Wars of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods

“The wars of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods” is not the name of one war. It is a way of describing more than five centuries of fighting among the states of ancient China, from the moment the Zhou kings lost their western capital in 771 BCE to the moment the state of Qin conquered its last rival in 221 BCE.

Historians divide this long age into two parts. The Spring and Autumn period takes its name from the Spring and Autumn Annals, a terse chronicle kept in the state of Lu that covers the years 722 to 481 BCE. The Warring States period takes its name from the Zhanguo ce, or ‘Strategies of the Warring States’, a collection of speeches and stories compiled in the Han dynasty. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Britannica date the two periods to 770–c. 476 and 475–221 BCE, but other dividing lines are also used.

Across these centuries the political map changed completely. At the start there were many states, from great powers to small principalities. By the fifth and fourth centuries BCE seven major states, the ‘seven powers’, dominated, and by 221 BCE Qin had conquered the other six. War was the machine that did this sorting, and it transformed armies, governments and ideas along the way.

The main stages of that story are the age of the hegemons, the wars of Wu and Yue in the southeast, the break-up of the great state of Jin, the reforms that prepared states for total war, the great battles of the third century BCE, and Qin's final wars of unification.

Around 1046 BCE the Zhou dynasty had overthrown the Shang and given lands to relatives and allies, who ruled them as lords under the Zhou king. In 771 BCE the Marquis of Shen, together with the Zeng and the Quanrong people of the west, attacked King You and killed him. The Zhou court was re-established at Luoyi, near modern Luoyang, in the east. This began the Eastern Zhou.

The Zhou king kept his title as ‘Son of Heaven’ and his ritual prestige, and for centuries no lord replaced him. But with a shrinking royal domain and army, he was increasingly unable to compel the powerful lords to obey. Real power passed to the rulers of the larger states.

Those states sat in a rough ring around the old centre. Jin lay in the north, in modern Shanxi. Qi held the rich coast of modern Shandong. Qin guarded the western valley of the Wei River, the old Zhou homeland. Chu spread across the middle Yangtze and was seen by the northern states as only half part of their world; according to the Shiji its ruler Xiong Tong proclaimed himself king in 704 BCE. Later, Wu and Yue rose on the lower Yangtze, and Yan held the far north around modern Beijing.

Between the great powers lay many smaller states, such as Zheng, Song, Lu, Chen and Cai. Much of the fighting of the Spring and Autumn period was really about who would control them.

In the early Spring and Autumn period, battle was an affair of nobles. Aristocrats fought from horse-drawn chariots, with foot soldiers around them, and campaigns were usually short.

By the Warring States period this had changed. As Yuri Pines summarises, new technologies such as the crossbow and new forms of military organisation replaced aristocratic chariot-led armies with mass infantry armies of peasant conscripts, radically increasing the scale and complexity of war. In 307 BCE, according to the Shiji, King Wuling of Zhao ordered his people to adopt northern ‘nomadic dress and mounted archery’, an important reform in Zhao’s use of cavalry.

Campaigns now could last months or even years. The Shiji reports armies of tens and even hundreds of thousands: when Qin invaded Chu in the 220s BCE, Li Xin is said to have asked for 200,000 men and Wang Jian for 600,000. Feeding and supplying such forces required the new bureaucracies the states were building, although the exact figures are traditional and cannot be checked.

Commanders also changed. Birth alone was no longer enough; generals were expected to know strategy, and military treatises appeared. The most famous, The Art of War, is traditionally attributed to Sun Tzu, a general who served Wu late in the Spring and Autumn period, but Britannica notes that it was more likely written early in the Warring States period.

Soon after the move east, a new system appeared. The strongest ruler was recognised as hegemon (ba). He presided over meetings of lords, led joint campaigns, and in theory protected the Zhou king. The first was Duke Huan of Qi (r. 685–643 BCE), who with his minister Guan Zhong strengthened his state; the Shiji says he ‘first became hegemon’ when the lords met him at Juan. Tradition lists five hegemons, though the lists differ.

