About 4600 years ago, a war between the Yellow Emperor tribe, the Yandi tribe and the Xuanyu tribe in Zhuolu shaped the Chinese nation with the Yanhuang tribe as the core to integrate the Qiang, Yi, Miao, Li and other clan tribal groups. After the Yellow Emperor, the position of the leader of the Huaxia tribal alliance was inherited in the form of Chan Rang: the Yellow Emperor Chan was located in the surname of Shao Hao; Shao Hao Zen was located in the grandson of the Yellow Emperor; after the Yellow Emperor, the throne was inherited by the son of the Zhao clan, Emperor Zhao; The Emperor Was located in the son of Emperor Zhi; Emperor Zhi Zen was located in the surname of Yi Qi; Yao Zen was located in the Shun surname of Yao; and Shun Zen was located in the surname of Yu.
The position of head of the tribal confederation during this period was not necessarily passed on between fathers and sons and brothers with the same surname. This system of succession to the status of chiefs is called the Zen system. This period is known as the era of "public world". Legend has it that during his reign, Yao lived in thatched huts and ate brown rice like his people, wore coarse linen clothes in summer, and only added a deerskin to protect himself from the cold in winter, and his clothes and shoes were never changed until they were torn. Yao's spirit of thrift and thrift, and sharing weal and woe with the people made the people support him. When Yao got older, he had to start thinking about the heir.
At that time, some people recommended Yao's son Danzhu to succeed to the throne, but Yao thought that his son was too rude to convince the public, so he convened a tribal alliance council for everyone to discuss the issue of succession. At first, everyone recommended the carp of the Xia tribe. Yao asked Him to control the flood in order to see if He had the talent to be the leader. Although the carp tried every means to block the flood, they still found nothing in the end. Yao banished the incompetent Carp and then asked everyone to renegotiate the successor. This time, everyone recommended Shun, and then Yao conducted a three-year inspection of Shun.
Shun is regarded as the originator of Chinese moral culture. The "Records of History" records this: "The mingde of the world began with Yu Shun." Although Shun was a descendant of Shun, their family had been a commoner by the time of Shun's generation. Shun's mother died when he was very young, and Shun's father, Shu Shu, married his wife and gave birth to a son named Xiang. Since remarriage, he has always favored the queen wife and the image born of the queen wife. Shun's family was often ostracized by his father, stepmother, and younger brother. However, Shun did not lose his filial piety to his parents and was very kind to his brother.
Legend has it that Shun was famous for his filial piety at the age of 20. When Yao asked everyone to elect an heir, Shun was recommended. Yao married his two daughters to Shun to test his character and abilities. Shun not only made the second daughter live in harmony with the whole family, but also showed outstanding talent and noble personality strength in all aspects. As long as it is a place where Shun labors, the fashion of courtesy has arisen. Wherever he went, he was followed, so "one year he lived in Chengju (Ju is a village), two years into Yi, and three years in Chengdu (four counties as the capital)". When Yao learned of these circumstances, he gave Shun's silk clothes (fine ge cloth clothes), qin, cattle and sheep, and barns.
Shun's receipt of these rewards caused jealousy among the three of them, The One Who, the Step-Wife of the Emperor, and the Elephant. They gathered together to discuss killing Shunhou and seizing the property. He asks Shun to repair the roof of the barn, but sets fire to the barn below. Shun only survived by jumping from the room with two wings. Later, He asked Shun to dig a well, but when the well was dug very deeply, He and the Elephant filled in the soil on it. They wanted to use this trick to bury Shun alive in the well. Shun dug a passage next to the wellbore and ran out. After this incident, Shun was as filial as ever to his parents, friendly to his brothers, and more sincere and cautious than before.
Yao officially passed the position of chief to Shun after completing his inspection of Shun. During Shun's reign, he had Bayuan manage the land, Bakai govern the indoctrination, deeds administer the civil, Yiguan Shan Lin Chuanze, Bo Yi manage sacrifices, and Gao Tao be tortured, thus improving the social management system. Both Yao and Shun had one thing to worry about: the Central Plains were flooding and the people were displaced. In that year, Yao had put Cang in charge of controlling the flood, and after Cang's failure, Cang's son Yu succeeded his father to continue to control the water. Yu changed his father's method of blindly blocking the flood and instead adopted the method of dredging the river channel according to snobbery.
