by Li Feng
Early China and the Grand Historical Trend
Why “Early China”? Are there compelling reasons for treating Early China as a large and separate phase in Chinese history? As mentioned above the Early China period ends at the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty in AD 220.7 There are three general reasons to treat this long period as an integrated field of research and teaching in Chinese history. First, in this early phase civilization, though modified inevitably by interregional influences, evolved on essentially indigenous East Asian ideas, and the development of social and political institutions can be seen as largely an internal process of this subcontinent. However, the expansion of the Han Empire into Central Asia in the first century BC brought China into sustained contact with other major world civilizations, most importantly Middle Eastern and Indian, and the subsequent introduction of Buddhism to China gave Chinese civilization a totally different dimension, a drastic beginning of a new era. In world history, this shift paralleled the transition from the Classical to the Christian West. Second, there is a common source base offered by archaeology. Even for the later part of the period when substantial information has become available from the received texts, documents (particularly legal statutes unearthed from underground) still constitute the most critical basis for our inquiry. Third, particularly because of the nature of sources, many being created before the unification of the Chinese writing system around 221 BC, the study of Early China is deeply indebted to the methodological support of paleography which deals with various forms of archaic scripts and inscriptions.
Although everything that dates before the end of the Eastern Han falls reasonably within the confines of Early China, by convention we choose to begin with the emergence of early farming communities in China in about the seventh millennium BC,8 particularly in the lands reached by the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. Over the next two millennia in the greater part of eastern China these original farming societies had developed into large-scale cultural complexes with regional characteristics. During the late fourth millennium BC, early complex societies began to emerge in a number of regions which were each organized into a settlement hierarchy, headed by a large political center that was often surrounded by rammed earth walls.9 This stage was followed, first in limited areas in North and South China, by intense social development into early states, or state-level societies. In North China, these early states are best known from archaeology and history to have been ruled by the dynastic houses such as that of Shang (1554–1046 BC) and of Western Zhou (1045–771 BC). Therefore, they can be called the early “royal states.” The collapse of the Western Zhou state in 771 BC and the lack of a true central authority thereafter opened ways to fierce inter-state warfare that continued over the next five hundred years until the Qin unification of China in 221 BC, thus giving China her first empire. Finally, after the consolidation of the imperial bureaucratic system under the Western Han Empire (206 BC – AD 8), the period ended with the collapse of the Eastern Han Empire (AD 25–220).
Therefore, in Early China we observe the rise and fall of social organizations at different levels and scales, and it is the focus of this book to trace and explain the development of society from the early farming villages to states and then to empires. If we take a proportional view of the whole of Chinese history, Early China would have been the longest period and the one that saw the most dramatic social changes and political developments. This was also a long process during which cultural traits originally developed in regional contexts were gradually modified and merged to characterize what can be called the distinctive Chinese civilization.
Rediscovering China’s Antiquity
Although the concept of “Early China” was formed relatively recently, the study of the period has had a much longer history in both China and the West. It is commonly held that three major discoveries at the turn of the twentieth century opened new windows to China’s past and contributed directly to the rise of modern historiography in China: first, the discovery in 1899 of inscriptions carved on oracle bones and shells of the Shang Dynasty in Anyang in northern Henan, second, the discovery in 1900 of a secret inventory of medieval manuscripts totaling some 50,000 items in a Buddhist cave in Dunhuang on the edge of the desert in western Gansu Province, and third, the disposal in 1909 and the subsequent reclamation of the Ming and Qing Dynasty archival documents from the imperial palace in Beijing. These are very important cultural events that had multiple implications for modern Chinese history and for the world beyond it.
Although the last two discoveries fall outside of the confines of Early China, the British explorer Aurel Stein, on his way to Dunhuang, excavated some 700 bamboo strips with writing on them from a desert fortress (which has recently been re-excavated), a discovery that was to lead to a long series of findings of administrative documents from the Western Han Empire in and out of the region. The strips from Dunhuang were subsequently studied and published, since Stein was unable to study them himself, by Édouard Chavannes (1865–1918) (Fig. 1.2a), a French scholar in Beijing and the reputed founding father of Western sinology. Chavannes by this time had just published his translation of the most important historical text from ancient China, the Grand Scribe’s Records (Shiji), written by Sima Qian in the first century BC. When Chavannes’s book on the Dunhuang strips was brought to China, it was reproduced and further annotated by prominent Chinese scholars in new editions.
