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A painting of a gentry scholar with two courtesans, by Tang Yin, c. 1500. The four occupations (simplified Chinese: 士农工商; traditional Chinese: 士農工商; pinyin: Shì nóng gōng shāng), or "four categories of the people" (Chinese: 四民; pinyin: sì mín), [1] [2] was an occupation classification used in ancient China by either Confucian or Legalist scholars as far back as the ...
The social structure of China has an expansive history which begins from the feudal society of Imperial China to the contemporary era. [1] There was a Chinese nobility, beginning with the Zhou dynasty. However, after the Song dynasty, the powerful government offices were not hereditary.
Before the Three Departments and Six Ministries, the central administrative structure of the Qin and Han dynasties was the Three Lords and Nine Ministers (三 公 九 卿, Sāngōng Jiǔqīng) system. Nonetheless, even then, offices which fulfilled the same functions as the later three departments were already in existence.
The Zhou fengjian system was termed as being 'protobureaucratic' [29] and bureaucracy existed alongside feudalism, while in Europe, bureaucracy emerged as a counter system to the feudal order. Therefore, according to some historians, the term "feudalism" is not an exact fit for the Western Zhou political structure [ 2 ] but it can be considered ...
The Chinese ritual and music system (Chinese: 礼乐制度; pinyin: Lǐ yuè zhìdù) is a social system that originated in the Zhou dynasty to maintain the social order. [1] Together with the patriarchal system , it constituted the social system of the entire ancient China and had a great influence on the politics, culture, art and thought of ...
In ancient China, the patriarchal clan system (Chinese: 宗法; pinyin: zōngfǎ; lit. 'clan law') of the Zhou cultural sphere was a primary means of group relations and power stratification prior to the Western Zhou and through the first half of the Eastern Zhou dynasty. This method of social organisation underlay and prefigured the political ...
The feudal social structure came to divide ordinary people into four categories, with scholar-officials at its top level, this structure is another important institutional basis of the formation and prosperity of scholar-officials. The order of these Four Occupations were scholar-officials, farmers, artisans, and craftsmen/merchants.
Confucian or Legalist scholars in ancient China—perhaps as far back as the late Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BC)—categorized all socioeconomic groups into four broad and hierarchical occupations (in descending order): the shi (scholars, or gentry), the nong (peasant farmers), the gong (artisans and craftsmen), and the shang (merchants). [1]