The Broken Kingdom

By the fifth century BC the Zhou kings were a hollow relic, their realm long since fragmented into rival states that paid the royal house nothing but empty ceremony. The symbolic end of the old order came in 453 BC in the powerful northern state of Jin, where three ministerial families — the Han, Zhao, and Wei — turned on the overweening Zhi clan, drowned its army at Jinyang, and then divided Jin among themselves. When the impotent Zhou court recognized the three as kingdoms in 403 BC, it confessed that ministers could now unmake their lords and become sovereigns in their own right.

So opened the Warring States: seven great powers — Qin in the west, Chu in the south, Qi in the east, and Yan, Zhao, Wei, and Han in the center and north — locked in two and a half centuries of escalating war. This was not the ritualized, chariot-borne combat of earlier ages. Iron tools cleared new farmland and fed exploding populations; those populations were conscripted into standing armies of hundreds of thousands of infantry and crossbowmen; and philosophers, strategists, and administrators wandered from court to court selling the arts of survival.

The first state to seize supremacy was Wei, which under early reforms fielded the age's finest army. But Wei's ambition drew the enmity of Qi, whose crippled strategist Sun Bin twice destroyed Wei's forces — 'besieging Wei to rescue Zhao' at Guiling, and annihilating Pang Juan's army by feigned desertion at Maling in 342 BC. Wei's collapse left a vacuum. Far to the west, a once-backward state was quietly building the machine that would fill it.