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No all of of China’s sages for hire were political advisors. There were all kinds of charlatans and self-appointed scholars, including physicians who compiled texts such as the so-called Zhangjiashan Yinshu manual, with detailed descriptions of daily hygienic routines appropriate for each season of the year: for spring, for example, the manual recommends that “palace-entering” (sexual intercourse) is conducted between the evening and midnight, without excessive practice that might disturb bodily humors.
Many of these people were wildly successful, to the point that, when historian Wang Fu traced the origins of surnames that survived into his own Century AD, he found that many were surnames not of Zhou-related dukes and lords, but of secondary aristocratic houses established by ministers in various states in place of older aristocratic lineages, apparently from the last quarter of the Seventh Century BC[1].
Jie Zhitui, a musician, poet and forefather of Taoism, which became China’s dominant religious system over the next two centuries, was such an example of prominent minister . He served under Duke Wen of Jin, a region to the west of Qin that became the most important component of the Zhou dynastic arrangement for the rest of the century.
Altogether, Jie spent 19 years in exile with Wen after he faced similar hardships to those Huan of Qin had undergone, including murder attempts, civil wars against brothers, and a plot that drove one of Wen’s half-brothers to suicide[2].
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