Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  Compared to Zhengzhou, the city in Yanshi was apparently a minor or secondary center. In view of the cultural complexity of Yanshi and its geographical proximity to Erlitou, many consider it as a stronghold for the Shang state that centered on Zhengzhou, believing that the population on the Luoyang plain was mainly Xia, whom the Shang state had recently subjugated and who were in need of being kept under close watch. While the question has to remain open at present particularly when it comes to the issue of Xia, the transition from Erlitou to Yanshi in the archaeological records must have corresponded to a major political change that happened on the Luoyang plain and served to factually integrate the region with the larger geopolitical entity of the Shang state to the east. A recent important archaeo-astronomical study reveals that the difference between the orientation of building foundations in Erlitou some 6–10 degrees west of north and that in the Yanshi city where buildings were oriented about 7 degrees to the east of north, must have been the result of using different stellar features to align architectures on the true north. The latter orientation (east of north) seen in Yanshi was followed by buildings in all Shang sites including Zhengzhou and Anyang, and was very much identified with the Shang culture.16 This suggests strongly that the transition from Erlitou to Yanshi/Zhengzhou, despite continuities in pottery typology, might have corresponded with a fundamental change in the political–cosmological culture of North China, possibly related to the establishment of a new dynastic rule, if not to the collapse of an old political regime.

  Erligang Expansion: Political Landscape Learned from Material Cultures

  In the three centuries before Shang, Erlitou was the only society in China so far as we know that enjoyed a developed bronze industry; beyond the Erlitou metropolis, social life remained essentially similar to that of the previous Longshan period. This phenomenon has encouraged some scholars to propose that the fundamental function of the early state in China was to centralize the production of the bronze vessels and to control their distribution to the local elites.17 However, this situation had changed dramatically during the Erligang period that ended the single-center monopoly of the use (and perhaps also production) of bronze vessels. Bronze vessels began to be found at a distance from Zhengzhou, in such sites like Yuanqu in southern Shanxi and Panlongcheng in central Hubei in the middle Yangzi region. The manufacturing of bronze vessels was carried out, beyond Zhengzhou, evidently also in such regional centers like Yanshi and Yuanqu.

  Archaeological discoveries suggest that this process of spreading of the bronze technology previously developed at Erlitou was actually embedded in a much larger process of the cultural expansion from central and western Henan to regions far beyond (Map 3.2). Standard Erligang types of pottery have been found in several sites in the Wei River valley in the west. In the north, the same pottery inventory has been identified in central and southern Hebei; in the south, the sites associated with the walled city of Panlongcheng offer an indisputable presentation of the Erligang culture in the middle Yangzi region. Evidently, an extensive process of cultural homogenization was taking place during the Erligang centuries that gave birth to a gigantic geo-cultural unity that had never been achieved under any Neolithic culture before, and was no longer maintained after the Erligang period. Of course, we cannot tell to what extent the cultural expansion we see in archaeology was underscored or affected by the political expansion of the Erligang Shang state, for the relationship between material culture and political entity can never be straightforward. Usually the expansion of a political system can take on two forms: through enlargement of the system itself or through replication of the system to produce competing autonomous units of various degrees. The expansion of the Erligang Shang state could have taken both routes.

  Map 3.2 Erligang and contemporary or nearly contemporary Bronze Age societies.

  Some of the regional centers such as Panlongcheng might have indeed had a direct political relation with the Erligang state based on Zhengzhou, some 500 km away in the north. The walled site is located on a small hilltop near the north bank of the Yangzi River in Hubei Province. The wall-enclosure, measuring 290 × 260 m, was excavated in the 1970s. In its center north was found a rectangular building foundation as the main structure on the site. Outside the wall circle, at several locales, tombs of large size were excavated, yielding bronze vessels and weapons identical to those from Zhengzhou. Not only these bronze vessels but also the pottery types found in the district of Panlongcheng match closely those found in Zhengzhou. This high degree of uniformity suggests strongly that the site of Panlongcheng might have been an outpost of the Erligang Shang state. More importantly, Panlongcheng was located at the south end of the ancient road from the north through the Nanyang Basin and reaching the north bank of the Yangzi River to the east of the ancient Yunmeng Marsh, at a key point to cross the Yangzi south into Hunan and Jiangxi Provinces. The recent discovery of a copper-mining site in Tongling in Jiangxi Province suggests that Panlongcheng might have suitably located at the key point of transportation of copper from the middle Yangzi region to the north (Box 3.2).

