[11][5][a] Therefore, King Nan lacked any personal territory and was effectively under the control of the local feudal lords, essentially relying on their charity.
On one side, the feudal states largely ignored the king's activities and adopted royal titles and rituals for themselves, while the Zhou dynasty's fall generally received meagre contemporary coverage and attention.
[10][12] On the other side, recent epigraphic discoveries and some accounts in the Records of the Grand Historian and Strategies of the Warring States suggest that until his death, King Nan was still respected as the Son of Heaven.
[12] Either way, the last king of Zhou managed to preserve his weakened dynasty through diplomacy and conspiracies for fifty-nine years until his deposition by the Qin state and death in 256 BC.
On another occasion, King Nan was summoned to Qin's royal court to debate the question of attacking the Han city of Nanyang.
In 273 BC Ma Fan developed a plan to protect the Nine Tripod Cauldrons of Yu the Great representing royal authority by enlisting the help of King Anxi of Wei, who constructed a fortification wall for Zhou.
[8] In order to survive, Nan and his officials even used to function as a spy for Qin in explaining the military changes in the state of Han, Wei and Zhao.
[16] Likewise, the scholars of Qin wrote in the Lüshi Chunqiu: "Nowadays, the house of Zhou has been destroyed, [the line of] the Sons of Heaven has been severed.