The Shang culture still lacked certain things that were to become typical of “Chinese” civilization.  The family system was not yet the strong patriarchal system of the later Chinese.  The religion, too, in spite of certain other influences, was still a religion of agrarian fertility.  And although Shang society was strongly stratified and showed some tendencies to develop a feudal system, feudalism was still very primitive.  Although the Shang script was the precursor of later Chinese script, it seemed to have contained many words which later disappeared, and we are not sure whether Shang language was the same as the language of Chou time.  With the Chou period, however, we enter a period in which everything which was later regarded as typically “Chinese” began to emerge.

During the time of the Shang dynasty the Chou formed a small realm in the west, at first in central Shensi, an area which even in much later times was the home of many “non-Chinese” tribes.  Before the beginning of the eleventh century B.C. they must have pushed into eastern Shensi, due to pressures of other tribes which may have belonged to the Turkish ethnic group.  However, it is also possible that their movement was connected with pressures from Indo-European groups.  An analysis of their tribal composition at the time of the conquest seems to indicate that the ruling house of the Chou was related to the Turkish group, and that the population consisted mainly of Turks and Tibetans.  Their culture was closely related to that of Yang-shao, the previously described painted-pottery culture, with, of course, the progress brought by time.  They had bronze weapons and, especially, the war-chariot.  Their eastward migration, however, brought them within the zone of the Shang culture, by which they were strongly influenced, so that the Chou culture lost more and more of its original character and increasingly resembled the Shang culture.  The Chou were also brought into the political sphere of the Shang, as shown by the fact that marriages took place between the ruling houses of Shang and Chou, until the Chou state became nominally dependent on the Shang state in the form of a dependency with special prerogatives.  Meanwhile the power of the Chou state steadily grew, while that of the Shang state diminished more and more through the disloyalty of its feudatories and through wars in the East.  Finally, about 1028 B.C., the Chou ruler, named Wu Wang ("the martial king"), crossed his eastern frontier and pushed into central Honan.  His army was formed by an alliance between various tribes, in the same way as happened again and again in the building up of the armies of the rulers of the steppes.  Wu Wang forced a passage across the Yellow River and annihilated the Shang army.  He pursued its vestiges as far as the capital, captured the last emperor of the Shang, and killed him.  Thus was the Chou dynasty founded, and with it we begin the actual history of China.  The Chou brought to the Shang culture strong elements of Turkish and also Tibetan culture, which were needed for the release of such forces as could create a new empire and maintain it through thousands of years as a cultural and, generally, also a political unit.