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The Shang dynasty people believed in dee (di), who was the ruler of the universe.

There was only 1 king and many civilians in the social class.

There govermant was only 1 kind and an eprentise

there king and a international diesase killed

https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/the_shang_dynasty_1600_to_1050_bce

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Selena Lai and Waka Takahashi Brown November 2006available in PDF format ( 180.78 KB )

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(the rise) Qin was chinas first unified state who was centralized instead of spread among different kingdoms in the north and south.

(the leaders) The first emperor of Qin, known as Qin Shihuangdi. He divided the state into provinces and prefectures governed by officials. And then he dead and China was under the rule of the Han dynasty.

(Great Architectural Works)The Lingqu Canal, the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, and the Zhengguo Canal.

the great wall of china was built for pertection from other lands.

(the Fall) The Fall happened when Qin Shihuangdi the emperor past away and the empire when in to craziness until another Dynasty took over.

https://asia-archive.si.edu/learn/for-educators/teaching-china-with-the-smithsonian/explore-by-dynasty/qin-dynasty/

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Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art

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At the end of the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), the state of conquered all other states and established the Qin (221-206 BCE). It was China's first unified state whose power was centralized instead of spread among different kingdoms in the north and south. Although it lasted only about fifteen years, the Qin dynasty greatly influenced the next two thousand years of Chinese history.

The first emperor of Qin, known as (literally "First Emperor," 259-210 BCE), instituted a central and systematic bureaucracy. He divided the state into provinces and prefectures governed by appointed officials. This administrative structure has served as a model for government in China to the present day. Shihuangdi sought to standardize numerous aspects of Chinese life, including weights and measures, coinage, and the writing system. These standards would last for centuries after the fall of his short-lived dynasty. He also ordered many construction projects. He expanded the network of roads and canals throughout the country. The first Great Wall (not the one that exists today) was built during his reign.

Despite the many accomplishments of the Qin dynasty, Shihuangdi was considered a severe ruler. He was intolerant of any threats to his rule and established harsh laws to maintain his control. He had his chief advisor burn all books that were not written on subjects he considered useful (useful subjects included agriculture and medicine) and reportedly buried hundreds of scholars alive.

The Qin dynasty is one of the best-known periods in Chinese history in the West because of the 1974 discovery of thousands of life-size terracotta warriors. They were part of the vast army guarding the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi. These figures were modeled after general categories of soldiers, such as archers and infantrymen, but possessed some individual characteristics as well. The warriors reflect Shihuangdi's reliance on the military to create and maintain a unified China and indicate his desire to retain a protective army in the afterlife.

Following the death of Qin Shihuangdi, the Qin dynasty collapsed into chaos. In 206 BCE, China was reunited under the rule of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE).

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Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE) - Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art

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At the end of the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), the state of Qin conquered all other states and established the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE). It was China's first unified state whose power was centralized instead of spread among different kingdoms in the north and south.

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The Zhou dynasty ruled ancient China for eight centuries, establishing China for the next two millennia. The beginning date of the Zhou has long been debated. Traditionally, it has been given as 1122 bce, that date has been successively revised as people have uncovered more archaeological evidence. The most recent findings have placed the outright start of the dynasty at 1046 bce. The dynasty ended in 256 bce.(https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zhou-dynasty)

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Zhou dynasty, Wade-Giles romanization Chou, dynasty that ruled ancient China for some eight centuries, establishing the distinctive political and cultural characteristics that were to be identified with China for the next two millennia. The beginning date of the Zhou has long been debated. Traditionally, it has been given as 1122 bce, and that date has been successively revised as scholars have uncovered more archaeological evidence. The most recent findings have placed the outright start of the dynasty at 1046 bce. The dynasty ended in 256 bce.

History

The Zhou coexisted with the Shang dynasty (c. 1600-1046 bce) for many years, living just west of the Shang territory in what is now Shaanxi province. At various times they were a friendly tributary state to the Shang, alternatively warring with them. One of the Zhou ruling houses devised a plan to conquer the Shang, and a decisive battle was fought, probably in the mid-11th century bce. However, a rebellion broke out before the whole Shang territory could be consolidated by the Zhou. The fighting went on for three years before the rebellion was put down, and finally the Zhou solidified their reign over all of China. An array of feudal states was created within the empire to maintain order and the emperor's hold on the land. The original Zhou capital had been located near present-day Xi'an in Shaanxi on the Wei River above its confluence with the Huang He (Yellow River). To support the empire in the east and its loyal feudal rulers, an eastern capital was built at Luoyang on the middle reaches of the Huang He.