After Qi weakened, the central question became whether Jin or Chu would dominate the small states between the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Duke Wen of Jin came to power in 636 BCE after long years in exile. In 632 BCE he defeated Chu and its allies at Chengpu, with Song, Qi and Qin forces on his side, and the Zhou king formally named him leader of the lords (hou bo).

Chu struck back. In 606 BCE King Zhuang of Chu paraded his army on the Zhou border and asked about the size and weight of the Nine Cauldrons, the symbols of royal authority, as if he might carry them off. In 597 BCE he defeated a divided Jin army at Bi near the Yellow River. In 575 BCE Jin won again at Yanling.

Exhausted, the great powers tried diplomacy: in 579 BCE Hua Yuan of Song brokered a peace between Jin and Chu, and in 546 BCE a larger conference of states agreed a truce. Neither lasted, and the old idea of a single hegemon protecting the Zhou king was fading. Meanwhile, inside Jin, Lu and other states, powerful noble families were taking power from their own rulers.

In 584 BCE Jin sent Wu Chen, a Chu noble who had fled to Jin, as envoy to Wu, a state on the lower Yangtze outside the old Zhou cultural world; he taught Wu chariot warfare so that it would attack Chu from the east. The plan worked beyond expectation. In 506 BCE King Helü of Wu, with the Chu exile Wu Zixu and his own younger brother Fugai, left his boats on the Huai River, marched overland and routed the Chu army at Boju. Wu won five battles in a row and entered the Chu capital, Ying. In 505 BCE Wu withdrew, after defeats by Qin and Chu forces sent to relieve Chu, an attack by Yue on its homeland, and Fugai’s attempt to seize the Wu throne.

Wu then turned on its southern neighbour, Yue. At Zuili in 496 BCE Yue defeated Wu and Helü died of his wounds. His son Fuchai took revenge at Fujiao in 494 BCE, trapped King Goujian of Yue on Mount Kuaiji, and accepted his surrender against the advice of Wu Zixu, who warned that Yue should be destroyed.

Fuchai looked north instead. He defeated Qi at Ailing in 484 BCE and in 482 BCE went with his best troops to a meeting of lords at Huangchi to claim leadership. While he was away, Goujian attacked Wu and killed the crown prince. Yue won again at Lize in 478 BCE and in 473 BCE destroyed Wu; Fuchai killed himself. The Shiji says Goujian was then hailed as hegemon.

According to the Shiji, Goujian kept a gall bladder by his seat and tasted it before eating so as never to forget his humiliation; it does not mention sleeping on brushwood. The combined phrase ‘sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall’ (臥薪嘗膽) appears much later, for example in a letter that the Song writer Su Shi composed in the imagined voice of Sun Quan, and it became one of the most famous expressions of patience and revenge in East Asia.

Jin, the greatest northern power, had a peculiar weakness: its rulers relied on ministerial families, who gradually took over the state. By the late sixth century six families dominated Jin; a civil war that broke out in 497 BCE eliminated two of them, the Fan and Zhonghang, leaving the Zhi, Zhao, Han and Wei houses.

The head of the Zhi house demanded land from the others. Han and Wei gave in, but Zhao Xiangzi refused and withdrew to his city of Jinyang, near modern Taiyuan. The Zhi, Han and Wei armies besieged Jinyang and, according to the Shiji, after more than a year diverted the Fen River to flood it. Zhao's envoy persuaded Han and Wei that they would be next. They switched sides, and in 453 BCE the Zhi house was destroyed; the Zuo zhuan closes with this event.

Han, Zhao and Wei then divided Jin between them. In 403 BCE King Weilie of Zhou recognised their rulers as lords, and the ‘Three Jin’ became states in their own right. In Qi, the Tian family displaced the old ruling house, and in 386 BCE its head, Tian He, was recognised as a lord. The recognition of 403 BCE is where Sima Guang's Zizhi tongjian begins.

From then on seven large states dominated: Qin in the west, Qi in the east, Chu in the south, Yan in the north, and Han, Zhao and Wei in the centre. Smaller states survived for a while between them, but one by one they were absorbed.