After 13 years of hard work, Yu finally completed the cause of water control. In the process of controlling the water, Yu divided the world into Ji, Yan, Qing, Xu, Yang, Jing, Yu, Liang, and Yongjiu prefectures according to the situation of mountains and rivers. Water control is a work with extremely high requirements on human, material and financial resources, so Yu has formed a set of scheduling mechanisms for various resources in the process of water control. Because Yu freed the people from the ravages of the flood, the people supported this water hero from the bottom of their hearts. Controlling the water enabled Yu to gain the hearts and minds of the people, gain the right to dispatch various resources, and become familiar with the situation of the mountains and rivers under the world.
Yu was able to naturally become the new leader of the Huaxia tribal alliance after Shun's reign by virtue of his great feats in water control. When Yu was older, he would have to choose a new leader according to the custom. Everyone elected Boyi, who had assisted Dayu in ruling the water, but after Yu's death, Yu's son Qi directly took the throne. The Xia Dynasty was born as the first hereditary dynasty in Chinese history. Since then, the hereditary system of the throne has replaced the Zen system, and the "public world" has become "family world". But was such a big change done in the calm of the wind and waves?
Xia Qi's succession to the throne means that the hereditary replacement of the Zen system by the throne has since become a normal phenomenon: the throne will be passed on from generation to generation in Xia Qi's family, and then people of other tribes will no longer have access to the throne. This, of course, will provoke opposition from other tribes that feel their interests are at stake. However, against the opposition, everyone still has to weigh their own weight. During Yu's reign, the Xia tribe had already accumulated a large amount of private property. The Xia tribe used these assets to hire warriors to form a powerful armed force. Everyone's verbal objection to Xia Qi's attack on the throne was mostly ineffective, and then they went with the flow.
However, there was a tribe called you the Youshi clan who had to use force to oppose Xia Qi's destruction of the Zen concession system. The Youhu clan did not join the Huaxia tribal alliance for a long time: during the reign of Dayu, he had consulted the Youhu clan, and the Youhu clan had to join the Huaxia tribal alliance as a vassal after the defeat. It is precisely because the Youhu clan only joined the Huaxia tribal alliance during the Dayu period, so many old members of the tribal alliance still regard it as barbarians. Kai used this to portray himself as a Chinese orthodoxy—he claimed to be inheriting his father's legacy to continue to conquer the Youhu clan.
Kai did win the support of many tribes through this kind of political propaganda, so he was able to defeat the Yu clan in a place called Gan. After the destruction of the Youhu clan, he returned to the capital Yang Zhai and convened an alliance meeting between the tribal chiefs. The so-called alliance meeting is to gather everyone to worship the ancestors of heaven and earth, and at the same time, the convener must also set up a banquet to entertain the guests who come to the meeting. This may be the first time in Chinese history that it has been written into the canonical history. Xia Qi made the tribal chiefs recognize their status as co-lords in the world at this dinner called "Juntai Enjoyment".
The core point of the previous era of "public heaven" was to realize the power change of the virtuous through Zen. In the Book of Rites, "The journey of the great avenue is also the public under the heavens." Selecting the wise and the able, and preaching faith and cultivating harmony" refers to this state. At this time, whoever is the boss is elected by everyone: whoever thinks he is virtuous will elect whomever he thinks is virtuous, and whoever thinks he is not virtuous will be deposed. This may seem fair and reasonable, but with the development of productive forces, social affairs have become complicated. It is increasingly difficult to reach a broad consensus on the criteria for evaluating "meritocrats".
