Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  The late Shang bronze inscriptions actually mention the roles of secretarial officials such as “Document Maker” and the role of “Superintendent” who was possibly a palace official. On the other hand, the oracle-bone inscriptions offer such terms as “many officers,” “many horses,” “many captains,” and so on, and these terms have been taken by some scholars as “official titles.” However, they are most likely to have described functions or status of certain groups of people, and there is no way to determine any superior–subordinate relations among the people referred to by these terms. The oracle-bone inscriptions also suggest that although the Shang king divined about a very wide range of topics that concerned him, and many of the divinations could have actually taken place in respect to the actual management of the Shang state in specific ways, yet the Shang king showed very little if any interest in the establishment of administrative offices. This situation certainly cannot be explained only by the bias of oracle-bone records, but most likely reflects the rudimental nature of the Shang government.

  It is very likely that, therefore, except for roles like “Document Maker” and “Superintendent” which appeared towards the end of Anyang, specific administrative offices had not been differentiated and a bureaucratic structure of the government had not emerged during the late Shang. It is above all possible that the diviners had occasionally also handled administrative matters that were brought to the royal court and helped the Shang king make decisions about them as the administrative functions of the Shang government had not been clearly separated from its religious roles. Indeed, one may observe that this rudimentary level of development of the Shang royal government might have well suited the peripatetic nature of the Shang king and the royal court, described recently by David Keightley.19

  Late Shang as a Religion-Focused Hegemonic State

  Beyond Anyang, the Shang state was essentially conceived in terms of the “Four Lands” (situ) – the eastern land, western land, southern land, and northern land – that were located around the “Central Shang.” The term frequently appears in the oracle-bone inscriptions in the context where the Shang king divined about good harvest that these lands will receive:

  Example (HJ: 36975) (Fig. 5.4):Crack-making on the yici day (#42), the king personally divined, asking: “This year will (our) Shang receive good harvest?” Having read the crack, the king said: Auspicious. [Then asking:] “Will the eastern land receive harvest? Will the southern land receive harvest? Will the western land receive harvest? Will the northern land receive harvest?”

  There were frequent communications between these regional lands and the Shang capital, and the oracle-bone inscriptions offer records that the Shang king divined about military actions taken to secure settlements in these lands when they were under foreign attacks by the various enemies. The leaders of the “Four Lands” are referred to in the inscriptions as the “Archer-Lord” (hou) and sometimes “Prince” (zi), the latter being most likely leaders of groups of the Shang people who lived near Anyang. The Archer-Lords were most likely to have been leaders of the autonomous local groups who might or might not be ethnic Shang. The political relationship between the Shang royal court at Anyang and the various local groups that recognized the supremacy of the Shang king was one of negotiation that demanded the Shang king’s continuous display of military might through royal hunting or punitive campaigns. As a matter of fact, the Shang kings particularly in the late Anyang period spent many days every year on hunting trips away from the capital. These hunting trips were important for bringing the various local groups into service of the Shang state and were an essential part of the Shang state’s political strategy.20 In this way, the power that the Shang king possessed to bring these local groups into submission can be better characterized as “hegemonic” than “legitimate,” because it had no other source except for the Shang king’s military might. No political relationship higher (or more permanent) than that level can be confirmed with the current evidence, and consequently beyond the royal center at Anyang there was little government that was originated from or integrated with the royal Shang government. Thus, the geographic perimeter of the Shang state, if any, could indeed be very elusive and changed dramatically over time, extending very far when a Shang king’s power was strong enough to bring distant local groups into submission to the Shang state and their leaders to accept the title “Archer-Lord,” but shrinking quickly when a king’s power diminished. In other words, the Shang state was conceived in terms of the relationship between the Shang king and the various local leaders. For one time, probably during the long reign of Wu Ding (King 21) during early Anyang, the oracle-bone inscriptions suggest that the network of relationships of the late Shang state had probably reached regions as far as the Fen River valley and possibly even the Wei River valley in the west and the western periphery of Shandong in the east as groups likely located in these regions were periodically called on by the Shang kings for coordinated military operations.21 But this height of Shang power seems to have passed soon after Wu Ding, and for the greater part of the late Shang, the king’s activity seems to have been confined to central and northern Henan along the middle course of the Yellow River. The various pro-Shang groups might have shared a common cultural background, which is recognizable in archaeology as the “Shang culture,” although groups that shared the “Shang culture” might not necessarily all be members of the Shang state, which was after all a political relationship accessible for the most part only through the written records. There was no permanent membership in the Shang state as there was no permanent enemy of it.

