Zhou Power Fragments: The Spring and Autumn Period Begins

The event

In 771 BC the Zhou capital was sacked by nomadic Quanrong tribesmen allied with a disaffected Zhou noble, and the king was killed. His son relocated the court east to Luoyang the following year, beginning the 'Eastern Zhou' period. The Zhou king retained ceremonial and religious prestige — only he could legitimately perform the sacrifices tied to the Mandate of Heaven — but real power passed to dozens of increasingly independent regional states.

The era takes its name from the Spring and Autumn Annals, a terse year-by-year chronicle of the state of Lu covering these centuries, later traditionally credited to Confucius as editor. It was marked by shifting alliances and chivalric warfare among aristocratic chariot-warriors, even as the larger states slowly absorbed their smaller neighbors.

A nominal central authority commanding little real obedience, and the moral confusion that came with it, set the stage for the great flowering of Chinese philosophy in the centuries that followed, as thinkers searched urgently for a way to restore order and virtue to a fractured society. It is not unlike Israel's own era of the judges, when 'everyone did what was right in his own eyes' (Judges 21:25) in the absence of a righteous king — until God provided one.

Dating

The 770 BC start — the year the Zhou court fled east to Luoyang — is secure. The end date is a convention, and sources genuinely differ: the Spring and Autumn Annals (from which the period takes its name) actually cover 722–481 BC; 476 BC is the traditional Chinese cutoff (the year before Sima Qian begins his Warring States chronology); and some historians instead end the period at 453 BC (the de facto partition of Jin) or 403 BC (its formal recognition). All appear in reputable sources.