The Chou officially abolished human sacrifices, especially since, as
former pastoralists, they knew of better means of employing prisoners of
war than did the more agrarian Shang. The Chou used Shang and other
slaves as domestic servants for their numerous nobility, and Shang serfs
as farm labourers on their estates. They seem to have regarded the land
under their control as "state land" and all farmers as "serfs". A slave,
here, must be defined as an individual, a piece of property, who was
excluded from membership in human society but, in later legal texts, was
included under domestic animals and immobile property, while serfs as a
class depended upon another class and had certain rights, at least the
right to work on the land. They could change their masters if the land
changed its master, but they could not legally be sold individually.
Thus, the following, still rather hypothetical, picture of the land
system of the early Chou time emerges: around the walled towns of the
feudal lords and sub-lords, always in the plains, was "state land" which
produced millet and more and more wheat. Cultivation was still largely
"shifting", so that the serfs in groups cultivated more or less
standardized plots for a year or more and then shifted to other plots.
During the growing season they lived in huts on the fields; during the
winter in the towns in adobe houses. In this manner the yearly life
cycle was divided into two different periods. The produce of the serfs
supplied the lords, their dependants and the farmers themselves.
Whenever the lord found it necessary, the serfs had to perform also
other services for the lord. Farther away from the towns were the
villages of the "natives", nominally also subjects of the lord. In most
parts of eastern China, these, too, were agriculturists. They
acknowledged their dependence by sending "gifts" to the lord in the
town. Later these gifts became institutionalized and turned into a form
of tax. The lord's serfs, on the other hand, tended to settle near the