Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  12 Gray W. Crawford, “East Asian Plant Domestication,” in Miriam T. Stark (ed.), Archaeology of Asia (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 83–84.

  13 The “Punaluan marriage” was a form of marriage in which several brothers of a group were the husbands of each other’s wives belonging to another group, and several sisters were the wives of each other’s husbands. This marriage relationship was described by Morgan for Iroquois of upstate New York, but it was also practiced by Hawaiians in the late nineteenth century. See Louis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (Palo Alto: New York Labor News, 1978), pp. 424–452.

  14 The “matrilineal” view of Yangshao society has been emphasized recently by Zhang Zhongpei in K. C. Chang and Xu Pingfang (eds.), The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 71–72, 68.

  15 Yun Kuen Lee, “Configuring Space: Structure and Agency in Yangshao Society,” paper delivered at the Columbia Early China Seminar, 2002.

  16 Li Liu, The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 189–191.

  17 In fact, defensive walls had already appeared during the late Yangshao period; ibid., p. 94.

  18 Anne Underhill, “Variation in Settlements during the Longshan period of North China,” Asian Perspectives 33.2 (1994), 200.

  19 Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, p. 266.

  20 Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, pp. 103–112.

  21 See David W. Pankenier, “Getting ‘Right’ with Heaven and the Origins of Writing in China,” in F. Li and D. P. Branner (eds.), Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), pp. 19–50, especially, p. 27. In another study, Pankenier emphasizes the use of the platform for ritual activities, perhaps ritualized worship of the rising sun, and advises avoidance of the English term “observatory” due to its modern scientific connotations, see David W. Pankenier, Liu Ciyuan, and Salvo De Meis, “The Xiangfen Taosi Site: A Chinese Neolithic ‘Observatory’?”

  22 William G. Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1994), p. 36.

  23 Underhill, “Variation in Settlements,” 197–228; Liu, The Chinese Neolithic, p. 191. Li Liu further defined the Longshan society as “complex chiefdom” society in contrast to the late Yangshao culture which she considers as “simple chiefdom” society.

  24 Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State, pp. 23–25.

  3 Erlitou and Erligang: early state expansion

  What the “multi-region” model of Neolithic cultural development cannot explain is how state-level society arose first not from other regional traditions but from the heartland of the Yangshao culture and its successors the Longshan cultures in Henan and Shanxi. However, the line of development in this large region leading to the rise of state was by no means very straight. The power of the Taosi “chiefdom” waned after a few hundred years of prominence and whoever remained to live in the Taosi community seem to have come under domination by another nearby political center. Archaeologists have much to do to understand this process of competition among the pre-state polities and the resultant regional integration in the middle reaches of the Yellow River and other regions in the contemporary time-frame. However, at the beginning of the second millennium BC, one society had risen to a level of power that was far above the limit of other “chiefdom”-level societies in western Henan and southern Shanxi. The Erlitou state or culture occupied a critical position in the formation of state and civilization in North China. It opened a new era that was marked by royal authority, urban civilization, larger political organization, and a strong coercive military presence.

  The “State” and “State Formation”

  Unlike the term “chiefdom” which is essentially an anthropological construct, the term “state” has a long history in the Western intellectual tradition,1 and is the one modern term to which different disciplines attach different meanings. In political science which conceives the meaning of “state” in legal–political terms, the “state” is defined as the embodiment of “sovereignty,” hence there is the notion of the modern “Nation State” which identifies the present unit of the “nation” as the bearer of such sovereignty. For political economists, the “state” is an institution equipped with coercive powers, standing in opposition to the individual citizens, and is supposedly the representation of public and collective interest versus individual or private interest. But in a sociological view, which is also the view of most social historians, the “state” is a human organization with multiple qualifications including territory, unified political order, law and coercive power to enforce it, and sovereignty. Finally, in an anthropological sense, the “state” is a type of society or a “stage” in social development, being different from and more massive and complex than the “chiefdom” society, therefore, validating the concept of “state-level society.”

