhou king and the land owning nobles.
The Zhou needed the landlords’ blessing, not just a lack of natural disasters, in order to stay in power outside the capital. They also needed the landlords’ resources in terms of the peasants that farmed the land and soldiers to fight wars (although unlike the Shang, the Zhou expanded by forming more alliances with landlords rather than outright conquest). The real kicker was that after being given the land by the Zhou ruler, they could do whatever they wanted with it, which normally meant passing it down the family or selling parts of it off. At least Silco didn’t hand over all the shimmer factories to the chem barons when he took over.
In 771 BCE, the lord of the vassal state of Shen (申国) allied with the Quanrong, a nomadic group from the west, to sack the Zhou capital and killed its king, King You (周幽王). Many landlords had effectively set up their own kingdoms with an army that didn’t need to depend on the central one by that time and so there really wasn’t any point in helping him out. With this the Zhou dynasty was officially useless.
But it didn’t technically end. After the Hao part of Fenghao was sacked, the Zhou royal family moved the capital to Chengzhou, which eventually became the modern day city of Luoyang. From there they were about as hands on in ruling China as I am in participating in my asynchronous classes. Since Luoyang to the east of Fenghao downriver in Henan, people tend to split the Zhou dynasty into the Western and Eastern portions, with the former being what the subject of the boring stuff we’ve discussed so far and the latter being what we’ve yet to discuss.
The Eastern Zhou period is where Chinese history for the first time gets really really messy, but also where it gets good. I’ll go in depth about all the important stuff about chapter 2 of the Zhou dynasty next week, but first I’ll do some housekeeping since the actual play by play is exceptionally boring.
As a general overview, the Eastern Zhou period was split into the Spring and Autumn period from 771 to sometime around 476 BCE and the Warring States sometime around 475 to 221 BCE. During the Spring and Autumn period, the landlords began consolidating power over other landlords and waging wars until you essentially had what were about a dozen or so independent kingdoms that all existed next to each other, the two most important of which are Qin and Jin. While there was a lot of drama that happened in between with tons of political chess games and literal war games, in the grand scheme of things we only care about the former because they were winners and the latter because they were losers. The state of Jin was located just to the north of the Zhou capital in modern day Shanxi and pulled a Western Zhou. Without control over their vassals, the duke of Jin lost central power over the nobles, who split it into 6 pieces around 600 BCE before it was eventually split between three neighboring states around 476 BCE.
For a while now, every single state thought they had the right to rule over all of China, and they naturally came up with all sorts of ideas on why they were correct and deserved the Mandate of Heaven. As a result, it was after this point during the Warring States that the remaining 7 kingdoms in contention for dominion began printing out philosophical works. Some notable schools of thought include Mohism, Confucianism, Legalism and Daoism, the latter three of which produced loads of texts and are still very important today, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Over 200 years of war, the Qin, originally in Shaanxi not too far from the homeland of the Zhou, was ultimately the state that managed to make the correct political moves for their army to unify all of the kingdoms of China, establishing the first true Chinese empire in 221 BCE. There is absolutely no reason to care about all the countless battles over the last 500 years of the “Zhou dynasty” even if they might look good on screen and provide you with the 5 minutes of mindless entertainment before you forget about them and go about your day. Nonetheless, I would argue that the Zhou were the most important rulers of China, even more so than the Han.
The Zhou dynasty was interesting for the boring reasons. With the constant pursuit of legitimacy came the need to really think hard about what it meant to inherit Chinese culture and what it meant to be a proper ruler, which will be the focus of the next blog. Without a powerful theme arising from these competing ideas and core philosophical framework, there is no empathetic conflict and there is no substance to whatever story you want to write. Until next week, think a bit about the most crucial last 4 sentences of the opening quote which I didn’t connect to the Zhou dynasty and what it reveals about Silco’s ideology. Would you thank a treacherous friend who tried to drown you?
-Article written by Nicholas Zhang. Contact him at nzhang321@gatech.edu for any inquiries or thoughts.