  * * *

  Box 3.2 Mining in Early China

  Over the past half century, archaeologists have made important progress in understanding the technological system that supported the bronze industry of the Shang and Western Zhou states as well as other Bronze Age societies in China. Modern geological surveys suggest that the richest concentration of copper deposits in China lie in the mountains along the south bank of the Yangzi River in present-day Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi Provinces. In 1973–5, an important ancient mining site was discovered on the mountain slopes called Tonglushan to the west of Daye City, located some 40 km from the bank of the Yangzi River in Hubei Province. Ancient mining activities on Tonglushan can be divided between open-surface quarrying and underground mining; underground mining was carried out through horizontal tunnels densely integrated with vertical shafts supported by wooden structures. Five large clusters of tunnels were cleared, yielding a large number of wooden and bronze tools and carrying baskets, as well as pottery vessels once used for meals by the ancient miners. In the areas surrounding the mines were scattered multiple smelting sites where tonnes of debris and remains of furnaces were found, suggesting that copper ores were locally smelted and transported out of the region in the form of copper ingots (also found at the sites). Two wooden samples from mining site XI are determined by carbon-14 dating to 3140±80 and 2750±70 BP, falling in a period contemporaneous with the Western Zhou.

  The ancient mining area called Tongling is located in Ruichang in Jiangxi Province, some 50 km to the southeast of Daye City, and was excavated in 1989–92. Multiple ancient mines were discovered in the area and the excavation suggests that they adhered to the same practice of using wooden frames to stabilize the underground tunnels and the straight shafts. Similarly in these tunnels were found a large number of bronze tools and wooden equipment and bamboo baskets used for transporting the ores. Interestingly in the same contexts were also found pottery vessels that match very closely those types found in Panlongcheng, belonging to the Upper Erligang and the middle Shang culture in the north (Fig. 3.8). Other types of pottery found in the mines date as late as the Warring States period. More than twenty carbon samples have been extracted from the mines and dated to 3330±60–2365±75 BP, supporting the dates established on the basis of pottery typology. They suggest that the local copper deposit continued to be exploited from a time contemporaneous with middle Shang in the north to the Warring States period. At the earliest stage, whether the mining activities were managed by the local communities of the Wucheng culture in Jiangxi or by certain Shang elites in close communication with Panlongcheng is still open to question, but there seems little doubt that the region was among the major sources of copper that supported the prosperity of bronze industry centered on Zhengzhou and Anyang.

  Fig. 3.8 Mining remains found in Tongling, Jiangxi: 1, view of ancient mine shafts; 2, layer of copper debris from on-site smelt
ing; 3, basket; 4, wooden windlass; 5, a Shang-style pottery li-tripod.

  * * *

  It is also true that under Erligang influence, in regions more distant from the Yanshi–Zhengzhou axis, a number of bronze cultures gradually developed that were almost certainly politically independent and culturally differentiated from Erligang. These include the Wucheng culture in northern Jiangxi which evidently arose in prominence as a response to the Erligang-associated political and economic activities in the middle Yangzi region. In the east, a Bronze Age center was located near modern Jinan in northwestern Shandong. In the west, another regional center of bronze culture was found near Xi’an in central Shaanxi. These regional bronze cultural centers arose more or less simultaneously towards the end of the Erligang period and prospered in a time contemporary with the middle Shang period in central and northern Henan. It is well possible that at least some of these sites were centers of the newly rising state-level societies that subsequently competed with the Shang in the remaining centuries of the Shang Dynasty.

  Selected Reading

  Liu, Li, and Chen Xingcan, State Formation in Early China (London: Duckworth, 2003).

  Liu, Li, “Academic Freedom, Political Correctness, and Early Civilisation in Chinese Archaeology: The Debate on Xia–Erlitou Relations,” Antiquity 83 (2009), 831–843.

  Chang, K. C., The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

  Chang, K. C., Shang Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

  Thorp, Robert, China in the Early Bronze Age: Shang Civilization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

  Nienhauser, William H. Jr. (ed.), The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, The Basic Annals of Pre-Han China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

  1 In medieval political philosophy, the term originally designated the condition or standing of the community, peoples, or the prince, very similar to its modern American use in such terms as the “State of the Union.” However, after the fifteenth century, the meaning of “state” gradually evolved into one that referred to the apparatus of government or the bearer of sovereign power from which the term’s most common modern application as a form of social–political organization descended.

  2 R. Thorp, China in the Early Bronze Age: Shang Civilization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 21–61.

  3 “Sectional mold casting” requires the making of a clay model of the intended bronze. Then, soft clay will be applied to it to produce an impression of the bronze’s outer surface and cut into sections in order to be removed from the model. When baked dry, the sectional molds will be reassembled around a casting core, usually acquired by reducing the dimension of the model. Molten bronze would be poured into the hollows between the core and the molds to form the bronze. This method of casting is highly developed in Bronze Age China as its technological mainstream, but it was underdeveloped in the West where wax molds were used.