  A society certainly does not have to be organized in such a way as a state; there are other social organizations such as tribes or chiefdoms which, according to the non-evolutionist view, may never develop into state or state-level societies. Therefore, there is the question of why did the state arise? Why did some societies develop into states, while others did not? And how, or what trajectories did they take to develop into states? This is the issue of “state formation” and there have been numerous explanations about this process. For some scholars, the state was the inevitable result of the internal struggle of a society and it was invented as a means to compromise or contain such internal conflicts. For others, the state arose as the response to a more massive and constant external threat, cast either by natural force or by another society, and it emerged as the means to unite the society’s members in their common interests to cope with such external threat. This latter view has become particularly popular in recent years in the explanation of the rise of the nomadic empires in the northern steppe regions. For still others, for instance the late Professor K. C. Chang, the state arose as the end-product of the long process of the internal tendency of a society to better manage its resources to reorganize and centralize its ritual system. These are all important theoretical dimensions that we should take into account in studying the rise of the state in Early China.

  The Erlitou Culture and the “Erlitou State”

  Most scholars agree now that after the beginning of the second millennium BC, something that can be properly called a “state” had indeed arisen in China, particularly in western Henan, to the south of the Taosi chiefdom. The time-frame for this new development has been fixed, based on the scientific dating of numerous carbon-14 samples from sites of the relevant culture, and by recent calibrations, to 1900–1600 BC. To provide a comparative dating in global contexts, this period overlaps the time of the Babylonians and of King Hammurabi in Mesopotamia; in Egypt, this is the time of the Middle Kingdom, before the Hyksos Invasion from the delta. In the New Continent, this is the time immediately preceding the emergence of the Olmecs. In other words, the “state” had already had a history of more than a millennium in Egypt, and slightly shorter in Mesopotamia, but it was a new phenomenon in China.

  In autumn 1959, a team of archaeologists was sent to western Henan by the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing), on confidence gained recently from archaeological substantiation of the historically known Shang Dynasty, to search for the possible ruins of the Xia Dynasty described in the same historical tradition as having ruled before the Shang Dynasty. By this time, pottery and bronze types earlier than those from Anyang had already surfaced at some sites in central and northern Henan, and of course sites with the similar cultural contents (earlier than Anyang) were the targets of their search. Among the more than ten sites turned up by the search, Erlitou, located about 20 km to the east of the modern city Luoyang, was the most prominent. By the close of the fieldwork season, the archaeological team had managed t
o test-excavate a small area of the site, and the rich deposits from the site confirmed the existence of a new culture that was subsequently named the “Erlitou Culture.” Since that time Erlitou has gained international fame as a center for the study of the rise of states and civilization in China, but clear understanding of the organization of the site has been achieved only through careful archaeological fieldwork in the past fifteen years. It should also be noted that by now our knowledge of the Erlitou culture has extended far beyond the Erlitou site itself, confirming a large region of distribution of sites that have the same cultural contents as far as eastern Henan, several sites in the Fen River valley in southern Shanxi, and the upper Huai River valley in southern Henan (Map 3.1). The confirmation of this cultural realm has suggested that the Erlitou site was located at the center of a settlement system, and doubtless at the top of a settlement hierarchy.

  Map 3.1 Distribution of Erlitou culture sites.

  The central site of Erlitou is located to the south of the Luo River (Fig. 3.1), stretching over 2.5 km E–W and 2 km N–S. It covers an area of 5,000,000 m2 (500 ha), at least twice as large as Taosi, and much larger than other Longshan centers in North China. At the center of this immense site is located the palatial complex surrounded by a wall that forms a rectangle, in which as many as eleven earth building platforms have been excavated or identified for excavation later. The most outstanding structures are Foundations nos. 1 and 2, each forming a self-enclosed compound surrounded by a wall. Foundation no. 1 was excavated in 1960, measuring 108 m E–W and 100 m N–S, and raised about 1–2 m above the original ground. The entire surface of the platform is surrounded by roofed hallways constructed along its edges. At its center north, a second step of platform was built, and the locations of postholes on its surface suggest a rectangular architectural layout. Foundation no. 2 is located along the east wall of the palatial zone and has an area slightly smaller than but structurally similar to Foundation no. 1. Outside the palatial zone, three sections of road were found, forming a part of the road system traversing the central area of the Erlitou site.2 Significantly, in the southern gateway to the palace, tracks of vehicles were discovered, providing the earliest example of the use of wheeled wagons in China.