Fig. 1.2 Pioneers of early sinology: (a) Édouard Chavannes, (b) Wang Guowei.
The Dunhuang manuscripts, combined with the historical texts that Chavannes knew well, provided an important context in which a generation of early French sinologists was trained with a clear focus on philology and historical linguistics, an interest that was certainly not restricted to the Han Chinese language, given the fact that nearly ten languages are represented in the Dunhuang materials. But gradually the French interest was expanded to various fields of history and religious studies, and in the hands of the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren the research scope of early sinology was further expanded to include the study of material objects, particularly the bronze vessels and their inscriptions.10
In China itself, the discovery of oracle bones, which were by and large handled by the Chinese dealers, had led to their collection and subsequent study and publication by scholars who also worked on Shang and Western Zhou Dynasty bronze inscriptions recorded in the native antiquarian tradition since the Song Dynasty (AD 960–1279). In particular the scholar Wang Guowei (1877–1927) (Fig. 1.2b), Professor at Tsinghua University after years of exile in Japan after the fall of the Qing Dynasty to which he owed his loyalty, produced a long series of essays that address religious and cultural institutions of the early royal states Shang and Western Zhou. Wang’s works set the fundamental tone of research for modern historical studies of Early China which was based largely on excavated paleographical materials. The identification of the oracle-bone inscriptions as the divination records of the late Shang royal court led to the excavation of the Shang capital in Anyang in northern Henan in 1928, a notable beginning of Chinese archaeology. Until Japan’s full-scale invasion of North China began in July 1937, the Academia Sinica in Nanjing planned and executed fifteen large-scale excavations in Anyang, uncovering both the royal palace zone and the cemetery of Shang kings, yielding huge quantities of materials including of course more oracle bones (Fig. 1.3). As the excavation there was resumed after the war and has continued to the present day, Anyang archaeology has played a central role in our understanding of the Shang Dynasty, and of early Chinese civilization in general.
Fig. 1.3 Excavators at Anyang wearing bronze helmets freshly excavated from the Shang royal tomb no. 1004; photograph taken in 1935 during the twelfth excavation. In the middle, playing the role of a Shang King, is Shi Zhangru, senior archaeologist in the Academia Sinica; to his left (behind) is Xia Nai who went on to serve as the Director of the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing from 1962 to 1982. Shi holds a long bronze knife on his arm; the man on the r
ight, Wang Xiang, has a cat sleeping on his arm.
However, modern Chinese historiography had many different roots, and it was never a homogeneous tradition. While Wang was pursuing a research method that aimed to re-establish China’s antiquity on the basis of corroboration of excavated data with the transmitted historical records, a new trend of essentially textual scholarship argued for the total rejection of the traditional view of history. The deepening frustration with China’s political reality since the late nineteenth century had come to a head in the May Fourth Movement in 1919. The reflection of this political–cultural current in historical studies was the so-called “Doubting Antiquity” movement led by Gu Jiegang (1893–1980), a young graduate from Beijing University who began in 1921 to formulate his own theory of Chinese history. To Gu, the received textual tradition about China’s antiquity was the piling up of layered fabrications produced in the later periods, because quite obviously texts dated later, particularly from the Han Dynasty, often have more to say than early texts about their contemporary time. Although these sources can be used to study the intellectual mentality of the Warring States to Han times, they are ultimately invalid as sources for early history.11 In the words of Gu’s spiritual mentor Hu Shih, China’s history has to be cut short by at least two thousand years, to start only with the Eastern Zhou period (770–256 BC).
The revolutionary role of Gu and his colleagues in undermining the authority of the received tradition should not be underestimated – by doing so they had taken traditional Chinese historiography along the very first step towards modernization. However, as serious scholarship the “Doubting Antiquity” movement was weakened by a number of logical problems. Not only did Gu and his followers conduct research almost entirely neglecting the already promising solid progress that had been made by scholars like Wang Guowei, in most cases the persuasiveness of their argument for the late fabrication of a certain tradition depended entirely on the non-existence of relevant records in the earlier period, which was itself an argument that cannot be proven. When such proof does turn up through archaeology as in many cases where texts were judged later forgeries by Gu and his followers, they are bound to be on the losing side.12 But in a more general sense, the “Doubting Antiquity” scholarship simplified the study of history to the study of the dates of texts, and this resulted in a very narrow view of history. As essentially a textual scholarship, it failed to respond to the changes in the Early China field that on the whole turned to rely more and more on contemporaneous paleographical and archaeological materials. Because of these problems, the “Doubting Antiquity” movement has been largely sidelined by mainstream historiography both in the Mainland and on Taiwan after the 1950s, which has adopted a more positive attitude towards transmitted historical records.
