Feudal society existed for two thousand yearsThe year statement is wrong.
At the age of 55, looking back, I still vividly remember a quote I learned in elementary school"China has existed as a feudal society for more than 2,000 years"。However, I recently gave a special lecture by the famous historian Mr. Yi Zhongtian on the Internet, and I couldn't help but question this sentence.
Mr. Yi Zhongtian believes that, strictly speaking, China's"Feudal society"It existed only in the Zhou Dynasty and lasted for a total of 790 years.
The hierarchical system is a system that divides people into different hierarchies, and its origins can be traced back to the Zhou rites in the early Western Zhou Dynasty. The basis of the Zhou rite was to divide the people in society into two large classes: the nobles and the common people.
The nobility can also be further subdivided into four ranks: the Son of Heaven, the princes, the doctors, and the scholars. The normal population of the Zhou Dynasty can be divided into five classes: the Son of Heaven, the princes, the doctors, the scholars, and the common people.
Because the Son of Heaven, princes, and doctors had fiefdoms, assets, and armies, they could marry wives and concubines, while the ordinary common people could only solve the problem of food and clothing, and it was basically impossible to marry wives and concubines.
Hierarchy has affected people's social status and lifestyle to a certain extent.
I'm going to go on and on to introduce a concept – primogeniture. The polyandry phenomenon of the aristocracy made it possible for some noble families to have multiple sons, even as many as dozens, which required the problem of inheritance of property, titles, and fiefdoms.
The Duke of Zhou carried out a strict system design for this, which is the primogeniture inheritance system. The eldest son refers to the eldest son who is both the son of the sister-in-law and the eldest son of the son-in-law. A concubine is a son born to a wife, and a son born to another concubine is called a concubine.
Even if the son born to a concubine is the eldest son, he is also a concubine, not a concubine. The second and subsequent sons born to the wife are concubines, the same as the sons born to concubines.
The primogeniture system stipulates that only the first son born to the wife is entitled to inherit the estate of the nobility. But if the wife is unable to have a son, how should the nobles solve the problem of heirs?
They could choose to abolish the main wife, replace it with a concubine with a son, or appoint an heir among the concubines. However, this issue became very confusing during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, and this article will not go into depth.
Understanding the concept of son-in-law, concubine, and eldest son, let's get to the point, **feudalism. In the Zhou Dynasty, feudalism was a verb phrase that represented the abbreviation of "feudal land to build a country" or "feudal land to build a home".
After King Wen of Zhou established the Western Zhou regime, he divided the world into multiple territories, each of which was called a "state", that is, a vassal state. He made his brothers, sons, some meritorious officials, and the orphans of the Shang royal family princes, and appointed them as kings of a certain territory.
Of course, King Wen of Zhou's eldest son was crowned crown prince and was his legitimate heir after King Wen's death. Until he becomes the heir to the throne, he will also have a fief similar to that of a prince, except that this fief is part of his father's vassal state, just like the fiefs of his brothers.
After these kings arrived at their fiefdoms, they would divide their fiefdoms into several parts, each of which was called "caiyi", and then assign them to their sons, called "caiyijun", the third level of the aristocratic class - qing.
Similarly, the eldest son of a prince is his rightful heir, and when a prince dies, his eldest son will inherit his fiefdom. These two levels, whether it is the monarch or the king of the province, as long as they have received the title of the Son of Heaven or the princes, they are called "building feuds".
Whether it is a monarch or a quarrying king, after they get the fiefdom, they will choose a piece of feng shui treasure land, dig a trench around it, and use the excavated soil to build a foundation to build a city, which is the national capital or city.
This process is known as "sealing".
In the feudal system of the Zhou Dynasty, the monarch and the family monarch owned the actual land, people, finances, and army, and these contents and forms were independent "administrative districts". However, from the Qin Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, the history of more than 2,000 years was actually the implementation of the county system, and the local administrative regions no longer had independence and no longer had armies, which was very different from the "feudal" of the Zhou Dynasty.
Therefore, the social system after Qin cannot simply be called "feudal".
It turned out that after the founding of the People's Republic of China, we called the social system before the Qing Dynasty and after the Qin Dynasty "feudal society", and the first half of the Zhou Dynasty as the "slave society".
However, this is actually problematic. I think Mr. Yi's lecture makes a lot of sense, and I very much agree with it - China's feudal society only existed in the Zhou Dynasty, about 790 years.
What should the social system after the Qin Dynasty and before the Qing Dynasty be called? I've been thinking about this question for a long time, and if you have any good suggestions, I'd love to hear them.