In the fourth century BCE the states competed to rebuild themselves. Rulers hired wandering experts, who offered plans for government, diplomacy and war and could be rewarded with high office or punished harshly if their advice failed.

Wei, in the centre, was the first great power of the new age, but its central position meant enemies on every side. In 354 BCE Wei besieged Handan, the capital of Zhao. Qi's commanders Tian Ji and Sun Bin did not march to Handan; they struck at the Wei heartland instead, and when the Wei army turned back they beat it at Guiling in 353 BCE. The tactic became the stratagem ‘besiege Wei to rescue Zhao’. In 342 or 341 BCE, when Wei attacked Han, Sun Bin again invaded Wei, then retreated while ordering fewer cooking fires each day, from 100,000 to 50,000 to 30,000, so that the Wei general Pang Juan believed Qi's army was deserting. Pang Juan chased him into an ambush at Maling and died there. Wei never recovered its leading position.

In the west, Qin had been seen as a backward state. Under Duke Xiao, the minister Shang Yang carried out sweeping reforms from the 350s BCE. He grouped households into units that were held responsible for one another's crimes; gave ranks to men who cut off enemy heads in battle; combined villages into counties run by appointed magistrates (thirty-one in his Shiji biography, forty-one in the Annals of Qin); reformed land and taxation; and built a new capital at Xianyang. He was killed in 338 BCE after his patron died, but his system survived.

The result was a state organised for ‘agriculture and war’. Qin gained a strong frontier and room to expand, conquering Shu in the Sichuan Basin in 316 BCE. Its ruler took the title of king in 325 BCE; the rulers of Wei and Qi had already recognised each other as kings at Xuzhou in 334 BCE, openly rejecting the Zhou king's monopoly of the title.

As Qin grew stronger, the other six states tried to combine against it in ‘vertical alliances’ (hezong), stretching north to south across the map. Qin answered with ‘horizontal alliances’ (lianheng), drawing individual states to its side. Persuaders such as Su Qin and Zhang Yi are remembered as the architects of these two policies, and their speeches, real or imagined, fill the Zhanguo ce.

An anti-Qin coalition attacked in 318 BCE. The Shiji’s Annals of Qin tell this attack together with a Qin victory at Xiuyu and list Han, Zhao, Wei, Yan and Qi with Xiongnu allies, while its Table of the Six States records the coalition’s failure in 318 and the defeat at Xiuyu in 317. Coalitions sometimes did check Qin: in 296 BCE an allied attack led Qin to return territory to Han and Wei, and in 247 BCE Lord Xinling of Wei led a coalition that defeated a Qin army. But their cooperation never lasted. In 293 BCE the Qin general Bai Qi defeated the Han and Wei armies at Yique; the Shiji credits him with 240,000 heads.

The most dramatic coalition war was aimed not at Qin but at Qi. In 284 BCE Yue Yi of Yan led a coalition against Qi and won a great battle west of the Ji River. The Shiji's lists of the allies differ: Yue Yi's biography names Zhao, Chu, Han, Wei and Yan, while the Annals of Qin say a Qin general fought alongside the Three Jin and Yan. Yue Yi took the Qi capital Linzi and over the next five years more than seventy Qi cities; only Ju and Jimo held out. At Jimo the commander Tian Dan finally broke the besiegers in 279 BCE and restored Qi, but Qi was left badly weakened.

In 278 BCE Qin forces under Bai Qi captured Ying, the Chu capital, and the Chu king fled east to Chen. Qin's chief adviser Fan Ju urged a policy of ‘befriending distant states and attacking nearby ones’.

By the mid-third century only Zhao seemed able to stand up to Qin. The clash came over Shangdang, a Han territory in the Taihang Mountains that Qin had cut off. Rather than submit to Qin, its people turned to Zhao, and Zhao accepted them. The Shangdang crisis began in 262 BCE; the Shiji narrates the fighting at Changping, near modern Gaoping in Shanxi, under 260 BCE, while Yuri Pines dates the campaign to 262–260 BCE.

