Sucessão das Dinastias ao Longo da História

This was an age of sweeping change. The long history of this ancient land was written in exclamation points.

In the waning days of the Xia Dynasty, China’s first dynasty, the feudal lord Tang of Shang led his great armies to a decisive victory over Jie of Xia at Mingtiao, founding the Great Shang Dynasty, China’s second. Legend says that among the descendants of Qi, the mythical figure born when a lively and alluring maiden of the Rong tribe swallowed the egg of the divine black bird of destiny, was Tang of Shang himself, once a vassal of the Xia. Having established the Great Shang Dynasty, he at last enjoyed boundless power and supreme glory.

Yet every dynasty has its rise and fall. Six hundred years later, the throne of Shang passed into the hands of King Zhou of Shang, Di Xin, a man of unrestrained luxury and savage cruelty, despised by all under heaven and therefore given the posthumous title of Zhou by later generations. King Wen of Zhou could be called a sage ruler comparable to Tang of Shang. At the Battle of Muye, King Wu of Zhou, the son of King Wen, defeated the descendant of Tang of Shang, King Zhou of Shang, and founded the Great Zhou Dynasty. The Zhou Dynasty endured two ages, the Western Zhou and the Eastern Zhou, and in the Western Zhou its decline began because of one event.

On a certain day in the eleventh year of King You of Zhou, in 771 B.C., Haojing, the capital of the Western Zhou, once a place of peace and joy in the eyes of the world, had now fallen into the chaos of war. Men and women, old and young alike, wept as the common peop