  Fig. 3.1 The Erlitou site and its palace zone.

  Tombs excavated within the site are mostly small, leaving the possibility that the elites of Erlitou society might have been buried at certain selected locations away from the site. Only on Foundation no. 2 in the corridor behind the main hall was a large tomb (5.2 × 4.25 m) excavated, but it had been completely looted a long time ago. However, from one of the middle-size tombs, a 70.2-cm long dragon-shape object decorated with turquoise was discovered (Fig. 3.2.4). Within the site, numerous pits of various functions were excavated, and in one of these structures located just outside the south wall of the palace, a large quantity of turquoise pieces were discovered, identifying the location of a workshop that might have produced many of the turquoise objects found on the site.

  Fig. 3.2 Bronze vessels and turquoise objects from Erlitou: 1, jue-drinking cups; 2, ding-cauldron; 3, jia-heating pitcher; 4, dragon-shape object decorated with turquoise (70.2 cm), possibly a hand-cane symbolizing political power; 5, bronze plaque inlaid with turquoise; 6, jue-drinking cup.

  Bronze vessels are among the most outstanding objects from Erlitou; they suggest that metallurgy in China had achieved a major stage of advancement at the beginning of the second millennium BC. And the Erlitou culture can be described as the first Bronze Age culture in China. Here, bronze was no longer used only to make small items, but was also used to manufacture vessels of considerably larger size at a much higher degree of technological complexity and sophistication – in a process that is called by scholars “sectional mold casting.”3 To date some fifteen pieces of bronze vessels have been unearthed at Erlitou, in addition to a greater number of bronze weapons and implements. Vessel types included jue-cups, jia-heating vessels, and ding-cauldrons, all central to the bronze inventory of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1554–1046 BC) which clearly owed its source to the Erlitou bronze culture. The workshop for bronze production has been located at the center south of the Erlitou site where clay molds and copper debris were unearthed in large numbers. Besides bronze objects, jades and other luxury items were also important elite objects produced and utilized in Erlitou.

  However, bronzes are more than just luxury goods; they have multiple social and political meanings. Since the Luoyang Plain yields no natural copper deposits, it has been recently suggested that the copper ores used by the Erlitou elites to cast bronze vessels and weapons were probably quarried in the Zhongtiao Mountains of southern Shanxi, an area that probably also provided the source of salt needed by the Erlitou population. The maintenance of a stable source-supply and transportation over a distance of hundreds of kilometers involved a level of organizational power only state-level societies could afford to have. The immense and complex building compounds at Erlitou suggest that the Erlitou leadership did possess such organizational power over a population that was estimated to have ranged somewhere from 18,000 to 30,000 people at the central site. It has further been suggested that organizing the bronze industry and distributing its products to the local elites for ritual and political purposes might have been among the most important functions of the Erlitou state.4

  The proposition of an “Erlitou State” has been widely accepted by scholars because the material evidence is compelling by comparison to that for other early states in world contexts. Due to the lack of contemporaneous written evidence from the Erlitou site or from any other site associated with the Erlitou culture, it can hardly be determined whether Erlitou was a “royal state” or a state of some other kind. Within some three centuries, Erlitou was doubtless the political and cultural center of the middle Yellow River region, far surpassing any other contemporary sites both in size and in the level of cultural development. Recent archaeological research has also confirmed the continuation in pottery typology from the late Longshan culture in Henan to the Erlitou culture, and even a transitional phase between the two longer cultural periods has been identified at a site near modern Zhengzhou. This certainly lends weight to the general understanding that the transition to state-level society was likely the result of accumulated social and cultural changes that took place in the world of the Longshan people particularly in the adjacent regions of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan Provinces. However, the Erlitou culture apparently also received heavy influence from the late Neolithic cultures of the east coastal regions especially the Longshan culture in Shandong, which might have offered the Erlitou elites typological standards for the vessels they cast in bronze.