Primitive clan tribes have far more demands for survival than they have for development: whoever can lead their people to grab more territory and get more food is the one who will not let go. For example, Dayu's actions of controlling floods and leading troops to fight against Sanmiao were regarded as acts of meritocracy by the clansmen. But when the problem of survival is basically solved, a variety of appeals appear. One of the big differences between humans and animals is that people are in constant development: when they can eat enough today, they think that they can eat fish and meat tomorrow; today they can put on clothes and think about whether they can design more innovative styles...
Different people will have different demands on their lives. People with different demands naturally have different judgments about the virtuous and the unwise. Since there is no set of objective criteria that can be accurately quantified, then anyone will feel that their family seems to be the most virtuous. The Zen concession system was originally designed to achieve meritocracy, but with the development of the times, it gradually became nepotism, because human nature determines that normal people are more willing to push their families to the position. Human nature determines that the Zen system of "public world" makes the ruler lack the driving force to transform the world.
Mencius once said: "Those who have permanent production have perseverance, and those who do not have permanent production have no perseverance." Some people fight for political achievements in order to gain the power, but they will be prudent after they get what they want. After all, reform and development are risky. Under the premise of the Zen system, no matter what kind of political achievements the tribal leaders had, they would eventually have to hand over their power and status to foreigners. I have been diligent all my life and I don't know who I am working hard for and who I am busy for. But what if the ruler's position of power could be passed on to his sons? In the end, the lusts of human nature triumph over the expectation of fairness.
In this way, "Family World" replaced "Gong Tianxia": from then on, Jiangshan Sheji became the permanent property of the ruler's family. The ruler's family has done its best for the family business for generations. If there is a benefit to everything, there must be a disadvantage: although the family world avoids the disputes and infighting caused by everyone's judgment of the wise and the unwise, and also solves the problem of the driving force of the ruler to transform the world, the drawbacks of the family world are also extremely obvious. Family world means that the throne can only be passed on from one family to one surname, but human nature determines that no one wants to be subordinate to others forever. Since you Xia Qi can change the Zen system to a hereditary system, why can't others replace it?
After the juntai was enjoyed, the tribal leaders had all submitted to Xia Qi on the surface, but in fact, everyone was playing their own little calculations in their hearts. Xia Qi's act of destroying the Zen concession system obviously moved the cheese of other tribes, so the dissatisfaction of these tribal leaders with Xia Qi can be imagined. When their strength was not enough to confront Xia Qi, they could only choose to endure, but the strength of this kind of thing sometimes appeared "thirty years of Hedong, thirty years of Hexi" changes. Not to mention that the leaders of other tribes were dissatisfied with Xia Qi, in fact, even within Xia Qi's family, there were people who were dissatisfied with him.
Xia Qi turned the throne into the private property of his own family, but Xia Qi did not have only one son. Conflicts soon arose between father and son over the ownership of the throne: Xia Qi's son Wuguan took the lead in raising the anti-banner against his father, and Xia Qi sent Peng Boshou to quell the Wuguan rebellion. Although the Wuguan rebellion was put down, it did not solve the problem fundamentally. The Xia Dynasty did not establish such clear rules of succession to the throne as the succession system of the eldest son of the concubine, as later dynasties did. Although the throne of the Xia Dynasty was hereditary, it was always a confused account of which son should inherit it within the family.
Later dynasties had a clear system of primogeniture and could not avoid extreme cases such as the Change of Xuanwu gate, so the Xia Dynasty, which did not have clear rules for succession to the throne, would only have more such things happening: almost every time the Xia Dynasty handed over the throne, it would trigger a complex political game between princes. After Xia Qi's death, five sons immediately fought for the throne, and eventually the eldest son, Taikang, successfully seized the throne. TaiKang was able to win the battle for the throne not because he was good, but because his opponents were worse than him. When Tai Kang took the throne, he immediately exposed his bad habits as a clumsy disciple.
