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TheGonghe Regency (Chinese:共和;pinyin:Gònghé) was aninterregnum period inChinese history from 841 BC[a] to 828 BC, afterKing Li of Zhou was exiled by his nobles during the Compatriots Rebellion[zh], when the people rioted against their old corrupt king. It lasted until the ascension of King Li's son,King Xuan of Zhou.
King Li of Zhou was a corrupt and decadent ruler. To pay for his pleasures and vices, King Li raised taxes and caused misery among his subjects. It is said that he barred the commoners from profiting from communal forests and lakes, and instated a new law which allowed him to punish anyone, by death, who dared to speak against him. King Li's tyrannical rule soon forced many peasants and soldiers all around Zhou China into revolt. Li was sent into exile at a place called Zhi near modernLinfen (842 BC), his son was taken by one of his ministers and hidden.[1]
When King Li died in exile in 828 BC, power was passed to his son, theKing Xuan of Zhou.[2]
According to theHan dynasty historianSima Qian, who interpretedgonghe as 'joint harmony' in hisRecords of the Grand Historian: during the Gonghe Regency the Zhou dynasty was ruled jointly by two dukes, theDuke Ding of Zhou [zh] and theDuke Mu of Shao [zh], hence effectively transforming the state into acoregency.[3]
Later discoveries proved this incorrect. According to theBamboo Annals, an archaeologically unearthed text discovered in antiquity but postdating Sima Qian, the Gonghe Regency was a period in which the Zhou dynasty was ruled by a single person—Gongbo He (共伯和; Elder He of the Gong lineage).[4] This reading has been fully corroborated by an independent archaeologically unearthed text known as theXinian (繫年).[4]
The first year of the Gonghe Regency, 841 BC, is highly significant in ancient Chinese history, in that Sima Qian was able to construct a year-by-year chronology back to that point, but he and subsequent historians were unable to confidently date any earlier events in Chinese history. Sima himself found the information about earlier dates in his sources to be unreliable and contradictory and so chose not to adopt them in his work. The government of thePeople's Republic of China sponsored theXia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project, a multidisciplinary project that sought to give better estimates for dates prior to 841 BC, but the project's draft report, published in 2000,has been criticized by various scholars.
When encountering the Western term "republic", theJapanese drew parallels with the Gonghe Regency ofChinese history, and began using the term共和国 (kyouwakoku, literally "shared harmony country", analogous to "commonwealth") to describe such non-monarchical systems. Thissemantic shift would later bereborrowed intoChinese. It is worth noting however, that the term民國 ("people's state", literally "people's country", read asmínguó,minkoku andmin'guk inChinese,Japanese andKorean respectively) is used when referring to theRepublic of China andKorea (but not thePeople's Republic of China or theDemocratic People's Republic of Korea, which use the regular word for "republic").
Gonghe Regency | ||
| Preceded by | Regent of China 841–828 BC | Succeeded by |