According to the Shiji, the Zhao general Lian Po, after repeated setbacks, built fortified lines and refused open battle. The Zhao king, angry at his losses and influenced by rumours spread by agents of Qin’s chancellor Fan Ju that Qin feared only Zhao Kuo, son of a famous general, replaced Lian Po with him. Qin secretly gave Bai Qi the command. When Zhao Kuo attacked in 260 BCE, the Qin army feigned retreat, cut the Zhao army in two and severed its supply lines. After forty-six days without food, Zhao Kuo was shot dead trying to break out, and his army surrendered.

According to the Shiji, written about a century and a half later, Bai Qi had the 400,000 prisoners killed by trickery, using the expression kengsha (阬殺, ‘killed in pits’), and released only 240 of the youngest; it counts 450,000 Zhao soldiers beheaded or captured in the whole campaign. In a speech placed in 258 BCE, during the siege of Handan, the same chapter has Bai Qi say that more than half of Qin’s soldiers had died, which is not a verified casualty rate for Changping alone. Human bones have repeatedly been found around Gaoping, for example in 1995 and 2020, and investigators have said they may be related to the battle.

Qin followed up by besieging the Zhao capital Handan from 259 BCE, but Zhao found allies. According to his Shiji biography, Lord Pingyuan won Chu’s agreement to aid Zhao, and Lord Xinling of Wei, using a military tally stolen from the Wei king's chamber, seized command of the Wei army and marched to the city's relief. In 257 BCE the siege was broken. Even so, Qin annexed the domain of West Zhou in 256 BCE, the last Zhou king died the same year, and according to the Shiji the Nine Cauldrons were taken to Qin the following year.

In 238 BCE the young King Zheng of Qin came of age and took full power. With advisers such as Li Si he took the remaining states one at a time. In 230 BCE a Qin army captured King An of Han, the weakest state, and Han's land became a Qin commandery.

Zhao, led by the able general Li Mu, resisted until Qin bribed the Zhao king's favourite Guo Kai to accuse Li Mu of planning a revolt. Li Mu was removed and killed, and in 228 BCE Qin captured the Zhao king. An attempt by Jing Ke, sent by the crown prince of Yan, to assassinate the King of Qin failed and gave Qin its reason to attack Yan: in 226 BCE Qin took the Yan capital Ji, and in 222 BCE it captured the last Yan king in Liaodong. In 225 BCE Wang Ben flooded Daliang, the Wei capital, with water from the Yellow River canals, and the Wei king surrendered.

Chu, the largest state, was the hardest. According to the Shiji, Li Xin’s invasion with 200,000 men was routed by the Chu army, and the king then gave the veteran Wang Jian the 600,000 men he had asked for. Wang Jian waited in fortified camps until the Chu army withdrew, then routed it. The Shiji’s accounts of the end diverge: the First Emperor’s annals place the capture of the Chu king Fuchu in 224 BCE and the suicide of the general Xiang Yan, after he had set up a new Chu king, in 223, while Wang Jian’s biography has Xiang Yan killed at Qinan before the capture of the Chu king more than a year later. Qi, whose chancellor Hou Sheng had taken Qin bribes and kept it out of the alliances, gave up without a fight when Wang Ben’s army came south from Yan in 221 BCE.

King Zheng took the title Shi Huangdi, ‘First Emperor’. He divided the empire into thirty-six commanderies run by appointed officials and moved 120,000 wealthy households to Xianyang. The Qin dynasty itself lasted only until 206 BCE, but the Han dynasty that followed kept its unified, bureaucratic framework.

These wars left a deep mark on language. ‘Besiege Wei to rescue Zhao’ (from Guiling) became one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems. The later idiom ‘talking about war on paper’ (紙上談兵) is associated with Zhao Kuo, who knew his father's military books but failed in the field, although the phrase itself is not in the Shiji; the Shiji compares his appointment to playing a se zither with its bridges glued in place. Goujian's ‘sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall’ is still used for patient determination.

The wars also shaped Chinese thought. The Hundred Schools of Thought flourished against the background of fierce interstate competition. The Mohists condemned unprovoked military aggression and some became specialists in defending threatened cities; Mencius told a king that the realm would be unified by one ‘who does not delight in killing people’; Legalist thinkers such as Shang Yang and Han Fei argued for impartial laws, rewards and punishments and a state devoted to agriculture and war.