  4 Li Liu and Chen Xingcan, State Formation in Early China (London: Duckworth, 2003), pp. 57–84.

  5 See Sima Qian, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 1, The Basic Annals of Pre-Han China, edited by William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 1–40.

  6 The story of Greater Archer Yi is itself fascinating, and probably originated in the east coastal region. There, facing the crisis of all ten suns coming out altogether in the sky, it was Yi who, using his vermilion bow, shot down nine of the suns, thus saving humankind from total destruction by the solar conflagration. See Anne M. Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 77–79.

  7 The Book of Documents and Book of Poetry are the core texts transmitted through the millennia of Confucian tradition. To give a quick summary here, the former is a collection of some twenty-eight government documents from the Zhou Dynasty, and is regarded as the embodiment of Western Zhou values and manifestation of a model government; the latter is an anthology of 305 poems. Both texts seem to have existed at the latest by the time of Confucius (551–479 BC) and both include a substantial part of works composed during the Western Zhou period. The two texts will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.

  8 The Bamboo Annals is a text originally written on bamboo strips, discovered in the Western Jin Dynasty (AD 265–316) in a tomb in northern Henan, belonging to a Warring States period (480–221 BC) king. Though a Warring States period text, the chronicle goes back to the beginning of history. For issues regarding the transmission of early Chinese texts, see relevant chapters in Michael Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1993).

  9 K. C. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 319.

  10 For a summary of the recent debate about the Erlitou–Xia relation, see Li Liu, “Academic Freedom, Political Correctness, and Early Civilisation in Chinese Archaeology: The Debate on Xia–Erlitou Relations,” Antiquity 83 (2009), 831–843.

  11 David W. Pankenier, “Astronomical Dates in Shang and Western Zhou,” Early China 7 (1981–2), 3–37. David Keightley now also accepts 1554 BC as the first year of the Shang dynasty; see David N. Keightley, “The Shang: China’s First Historical Dynasty,” in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 248.

  12 K. C. Chang, Shang Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 263–283.

  13 Thorp, China in the Early Bronze Age, pp. 85–99.

  14 The oracle-bone inscriptions from Zhengzhou have been recently examined in Ken-ichi Takashima, “Literacy to the South and the East of Anyang in Shang China: Zhengzhou and Daxinzhuang,” in Li Feng and David Branner (eds.), Writing and Literacy in Early China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), pp. 141–172.

  15 Chang, Shang Civilization, pp. 271–272.

  16 David W. Pankenier, “A Brief History of Beiji (Northern Culmen): With an Excursion on the Origins of the Character Di,” Journal of American Oriental Society 124.2 (2004), 211–236.

  17 Liu and Chen, State Formation in Early China, pp. 133–137.

  4 Anyang and beyond: Shang and contemporary Bronze Age cultures

  If we were to point to an archaeological site that over the course of more than half a century has unceasingly offered sources of inspiration to researches in various disciplines in understanding the essentials of early Chinese civilization, it has to be Anyang. This immense Shang metropolis of some 24 km2 extending along the Huan River in northern Henan was not only the “cradle of Chinese archaeology,” but has also served as a firm base for the joint operation of text-inspired inquiries into the political history of the royal Shang state and studies that aim to clarify the characteristics of its material culture. Even since the beginning of the new century, Anyang has continued to offer a number of astonishing new discoveries that have significantly deepened our knowledge about the Shang state and civilization. As Anyang has just celebrated the eightieth anniversary of its discovery in 1928, its newly granted status as a “World Heritage Site” is indeed very richly deserved.1

  Discovering the Late Shang Dynasty

  Beijing’s winter was cold in the years that witnessed the crumbling of the once glorious Manchu Empire when famine and malaria could easily take control over the streets of the imperial capital. Towards the end of 1899, Wang Yirong, President of the Imperial University, was terribly sick. His servant turned up what were known as the “dragon bones” among other prescribed ingredients in two bags which he brought back from a drugstore in the commercial street of southern Beijing.2 Already well known for his learning in traditional “Studies of Bronze and Stone Inscriptions,”3 Wang immediately noticed that there were archaic forms of writing on these bones; therefore he sent his servant back to the drugstore and purchased the remaining
several hundred pieces at a high price. After about eight months when the allied Western armies invaded Beijing, the fleeing Manchu court appointed Wang to command the remaining Qing troops to defend the capital. This was mission impossible! After foreign soldiers broke his line of resistance and entered the city, Wang saw no hope for the imperial city to survive the onslaught and thus committed suicide to preserve his loyalty to the emperor and his people. The inscribed bones numbering some 300 pieces were handed by his son to Wang’s friend, the famous scholar Liu E, who was himself banished to Central Asia upon the return of the Empress Dowager to the capital. However, the collection was able to go into print in 1903, the very first publication of oracle-bone inscriptions ever.