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Zi Chan
Chief minister of Zheng who reorganised land and military levies, kept the village schools open to criticism and cast the state's penal code in bronze
In a council hall, a long table holds an unrolled map scroll, a brass-cornered chest and a brush pot, with tall-backed chairs around it and a bronze lamp at the left; a figure stands with their back turned on the balcony at the right, with palace roofs beyond.
Also known as Gongsun Qiao · Cheng Zi
Zichan, personal name Gongsun Qiao, was a grandson of Duke Mu of Zheng and a son of Prince Fa, whose courtesy name Ziguo gave him the alternative name Guo Qiao. In 543 BCE he succeeded Zipi as head of Zheng's government, fixing the bounds of town and country, marking fields with boundaries and ditches and grouping households into units of five. When people gathered at the village schools to criticise the government and someone proposed pulling the schools down, he refused, saying he could learn from what was said there. In 538 he raised the military levy on the land, and two years later he had the penal code cast on bronze cauldrons; when Shuxiang of Jin wrote to condemn this, he replied that he was trying to save his own age. Between the great powers Jin and Chu he argued Zheng's case at one interstate meeting after another. He died in 522, and Confucius, on hearing the news, wept and called him a man who carried on the love of the ancients.
Life and times
Dates Birth unknown–522 BCE