The stability of that arrangement lasted some 200 years before it began to collapse with the increasing local interests of the 20 or more feudal lords. In the 8th century bce the political system, which had essentially consisted of a network of extended family, began to weaken seriously. With the decline of the feudal king's power, de facto power fluctuated among various of the feudal chiefs as they were able to make themselves overlords.

The period before 771 bce is usually known as the Xi (Western) Zhou dynasty, and that from 770 is known as the Dong (Eastern) Zhou dynasty. The Dong Zhou itself is often further subdivided into the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu) period (770-476 bce), when China consisted of many small squabbling states, and the Warring States (Zhanguo) period (475-221 bce), when the small states consolidated into several larger units, which struggled with one another for mastery. Finally, one of those small kingdoms, Qin (from which derives modern China's name), succeeded in conquering the rest of the states and establishing the Qin dynasty (221-207 bce).

Cultural achievements

The visual arts of the Zhou dynasty reflect the diversity of the feudal states of which it was composed and into which it eventually broke up. The arts of the early Xi Zhou were essentially a continuation of those of the Shang dynasty. That was especially true of works in bronze, in which there was an accelerated deterioration of the variety of shapes, the decoration, and the craftsmanship of casting. It was not until the Dong Zhou and the classical age of Confucius and Laozi that unique local traditions became apparent. The range of applied decoration for the first time included pictorial subjects-for example, hunting scenes and chariots and horsemen.

As the empire was breaking up, arts and culture were flowering in the various component states, encouraged and stimulated by the highly localized interests that fed the impulse toward independence of the empire. The remains of many of the feudal capitals during the Zhou period have been uncovered and reveal great buildings with rammed-earth floors and walls. There were also two-story buildings and observation towers, and Laozi mentions a nine-story tower.

Although (with the exception of a few works on silk) no painting survives from the Zhou, written descriptions of paintings evidence their themes, including figures, portraits, and historic scenes. Lacquerware including gold and silver inlay became finely developed, and bronzework carried on from the great legacy of the Shang. Jade ornaments and objects were used lavishly for funerary and ritual purposes, and ornamental carvings reflected superb craftsmanship. Pottery continued Shang traditions and expanded greatly in variety of shapes and finishes during the Warring States period.

During the Zhou dynasty, China underwent quite dramatic changes. Iron, ox-drawn plows, crossbows, and horseback riding were all introduced; large-scale irrigation and water-control projects were also instituted for the first time, greatly increasing the crop yield of the North China Plain. The communication system was also greatly improved through the construction of new roads and canals. Trade was increased, towns grew up, coinage was developed, chopsticks came into use, and the Chinese writing system was created out of its primitive beginnings in the Shang period.

There was also a great philosophical flowering: the schools of Confucianism, Daoism, and legalism developed in that period. Literature flourished with Confucius and other great Chinese philosophers. Later generations of Chinese have regularly studied the Zhou dynasty for information regarding the origin of their civilization.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Amy McKenna.

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Zhou dynasty | History, Achievements, Art, & Facts

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Zhou dynasty, dynasty that ruled ancient China for some eight centuries, establishing the distinctive political and cultural characteristics that were to be identified with China for the next two millennia. The Zhou dynasty began in 1046 BCE and ended in 256 BCE.

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- Confucianism was developed by the ancient Chinese sage Confucius and his people.

-Confucianism was developed in the 6th to 5th century BCE

- Confucianism was a system of thought originating in ancient China with Confucius, focusing on ethics, social harmony, and familial responsibility rather than strict religious dogma.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Confucianism

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Does Confucianism have a god?

Where does Confucianism come from?

How did Confucianism spread?

Confucianism, the way of life propagated by Confucius in the 6th-5th century bce and followed by the Chinese people for more than two millennia. Although transformed over time, it is still the substance of learning, the source of values, and the social code of the Chinese. Its influence has also extended to other countries, particularly Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

Confucianism, a Western term that has no counterpart in Chinese, is a worldview, a social ethic, a political ideology, a scholarly tradition, and a way of life. Sometimes viewed as a philosophy and sometimes as a religion, Confucianism may be understood as an all-encompassing way of thinking and living that entails ancestor reverence and a profound human-centred religiousness. East Asians may profess themselves to be Shintōists, Daoists, Buddhists, Muslims, or Christians, but, by announcing their religious affiliations, seldom do they cease to be Confucians.

Although often grouped with the major historical religions, Confucianism differs from them by not being an organized religion. Nonetheless, it spread to other East Asian countries under the influence of Chinese literate culture and has exerted a profound influence on spiritual and political life. Both the theory and practice of Confucianism have indelibly marked the patterns of government, society, education, and family of East Asia. Although it is an exaggeration to characterize traditional Chinese life and culture as Confucian, Confucian ethical values have for well over 2,000 years served as the source of inspiration as well as the court of appeal for human interaction between individuals, communities, and nations in the Sinitic world.

