Zhou dynasty
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The Zhou dynasty ruled China from about 1046 to 256 BCE, the longest in Chinese history, and it bequeathed the ideas that shaped the next two thousand years. King Wu of Zhou defeated the last Shang king at Muye, and the regent the duke of Zhou justified the change with the mandate of heaven, a doctrine that heaven favoured a virtuous ruler and withdrew its support from a bad one, which explained dynastic turnover without a genealogy of conquest. Power was shared with relatives and allies enfeoffed across the plains, each lord owing troops and grain: the classic feudal order. From about 770 BCE, when the capital moved east to Luoyang after invaders sacked Hao, royal authority declined and the states fought one another in the spring and autumn and then the warring states periods. Iron ploughs, the crossbow and cash coinage appeared, and rival courts patronised the hundred schools: Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Mozi and the legalists all wrote in these centuries. The last king was deposed by the state of Qin in 256 BCE, but the dynasty's institutions, its classics and the names it gave its people survived it. Its bronze ritual vessels and its written classics were copied for centuries.