This has been subject to considerable misunderstanding due to a philosophical attempt to project backwards in time upon the Western Zhou dynasty a systematization of noble titles where none existed.
In translation, these misunderstandings have been compounded by an enduring false equivalence between titles of Zhou nobles and those of European feudal peers, as well as inattention to context in certain use cases.
[3] The regional lords were established to provide a screen to the royal lands and exert control over culturally distinct polities and were mostly defined by that responsibility, but this was also embedded in the kinship groups.
[7] The leaders of existing Zhou cultural polities within the same ancestral temple surname as the royal house (Jī; 姬), such as Guo (虢), were rarely called Gong,[8] in which case, it also carried the meaning patriarch.
[6] Hou (侯; hòu) were the regional lords, rulers of the border states, appointed from a pool of close relatives by the early Zhou court to project force and secure the dynasty.
[11] In the old Zhou homeland, less senior members of their lineage branch referred to themselves by the appropriate birth order term: 仲; zhōng; 'second', 叔; shū; 'younger', or 季; jī; 'youngest'.
[13] Complicating matters, the rulers of some smaller polities such as Qin, Zheng, and Cao were also called Bo, in which case the term did have overtly political meaning.
[25] The new geopolitical situation put regional states and minor polities in direct contact with each other, where previously they had interacted mostly through the central government and their relation to the royal house.
[26] Alongside this development, there was precedent of Zhou kings "upgrading" noble ranks as a reward for service to the throne, giving the recipients a bit more diplomatic prestige without costing the royal house any land.
[5] Archaeologically excavated primary sources and received literature agree to a high degree of systematization and stability in noble titles during the Eastern Zhou, indicating an actual historical process.
[27] It is against this backdrop of self-organizing systematization that thinkers of the traditionalist school began to conceive of a lost ideal, a strictly graded system of noble titles and enfeoffments from the time of the early Western Zhou.
[10] First articulated by Mencius,[28] this fiction found its way into important classical works, which were subsequently canonized in the Han dynasty, becoming accepted historical truth in the process.
[30] In the Eastern Han and Western Jin dynasties, the "traditional" Confucian five-rank system was actually put into practice with minor modifications, finally manifesting this historical fiction as political fact.
Working with the terminology of European feudalism, they gave us the familiar "duke" for gong, "marquess" for hou, "earl" for bo, "viscount" for zi, and "baron" for nan.
Modern scholarship of Zhou-era China has focused on the examination of bronze inscriptions and other archaeologically excavated records as primary sources to establish a more accurate picture of political dynamics.
[36] Unlike the preceding Shang dynasty, which featured women such as Fu Hao and Xiao Chen Tao in positions of authority in military and religious institutions, the highly patriarchal Zhou[37] appear by all accounts to have concentrated official political power exclusively in the hands of men.