Aristocrats got their money from the land they owned. When the father died they gave their land and power to their sons. China’s aristocratic families owned estates. Walls went around their houses to keep out bandits. Aristocrats did not farm their own land. Instead, farmers share-cropped it. The aristocrats became very rich.
Farmers worked on the aristocrats' farms. They grew millet, wheat, and rice, and raised cattle, sheep, chicken, and pigs. The farmers worshiped many gods and goddesses so that everything would go as planned. They also worshiped their ancestors, and burnt pictures of things they would need. Nine out of ten Chinese were farmers. They lived in simple houses inside village walls. Most farmers owned a small piece of land where they grew food for their family. The farmers paid taxes. They also had to work one month of each year on government projects like building …show more content…
The merchant social class included shopkeepers, traders, and bankers. Merchants lived in towns.
They provided goods and services to the landowners. Many merchants were very rich, but landowners and farmers still looked down on them. Chinese leaders thought that government officials should not think about money, so merchants were not allowed to have government jobs.
Their language was made of pictographs and characters, and two or more pictographs makes an ideograph. They had 2,500 characters (characters are their letters).
The family name came first because family was very important.The family was the basic building block of Chinese society.
China had dynasties, two of them were, The Shang and The Zhou dynasties.
The Shang dynasty's rulers known as the Shang became powerful because they had land and strong armies. Shang kings armies wore bronze armor. Shang built the first big cities, and one of them was Annieg