SPRING AND AUTUMN CHINA (771-453)
What are the 4 seasons in order?
In these pages, we will survey the events of this long period. Our narrative will combine a
selective recounting of major events with an attempt to illustrate the political variety that
developed among the patrician states of the time. It embeds also certain stories from traditional
sources, which are intended to help you picture more vividly and so recalls more easily major
turning points. These tales (which appear in italics) are retold here in a way that eliminates the
profusion of personal and place names that characterize the original accounts. There are four such
stories and each focuses on a single individual (although the last and longest has a larger cast of
characters). The first two stories, those of Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin, highlight certain
central features of Spring and Autumn political structures. The third tale, concerning King Ling of
Chu, illustrates the nature of many early historical accounts as cautionary tales. The last, the story
of Wu Zixu, is one of the great “historical romances” of the traditional annals.
It is important to bear in mind that the tales recounted here are parts of a “master narrative”
of early China, crafted by literary historians. The flow of the account makes overall sense as a story,
and the moral drama of each episode is easy to detect. This is not the way life is lived, and in a time
before newspapers and other information media, it took intellectual imagination and effort to
represent events over such vast stretches of time and space coherently. We may be certain that at
many points “facts” have been distorted to accomplish narrative and moral coherence, sometimes
dramatically – the more closely academic historians examine historical evidence, the more
problems emerge with this traditional narrative. But constructing the “storyline” of early China
was a project of the era itself, and regardless of the “accuracy” of the story, the voices who are
telling it are voices from that time, recreating themselves in the narrative as it progresses.
This narration of events breaks the Spring and Autumn into six smaller periods, with some
gaps between them (some dates in this list are approximate).
I. The Zhou schism and the dominance of Zheng, 770-700
II. The hegemony of Duke Huan of Qi, 680-643
III. The ascendance of Jin, 636-620
IV. The period of the Jin-Wu alliance, 584-520
V. The rise and fall of the state of Wu, 515-473
VI. The dissolution of Jin, 497-453
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