The Spring and Autumn Period

The Spring and Autumn Period, 771 to 476 BCE, named after the Spring and Autumn Annals, a chronicle traditionally attributed to Confucius that records the era, marks the first half of the long decline of the Zhou dynasty's central authority in China, during which the Zhou king retained only ceremonial and ritual primacy while real power fragmented among dozens of nominally subordinate regional states that fought, allied and absorbed one another. The period nonetheless produced an extraordinary flowering of Chinese philosophy, as thinkers responded to the era's political instability by developing rival schools of thought on how society should be ordered, most famously Confucius (551-479 BCE), whose teachings on ethics, ritual and good governance would shape Chinese civilization for the following two and a half millennia, alongside the roughly contemporary Laozi, traditionally credited as the founder of Daoism. Warfare during the period was still governed by chivalric codes and limited in scale compared to what followed. The period is generally considered to end around 476 BCE as the surviving states consolidated into a smaller number of much larger, more ruthlessly competitive powers, opening the Warring States Period.