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.

2 Feudalism in the new empire

A natural result of the situation thus produced was the turning of the country into a feudal state.  The conquerors were an alien minority, so that they had to march out and spread over the whole country.  Moreover, the allied tribal chieftains expected to be rewarded.  The territory to be governed was enormous, but the communications in northern China at that time were similar to those still existing not long ago in southern China—­narrow footpaths from one settlement to another.  It is very difficult to build roads in the loess of northern China; and the war-chariots that required roads had only just been introduced.  Under such conditions, the simplest way of administering the empire was to establish garrisons of the invading tribes in the various parts of the country under the command of their chieftains.  Thus separate regions of the country were distributed as fiefs.  If a former subject of the Shang surrendered betimes with the territory under his rule, or if there was one who could not be overcome by force, the Chou recognized him as a feudal lord.