Around 1066 BC a duke kingdom Zhou rose to power and overthrew Shang. The Zhou perfected the Shang court ritual and ancestor worship into a hierarchally patriarchal clan system which essentially lasted into modern times. Zhou people were as superstitious as Shang people and tried to predict the future by grouping and calculating the stalks of a poisonous plant achillea sibirica. The Zhou idea of divination ended in I Ching, or Book of Changes, but their activity records, which were likely done on wood slips, have not survived. What survived from this period are hundreds of inscribed bronze vessels. The Zhou inscriptions are lengthy, which can be several hundred characters long, recording official appointments, sacrificing rituals, wars and law suits. Cast into the inner face of a vessel, these inscriptions are not merely historical documents; they are evidences of a new function of communicating the political and social achievements of their owners. As the vessels were retained in ancestral temples, the inscriptions would recall the merits to future generations.

Seal script.   The first Chinese calligraphy style is pronounced 'zhuan' in Chinese, literally means 'passing on'. There are two developing phases in this style - big seal script, which was named after Big Seal Characters, the Zhou children's primers, and small seal script, the standardized style of the Qin. Big seal script in general includes oracle inscription; in its narrowest sense it refers to the font when the primers were compiled. Taking the narrowest sense, these characters are less pictographic than before, regular in form, evenly aligned in columns and rows and, above all, brush written. This brush, no matter how faintly it demonstrates itself on a bronze vessel, was to convert physical act of handwriting from mere craft to a superb means of self-expression. Seal style is difficult to read for modern Chinese, but has remained the principal script employed on seals for the last two thousand years.

In 771 BC an invasion of a nomadic tribe from northwest forced the Zhou to move its capital from Xian east to Luoyang, which divided the Zhou into two phases - Western and Eastern Zhou. The Zhou began to decline after this event and before long it dissolved into a number of warring states. The political turbulence during the second phase of the Zhou history was accompanied by an intellectual upheaval in various schools of thought. While Confucius, 551 - 479 BC, strove to analyze the troubles of his day by affirming the virtues of Western Zhou rites which were abandoned by the warring states, his contemporary Laozi, the exponent of Taoism, favored inaction and withdrawal from society. None of them, however, affected the art of handwriting yet until the reverence in Confucianism during the Han and Taoism during the Jin dynasty.

As the Zhou was split into small kingdoms by major periods of war and social difficulties, Chinese writing moved into differently directions, an ancient example of modern day mainland China and Taiwan. Indeed, we find an increasing variety of regional styles as each of the feudal lords assumed the right to have his own way to write. So significant was the difference that when the earliest manuscript of Confucian Scriptures, which were compiled in the state of Lu, were found at the saint residence during a construction in 155 BC, few scholars could read them. What shared in these characters, however, is their worldly rashness - the objects that bear inscriptions were the items in daily use.

Writing variations in 1. Qin, 2. Wu, 3. Qi and 4. Chu.

Made for Fu Chai, King of Wu.

Chen Man of the State of Qi dares not forget his forefathers' achievements. This vessel is made in memory of his father Xian Shu. May later generations treasure and use it.

The Mound, “I love her; I am hopeless, though.”