divided into two classes, and only privileged ones were permitted to
live in the capital, the others being required to remain in their
domains. At first, the area was controlled by a "minister" of the
prince, an official of the state; later the area remained under normal
administration and the feudal prince kept only an empty title; the tax
income of a certain number of families of an area was assigned to him
and transmitted to him by normal administrative channels. Often, the
number of assigned families was fictional in that the actual income was
from far fewer families. This system differs from the Near Eastern
system in which also no actual enfeoffment took place, but where
deserving men were granted the right to collect themselves the taxes of
a certain area with certain numbers of families.

Soon after this the whole government was given the shape which it
continued to have until A.D. 220, and which formed the point of
departure for all later forms of government. At the head of the state
was the emperor, in theory the holder of absolute power in the state
restricted only by his responsibility towards "Heaven", i.e. he had to
follow and to enforce the basic rules of morality, otherwise "Heaven"
would withdraw its "mandate", the legitimation of the emperor's rule,
and would indicate this withdrawal by sending natural catastrophes. Time
and again we find emperors publicly accusing themselves for their faults
when such catastrophes occurred; and to draw the emperor's attention to
actual or made-up calamities or celestrial irregularities was one way to
criticize an emperor and to force him to change his behaviour. There are
two other indications which show that Chinese emperors--excepting a few
individual cases--at least in the first ten centuries of gentry society
were not despots: it can be proved that in some fields the
responsibility for governmental action did not lie with the emperor but
with some of his ministers. Secondly, the emperor was bound by the law