TaiKang often went out hunting with his family and cronies for several months and did not return, so that the state government was not managed by anyone. Once Taikang went hunting again, and as a result, Hou Yi, the leader of the Poor Clan, took the opportunity to raise an army to capture the capital of the Xia Dynasty. Hou Yi took away Taikang and Li Taikang's younger brother Zhongkang became a puppet. At this point, the military and political power of the Xia Dynasty completely fell into the hands of Hou Yi. Zhongkang died of illness after serving as a puppet for seven years, and Houyi supported Zhongkang's son Xiang to continue to be a puppet. HouYi expelling Taikang is like a praying mantis catching cicadas, but Houyi would not have dreamed that there was a yellow finch behind.
The pretentious Houyi also began to be blessed: he went out hunting like Taikang and entrusted the affairs of the country to his cronies Han Hun. Han Huan took the opportunity to quietly develop his own power behind his back. After Han Hun's wings were full, he raised an army to kill Hou Yi and Hou Yili's puppets, but xiang,who was already pregnant with a concubine, unknowingly climbed out of the water hole under the city wall. Hou Mao was the daughter of the Yu clan, so she disguised herself as a peasant woman and fled back to her mother's house, Youzhi (present-day south of Jining, Shandong). Han Hun's twenty-first year (庚子, 2001 BC) xiang's concubine Hou Miao gave birth to a boy named ShaoKang.
Shao Kang grew up in his grandfather's house and later became the muzheng (official in charge of animal husbandry) in the country. Later, Han Huan somehow learned of Shao Kang's identity and sent his son Han Shui to take someone to you to arrest him. Upon hearing the news, ShaoKang fled to Youyu (present-day southwest of Yucheng County, Shangqiu City, Henan) to work as a cook. In the thirty-ninth year of Han Hun (五午, 1983 BC), Shao Kang was recruited as a son-in-law by the monarch Yu Si in Youyu. Yu Si also gave him Lunyi (龍邑; present-day eastern Yucheng County, Shangqiu City, Henan) and rewarded him with ten acres of fertile land and 500 soldiers. Shao Kang did not forget his father's vendetta and the humiliation of the subjugation of the country, so he assiduously practiced martial arts and made friends with warriors and sages in the world.
In the fifty-fifth year of Han Hun (甲戌, 1967 BC), the old Xia dynasty minister Bo Jing, who had fled to Youhai (the Princely States of the Xia Dynasty, northwest of pingyuan County, present-day Dezhou, Shandong), secretly contacted the remaining Clan of the Shu Andu clan to lead them to Shaokang. Shao Kang relied on these people to form a large army of restoration to declare war on Han Hun. Shao Kang sent spies to spy on Han Hun before the official war with Han Hun began. Among the spies sent by Shaokang was The Chinese and possibly the first female spy in the history of the world, Ai Ai—much earlier than the Spring and Autumn Period when Xi Shi cooperated with the Yue King to destroy Wu with beauty.
In the fifty-seventh year of Han Hun (丙子, 1965 BC), Shao Kang's restoration army attacked Han Shui's feudal affairs and killed Han Hun's eldest son, Han Shui. In the fifty-ninth year of Han Hun (戊寅, 1963 BC), Shao Kang ordered his eldest son Ji Zhu to lead an army to attack Ge Yi, and Han Hun's second son Han Xi led the army to meet the battle and was defeated by the Xia army: Shao Kang killed Han Xi and recovered Ge Yi. In the sixty years of Han Hun (己卯, 1962 BC), Shao Kang's restoration army successively conquered the two major feudal states of Han Hun, and then marched to attack Han Hun's old lair to find the capital. At this time, Han Hun, who was nearly eighty years old, was unable to fight and tear up, so he had to hide in the deep palace and survive.
Han Hun's subordinates suddenly rebelled and entered the palace when the Xia army was besieging the city. After Shao Kang led his army into the city, he slaughtered the Han Hun clan. Taikang's lost throne was restored by Shaokang after decades. At this point, the Xia Dynasty, as the first hereditary dynasty in Chinese history, was truly stable. After decades of chaotic struggle, the new system of hereditary succession has finally triumphed over the traditional old system of "Zen Concession". After the shao recovered from the throne, the national strength of the Xia Dynasty was greatly enhanced, so history called this period of Shao Kang's reign "Shao Kang Zhongxing".