  State Formation in Early Historical Traditions and the Debate about the Xia Dynasty

  The process of the formation of states in China has also been told in the received historical tradition, though in a more subtle way hidden behind a series of legends that anticipated the founding of the Xia Dynasty. This tradition, most systematically presented in The Grand Scribe’s Records written by Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BC) in the Western Han Dynasty, first describes a period in which a series of five legendary emperors including the Yellow Emperor and Emperors Zhuanxu, Ku, Yao, and Shun ruled China in their capacity of elected leader.5 They represented a time when the world was governed by virtue, but not by force, and political leadership was conceived in terms of personal charisma helped by mythical energy. This idea of the “Five Emperors” did not come into existence until the fifth century BC, and modern scholars see the mythical tradition of succession through abdication as the ideological support of the political agenda of the late Spring and Autumn or early Warring States period ministers who frequently attempted the overthrow of their state rulers. However, the tradition also distantly echoes the social and political conditions before the rise of the state in China, known also from other world contexts, where regional leaders competed with each other for political supremacy. At the time of Emperor Shun, the last in the seri
es, there were horrible floods overflowing the North China Plain, causing a great many deaths. Thus the emperor summoned the chief of a major tribe unit whose name was Yu, or “Great Yu,” to carry out irrigation works to overcome the floods. Yu then traveled throughout China, cleaning up the rivers and dredging canals; hence the floods of the rivers were guided to enter the eastern sea. Yu won great respect among the people and henceforth became the leader of all China after the death of Shun. However, when Yu died, the power did not pass on to a new elected leader like Yu himself, but was taken likely by force by Yu’s own son, Qi, who then founded the Xia Dynasty. In the way this story is told in the tradition, the accession of Qi is described as the breakdown of the tradition of elected leadership and the establishment of a royal state in China to be ruled by a hereditary house. After Qi, the Xia house’s dynastic rule continued over sixteen generations until the last Xia king, Jie, who was overthrown by the Shang Dynasty. For one time early in the Xia Dynasty, the rule of the Xia house was usurped by a tribe from eastern China led by the Greater Archer Yi.6 But after the latter was murdered by his advisor, the Xia Dynasty was restored by King Zhong Kang and was to continue for another 200 years.

  The earliest references to Yu and the Xia Dynasty are found in Western Zhou (1045–771 BC) texts, in the chapters that are parts of the transmitted Book of Documents, and in some of the poems in the Book of Poetry.7 The Western Zhou date of this tradition is confirmed by the discovery in 2003 of a bronze vessel cast during the mid Western Zhou, the Bingong xu, whose inscriptions tell stories of Yu in close parallel to the received tradition ascribed to him (Box 3.1; Fig. 3.3). The earliest complete list of the Xia kings is found in the Bamboo Annuals, securely dated to the early third century BC. In fact, this list was buried in a tomb until being rediscovered in AD 280 and was unknown to the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian who in his book offers a reign-by-reign independent account of the Xia Dynasty in the same order of the Xia kings as is given by the Bamboo Annals.8 In other words, from the Western Zhou to the Han Dynasty there had been a consistent tradition regarding the historicity of the Xia Dynasty. One would further hope, if the Xia Dynasty ever existed, we would find references to it in the written sources of the Shang Dynasty that comes even closer to the Xia time. But this is not true and the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions say nothing about a Xia Dynasty the Shang had conquered. However, the strength of this evidence to negate the historicity of the Xia Dynasty is itself weakened by the bare fact that the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions are divinatory records that are narrowly concerned with powers that still affected the Shang state; therefore, they show no historical curiosity at all about an enemy power that exited in the distant past and no longer affected the life of the Shang king.