Later ages read the story in different ways. Han writers, living under the dynasty that replaced Qin, were often hostile to it, though Yuri Pines argues that some distortions in the Shiji's account of Qin came from the Qin records Sima Qian used. Victoria Tin-bor Hui challenges the view that China was destined to be a unified empire, pointing out that this was once a system of sovereign territorial states similar to early modern Europe. In Japan, the same term, Sengoku (戦国), is used for the age of civil wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Ancient texts give enormous figures. The Shiji credits Qin with 82,000 enemy heads at Xiuyu (dated 318 or 317 BCE in different chapters) and 240,000 at Yique in 293 BCE, counts 450,000 Zhao soldiers killed or captured at Changping, and says that Wang Jian took 600,000 men against Chu. Such numbers are repeated in modern popular histories.

None of these figures can be checked against independent records. Qin awarded ranks for enemy heads (Han Feizi quotes Lord Shang's law: ‘whoever cuts off one head is promoted one rank’), so its armies counted heads, and Sima Qian drew much of his Qin history from Qin's own records. Historians disagree about how far the round totals can be trusted, although the sources consistently show warfare growing dramatically in scale and cost.

Changping is a useful test case. The Shiji figure was written about a century and a half after the battle, and the story of the mass killing of prisoners is told in a highly dramatic form. Yet human remains are real: bones have been found in the area several times, and investigators have linked some of them tentatively to the battle. Archaeology may confirm large-scale killing without confirming the exact number.

Political scientists and sociologists have also used these wars to test general theories. Victoria Tin-bor Hui compared the Warring States system with early modern Europe to ask why China ended in a single empire while Europe remained divided; Edgar Kiser and Yong Cai argued that a long period of severe warfare, by weakening the aristocracy, explains Qin's precocious bureaucratisation, a claim criticised by Dingxin Zhao. These debates depend heavily on how far the traditional narratives can be trusted.

For the Spring and Autumn period the main narrative source is the Zuo zhuan, a detailed narrative attached to the terse Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu; its year-by-year account ends in 468 BCE, with a closing passage on the fall of the Zhi house in 453 BCE. The Guoyu covers similar ground state by state. For the Warring States, the Zhanguo ce preserves speeches and anecdotes of persuaders, many of them literary rather than documentary. Sima Qian's Shiji, completed around 100 BCE, combines the Qin records with many other materials, including anecdotes later collected in the Zhanguo ce, which the Han archivist Liu Xiang compiled some decades after Sima Qian. As Yuri Pines notes, for the two and a half centuries after the Zuo zhuan narrative the Shiji is the only surviving narrative history, and its Warring States chapters contain many lapses in chronology.

These sources disagree. The Shiji says Sun Wu helped Wu ‘break mighty Chu in the west and enter Ying’, but the Zuo zhuan, the earliest account of Boju, does not mention him. Different chapters of the Shiji disagree about which states joined the coalition against Qi in 284 BCE, the sequence of events in Qin's conquest of Chu, and the date of the battle of Xiuyu. Maling is dated to either 342 or 341 BCE. The start of the Warring States is placed at different steps: Sima Qian's Table of the Six States begins with the first year of King Yuan of Zhou, and modern periodisations use 476 or 475 BCE; others use the destruction of the Zhi in 453 BCE, and Sima Guang's Zizhi tongjian begins with the recognition of the Three Jin in 403 BCE.

Exact dates are rare. The chronicles give years by the reigns of rulers, and sometimes months and days in local calendars that differed from state to state. Converting such dates to Western calendar months requires assumptions about each state's calendar, so modern works that give precise Western calendar dates should be treated with caution. Years are often more reliable than reconstructed calendar dates for these events.

Finally, the story is told mostly from the courts' point of view. The farmers conscripted into mass armies, the civilians of flooded cities such as Jinyang and Daliang, and the peoples of the southern and northern frontiers appear only in passing. Modern historians increasingly use archaeology and excavated texts to recover their experience.