  Fig. 5.4 Shang king asking about the “Four Lands” (HJ: 36975).

  On the other hand, the oracle-bone inscriptions record frequent Shang military campaigns against the so-called Fang enemies located even farther in western Shanxi, northern Shaanxi, northern Hebei, and western Shandong.22 Some of these Fang entities might have from time to time allied themselves with the Shang and their leaders hence held the title “Elder of the Fang” (Fangbo), such as is the case of the leader of the pre-dynastic Zhou people, but on the whole they remained hostile to the Shang. There is good evidence that these foreign polities mentioned in the oracle-bone inscriptions can be identified with those regional bronze cultures situated in the periphery of the Shang cultural realm, mentioned in Chapter 4. For instance, the Gui Fang and possibly also Gong Fang were probably groups that shared the Bronze Age culture distributed in northern Shanxi and Shaanxi, in the “Lower Ordos” region, which was in close contact with the Shang bronze culture. Recent archaeological discoveries in Shandong have also provided hard evidence that the Ren Fang (Polity of People) frequently appearing in the late Anyang inscriptions as target of Shang military campaigns can be suitably located, as scholars who studied oracle bones suggested decades ago, in southwestern Shandong to northern Jiangsu. The Qiang Fang, the most important source of war prisoners that the Shang frequently used as human sacrifice, were likely to have been located to the west of Shang’s west land, probably in western Shaanxi and eastern Gansu in the upper Yellow River region. The Hu Fang (Polity of Tiger), there is good reason to suggest, might have been located in the region to the south of the Yangzi River, in present-day Jiangxi and Hunan, where a developed regional bronze culture, the Wucheng culture, existed contemporaneously with late Shang in the north.

  These various Fang polities formed the external world with which the Shang were in close contact and against which the Shang king planned his military campaigns. Warfare was the most frequent relationship between these outlying independent Fang polities and the Shang. Some of these polities might well have developed a state-level society, while others might have been at the chiefdom level of development. There were still foreign polities located in regions that the Shang might have never reached, for instance, Sanxingdui on the Chengdu Plain which was most likely the center of a state-level polity. Studies have shown that at least a large proportion of the copper that the Shang used to cast bronzes in Anyang migh
t have come from as far as Sichuan, if not farther, but there is no direct evidence in the oracle-bone inscriptions of communication between Anyang and the polity centering on Sanxingdui.

  Selected Reading

  Keightley, David. “The Shang,” 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), pp. 286–288.

  Keightley, David .Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

  Keightley, David .“Marks and Labels: Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China,” in Miriam T. Stark (ed.), Archaeology of Asia (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 177–202.

  Keightley, David .The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca., 1200–1045 BC) (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2000).

  Bagley, Robert, “Anyang Writing and the Origin of the Chinese Writing System,” in Stephen D. Houston (ed.), The First Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 190–249.

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

  Allan, Sarah, The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China (Albany: State University of New York, 1991).

  1 See William G. Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1994), pp. 38–41. In a recent study, Boltz argued further that the existence of certain graphs that were each used to write two different words, a phenomenon that is called “polyphony,” indicates that the oracle-bone scripts, though appearing as a mature system of writing, were still not far from their origin. See William G. Boltz, “Literacy and the Emergence of Writing in China,” in Li Feng and David Branner (eds.), Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), pp. 51–84.

  2 This is the Xiaoshuangqiao site excavated in 1990.

  3 Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Issues in Western Zhou Studies: A Review Article,” Early China 18 (1993), 146–147, 167.

  4 See David Keightley, “Marks and Labels: Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China,” in Miriam T. Stark (ed.), Archaeology of Asia (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 184–185.

  5 See Robert Bagley, “Anyang Writing and the Origin of the Chinese Writing System,” in Stephen D. Houston (ed.), The First Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 190–249.

  6 Li Feng, “Literacy and the Social Contexts of Writing in the Western Zhou,” in Writing and Literacy in Early China, pp. 271–301.

  7 See Edwin G. Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and Their Neighbors in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times,” in David Keightley (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 411–466.

