certain rights, at least the right to work on the land.  They could change their masters if the land changed its master, but they could not legally be sold individually.  Thus, the following, still rather hypothetical, picture of the land system of the early Chou time emerges:  around the walled towns of the feudal lords and sub-lords, always in the plains, was “state land” which produced millet and more and more wheat.  Cultivation was still largely “shifting”, so that the serfs in groups cultivated more or less standardized plots for a year or more and then shifted to other plots.  During the growing season they lived in huts on the fields; during the winter in the towns in adobe houses.  In this manner the yearly life cycle was divided into two different periods.  The produce of the serfs supplied the lords, their dependants and the farmers themselves.  Whenever the lord found it necessary, the serfs had to perform also other services for the lord.  Farther away from the towns were the villages of the “natives”, nominally also subjects of the lord.  In most parts of eastern China, these, too, were agriculturists.  They acknowledged their dependence by sending “gifts” to the lord in the town.  Later these gifts became institutionalized and turned into a form of tax.  The lord’s serfs, on the other hand, tended to settle near the fields in villages of their own because, with growing urban population, the distances from the town to many of the fields became too great.  It was also at this time of new settlements that a more intensive cultivation with a fallow system began.  At latest from the sixth century B.C. on, the distinctions between both land systems became unclear; and the pure serf-cultivation, called by the old texts the “well-field system” because eight cultivating families used one common well, disappeared in practice.

The actual structure of early Chou administration is difficult to ascertain.  The “Duke of Chou”, brother of the first ruler, Wu Wang, later regent during the minority of Wu Wang’s son, and certainly one of the most influential persons of this time, was the alleged creator of the book Chou-li which contains a detailed table of the bureaucracy of the country.  However, we know now from inscriptions that the bureaucracy at the beginning of the Chou period was not much more developed than in late Shang time.  The Chou-li gave an ideal picture of a bureaucratic state, probably abstracted from actual conditions in feudal states several centuries later.

The Chou capital, at Sian, was a twin city.  In one part lived the master-race of the Chou with the imperial court, in the other the subjugated population.  At the same time, as previously mentioned, the Chou built a second capital, Loyang, in the present province of Honan.  Loyang was just in the middle of the new state, and for the purposes of Heaven-worship it was regarded as the centre of the universe, where it was essential that the emperor should reside.