The thought of Confucius

The story of Confucianism does not begin with Confucius. Nor was Confucius the founder of Confucianism in the sense that the Buddha was the founder of Buddhism and Jesus Christ the founder of Christianity. Rather, Confucius considered himself a transmitter who consciously tried to reanimate the old in order to attain the new. He proposed revitalizing the meaning of the past by advocating a ritualized life. Confucius's love of antiquity was motivated by his strong desire to understand why certain life forms and institutions, such as reverence for ancestors, human-centred religious practices, and mourning ceremonies, had survived for centuries. His journey into the past was a search for roots, which he perceived as grounded in humanity's deepest needs for belonging and communicating. He had faith in the cumulative power of culture. The fact that traditional ways had lost vitality did not, for him, diminish their potential for regeneration in the future. In fact, Confucius's sense of history was so strong that he saw himself as a conservationist responsible for the continuity of the cultural values and the social norms that had worked so well for the idealized civilization of the Western Zhou dynasty.

The historical context

The scholarly tradition envisioned by Confucius can be traced to the sage-kings of antiquity. Although the earliest dynasty confirmed by archaeology is the Shang dynasty (18th-12th century bce), the historical period that Confucius claimed as relevant was much earlier. Confucius may have initiated a cultural process known in the West as Confucianism, but he and those who followed him considered themselves part of a tradition, later identified by Chinese historians as the rujia, "scholarly tradition," that had its origins two millennia previously, when the legendary sages Yao and Shun created a civilized world through moral persuasion.

Confucius's hero was Zhougong, or the duke of Zhou (fl. 11th century bce), who was said to have helped consolidate, expand, and refine the " feudal" ritual system. This elaborate system of mutual dependence was based on blood ties, marriage alliances, and old covenants as well as on newly negotiated contracts. The appeal to cultural values and social norms for the maintenance of interstate as well as domestic order was predicated on a shared political vision, namely, that authority lies in universal kingship, heavily invested with ethical and religious power by the "mandate of heaven" (tianming), and that social solidarity is achieved not by legal constraint but by ritual observance. Its implementation enabled the Western Zhou dynasty to survive in relative peace and prosperity for more than five centuries.

Inspired by the statesmanship of Zhougong, Confucius harboured a lifelong dream to be in a position to emulate the duke by putting into practice the political ideas that he had learned from the ancient sages and worthies. Although Confucius never realized his political dream, his conception of politics as moral persuasion became more and more influential.

The concept of " heaven" (tian), unique in Zhou cosmology, was compatible with that of the Lord on High ( Shangdi) in the Shang dynasty. Lord on High may have referred to the ancestral progenitor of the Shang royal lineage, but heaven to the Zhou kings, although also ancestral, was a more-generalized anthropomorphic god. The Zhou belief in the mandate of heaven (the functional equivalent of the will of the Lord on High) differed from the divine right of kings in that there was no guarantee that the descendants of the Zhou royal house would be entrusted with kingship, for, as written in the Shujing ("Classic of History"), "heaven sees as the people see [and] hears as the people hear"; thus, the virtues of the kings were essential for the maintenance of their power and authority. This emphasis on benevolent rulership, expressed in numerous bronze inscriptions, was both a reaction to the collapse of the Shang dynasty and an affirmation of a deep-rooted worldview.

Partly because of the vitality of the feudal ritual system and partly because of the strength of the royal household itself, the Zhou kings were able to control their kingdom for several centuries. In 771 bce, however, they were forced to move their capital eastward to present-day Luoyang to avoid barbarian attacks from Central Asia. Real power thereafter passed into the hands of feudal lords. Since the surviving line of the Zhou kings continued to be recognized in name, they still managed to exercise some measure of symbolic control. By Confucius's time, however, the feudal ritual system had been so fundamentally undermined that the political crises also precipitated a profound sense of moral decline: the centre of symbolic control could no longer hold the kingdom, which had devolved from centuries of civil war into 14 feudal states.

Confucius's response was to address himself to the issue of learning to be human. In so doing he attempted to redefine and revitalize the institutions that for centuries had been vital to political stability and social order: the family, the school, the local community, the state, and the kingdom. Confucius did not accept the status quo, which held that wealth and power spoke the loudest. He felt that virtue (de), both as a personal quality and as a requirement for leadership, was essential for individual dignity, communal solidarity, and political order.

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Confucianism | Meaning, History, Beliefs, & Facts

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Confucianism, the way of life propagated by Confucius (6th-5th century BCE) and followed by the Chinese people for more than two millennia. Still the substance of learning, the source of values, and the social code of the Chinese, it has also influenced other countries, particularly Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.