  8 See Adam Smith, “The Evidence for Scribal Training at Anyang,” in Writing and Literacy in Early China, pp. 173–205.

  9 David Keightley, Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 12.

  10 The Shang used the combination of two series of terms to record dates. The first is called “Heavenly Stems” today and included ten: jia, yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, gui. The Shang kings also used these ten terms in their names (see below). The second series is called “Earthly Branches” and included twelve: zi, chou, yin, mao, chen, si, wu, wei, shen, you, xu, hai. When combined, any two-character number repeats every 60 days; therefore, the system is referred to as the “Sixty-Day Circle.” Here, #19 means the nineteenth day from the beginning of the circle at jiazi (#1), and it is the renwu day.

  11 Keightley, “Marks and Labels: Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China,” pp. 193–194.

  12 For a recent analysis of the oracle bones from Zhengzhou and the Daxinzhuang site in Shandong, see Ken-ichi Takashima, “Literacy to the South and the East of Anyang in Shang China: Zhengzhou and Daxinzhuang,” in Writing and Literacy in Early China, pp. 141–172.

  13 In an article published in 2004, David Pankenier demonstrated that even the oracle bone form di was derived from the stellar formation including the Kochab, Thuban, and others situated around the Northern Pole which the Shang people used to locate the real north due to the lack of a particular star at the pole. See David W. Pankenier, “A Brief History of Beiji (Northern Culmen), with an Excursus on the Origin of the Character Di,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 124.2 (2004), 229–235 . In the second study, published in 2007, Sarah Allan argues that the deity di on the oracle bones has a status much higher than the ancestral deities whom she identified with the ten suns; therefore, in the cosmology of the Shang people, High God (di) could only be identified with the Northern Pole. See Sarah Allan, “On the Identity of Shang Di and the Origin of the Concept of a Celestial Mandate,” Early China 31 (2007), 1–46.

  14 For a discussion on this point, see, Aihe Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 28–37.

  15 Sarah Allan, The Shape of Turtle: Myth, Art and Cosmos in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 25, 54–56.

  16 K. C. Chang, Shang Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 158–209.

  17 Keightley’s early view is that although the Shang royal ancestral worship was essentially religious, it exhibited certain “bureaucratic logic” as the institution was maintained routinely and the ancestors promoted according to rules. See David Keightley, “The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture,” History of Religions 17.3–4 (1978), 214–220.

  18 David Keightley, “The Shang,” 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), pp. 286–288.

  19 David Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca., 1200–1045 B.C) (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2000), p. 58.

  20 On the Shang king’s hunting practice, see Magnus Fiskesjö, “Rising from Blood-Stained Fields: Royal Hunting and State Formation in Shang China,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 73 (2001), 48–192.

  21 See David Keightley, “The Late Shang State: When, Where, and What?” in The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 540–543.

  22 Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape, pp. 66–67.

  6 Inscribed history: the Western Zhou state and its bronze vessels

  The Zhou Dynasty occupies a special position in the cultural and political history of China, being held in high esteem as the paradigm of political perfection and social harmony in the long Confucian tradition.1 In some way the reputation was well earned because there was no another civilization (such as that of the Shang) that separated the Zhou Dynasty from the well-documented early imperial times; on the contrary, the Zhou Dynasty created a social and cultural context in which, particularly because of the decline of the Zhou royal order, the embryo of the imperial system grew, and in which all the founding figures of Chinese philosophy lived. On the other hand, the Zhou Dynasty can be seen as a period in which the value of literary culture had been fully explored and appreciated, thus allowing us the opportunity to analyze its political and social institutions in a more coherent way than is possible for the Shang Dynasty on the basis of the contemporary written evidence. It was also a period during which the key to bureaucratic administration was discovered and the concept of the state had become differentiated from that of the royalty.

  The Search for Pre-Dynastic Zhou

  The question of whether there were a people called by the name “Zhou” before the Zhou conquest of Shang would seem quite superfluous if not contradictory. However, in the 1970s–1980s studies of the various “pre-” or “proto-” dynastic cultures of the regimes that once ruled
a large part of China, e.g. Shang, Zhou, and Qin, formed an important stream in Chinese archaeology. Underlying these studies was the methodological assumption that the prehistory of a dynasty can be sought in the archaeological records and, by virtue of its identification with a material culture, the origin of that prehistory can be traced farther back to a time that was beyond what the often ambiguous textual records purport to tell.