Kingship, Ritual, and Royal Ideology in Western Zhou China

In accounts of Chinese history, the Western Zhou period has been lionized as a golden age of ritual, when kings created the ceremonies that underlay the traditions of imperial governance. In this book, Paul Nicholas Vogt rediscovers their roots in the vagaries of Western Zhou royal geopolitics through an investigation of inscriptions on bronze vessels, the best contemporary source for this period. He shows how the kings of the Western Zhou adapted ritual to create and retain power, while introducing changes that affected later remembrances of Zhou royal ritual and that shaped the tradition of statecraft throughout Chinese history. Using ritual and social theory to explain Western Zhou history, Vogt traces how the traditions of pre-modern China were born, how a ruling dynasty establishes and holds on to power, how religion and politics can support and restrain each other, and how ancient peoples made, used, and assigned meaning to art and artifacts. "With the defeat of the Shang, the Zhou royal house positioned itself at the ideological center of a network held together by personal relationships with the early kings. To maintain this central position in the new post-Shang hierarchy, and to pursue their project of state-building through delegation of authority, the Zhou kings drew on one of their primary cultural advantages: their familiarity with Shang-style ancestral ritual. In doing so, the royal family faced the challenge of retooling the well-established Shang ritual system, centered on a supreme lineage tracing its ancestry back more than twenty generations, to meet the needs of a recently forged coalition of elite populations. The following analysis explores the political details of this Western Zhou adaptation of Shang ancestral ritual. Through a close look at the records of individual ritual techniques, it shows that royal ancestral ceremonies reinforced the king's role as arbiter of prestige in Zhou elite society and inculcated principles of Zhou social organization. High-ranking elites attended these ceremonies, took part in them, and duplicated them within their own domains, in some cases at the king's express recommendation. They cast inscribed bronzes commemorating their attendance and used them in their own ancestral cults and burial practices, appropriating the memories of these ceremonies as tools for building personal and lineage identities"-- Provided by publisher Using ritual and social theory to explain Western Zhou history, this book traces how the traditions of pre-modern China were born, how a ruling dynasty establishes and holds on to power, how religion and politics can support and restrain each other, and how ancient peoples made, used, and assigned meaning to art and artifacts. The book shows how the kings of the Western Zhou period used ritual to create and hold onto their power