This upper class in the garrisons formed the nobility; it was sharply divided from the indigenous population around the towns The conquerors called the population “the black-haired people”, and themselves “the hundred families”.  The rest of the town populations consisted often of urban Shang people:  Shang noble families together with their bondsmen and serfs had been given to Chou fiefholders.  Such forced resettlements of whole populations have remained typical even for much later periods.  By this method new cities were provided with urban, refined people and, most important, with skilled craftsmen and businessmen who assisted in building the cities and in keeping them alive.  Some scholars believe that many resettled Shang urbanites either were or became businessmen; incidentally, the same word “Shang” means “merchant”, up to the present time.  The people of the Shang capital lived on and even attempted a revolt in collaboration with some Chou people.  The Chou rulers suppressed this revolt, and then transferred a large part of this population to Loyang.  They were settled there in a separate community, and vestiges of the Shang population were still to be found there in the fifth century A.D.:  they were entirely impoverished potters, still making vessels in the old style.

3 Fusion of Chou and Shang

The conquerors brought with them, for their own purposes to begin with, their rigid patriarchate in the family system and their cult of Heaven (t’ien), in which the worship of sun and stars took the principal place; a religion most closely related to that of the Turkish peoples and derived from them.  Some of the Shang popular deities, however, were admitted into the official Heaven-worship.  Popular deities became “feudal lords” under the Heaven-god.  The Shang conceptions of the soul were also admitted into the Chou religion:  the human body housed two souls, the personality-soul and the life-soul.  Death meant the separation of the souls from the body, the life-soul also slowly dying.  The personality-soul, however, could move about freely and lived as long as there were people who remembered it and kept it from hunger by means of sacrifices.  The Chou systematized this idea and made it into the ancestor-worship that has endured down to the present time.

The Chou officially abolished human sacrifices, especially since, as former pastoralists, they knew of better means of employing prisoners of war than did the more agrarian Shang.  The Chou used Shang and other slaves as domestic servants for their numerous nobility, and Shang serfs as farm labourers on their estates.  They seem to have regarded the land under their control as “state land” and all farmers as “serfs”.  A slave, here, must be defined as an individual, a piece of property, who was excluded from membership in human society but, in later legal texts, was included under domestic animals and immobile property, while serfs as a class depended upon another class and had