Crossing the sea eastwards to Japan, the “Doubting Antiquity” position was anticipated in works by scholars like Shiratori Kurakichi (1865–1942) who, operating in a completely different intellectual context, spent much of his life attempting to disprove the actual existence of the legendary emperors down to the founder of the reputed Xia Dynasty. However, a parallel development took place particularly in the areas of oracle bone and bronze studies where Japan soon produced her first generation of scholars at a time when such scholarship was also in the formative stage in China. Given Japan’s strong tradition of Chinese textual scholarship, encouraged further by visits by eminent Chinese scholars since the early twentieth century, Japan has been one of the birthplaces of modern sinology outside China. In particularly Guo Moruo (1892–1978), the most ingenious modern scholar of bronze inscriptions and a leading Marxist historian of Early China, completed most of his research work while taking refuge in Japan after the Nationalists–Communist split in 1928.
It is true that since the 1930s both Chinese and Japanese traditions of historical scholarship have been heavily influenced by Marxist social theories. But particularly because of the unofficial position of Marxism in Japan after the war, Japanese scholars, while using certain Marxist concepts for social analysis, were able to break away from the confines of Historical Materialism and the Marxist periodization of history, popularly and politically endorsed in China. This allowed Japanese scholars to generate new research paradigms and to explore new topics in the Early China field. As a result, Japanese sinology was able to maintain its high standards through the 1950s to the early 1970s, while in China scholarly rigor had completely given way to political zeal. In general, it can be said that Japanese scholarship has the advantage of balancing detailed evidential research with broad theoretical perspectives, and this played no small role in the production by Japanese scholars of some of the finest works in the socioeconomic history of Early China.
The Recent Development of a North American Tradition of Early China Studies
Herrlee G. Creel (1905–94), a native of Chicago who had just earned a Ph.D. in Chinese philosophy, and studied Chinese with Berthold Laufer (1874–1934) at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, arrived in China in 1931 with the purpose of furthering his understanding of China’s early past. Creel had gone to China at a time when there were only a very few intellectuals in North America who had a serious scholarly interest in Early China. While in China Creel maintained close contacts with pioneering scholars in the Academia Sinica and made a number of tours to observe the excavation that was taking place in Anyang. Back in the United States in 1936 as a professor at the University of Chicago, Creel soon published his book, The Birth of China,13 which offered a suitable new introduction to Early Chinese civilization for a Western audience who had so far been reading solely the French scholarship. Chicago in this period also served as the focus for visits by distinguished scholars from China, whose interests complemented those of the university’s own faculty in the early period of Chinese history.14 By the end of the 1950s, with a few more scholars whose interests fell in periods before the end of Han taking up teaching posts in major universities, a rudimental curriculum for the study of Early China was established in North America. However, it was in the hands of the students of these early scholars that Early China became an established academic field defined by its own scholarly organization, which has published the journal Early China since 1975. In the words of David N. Keightley, respected founder of the journal and the first true American specialist of the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions: “If modern China is to be understood in sympathy and in depth its ancient history cannot be ignored. The study of early China has a legitimate place in modern curriculums; we must ensure that its value is appreciated.”15
However, with relatively weak roots (compared to the situation in Europe and Japan) in past scholarship except in such fields as art history and philology inherited from European sinology, North American scholars of Early China came under the very strong influence of the “Doubting Antiquity” movement originating in China. Not only was Gu’s autobiography translated into English almost immediately after its publication in China, a monographic study of Gu’s life and scholarship by Laurence A. Schneider was published just a few years before the journal of Early China was founded, making Gu the best-known modern Chinese historian in America.16 Against this special background, North American scholarship on Early China not only grew in its youth in near isolation from China as China was closed to the Western world after 1950; it has also taken the path of debating with China, particularly in the past twenty years, on a number of major issues such as the historicity of the Xia Dynasty, or broadly about the process by which Chinese civilization was formed and China had become a nation.
At the bottom of the debate is a fundamental difference with regard to the value of the transmitted textual information about China’s antiquity. While the “Doubting Antiquity” agenda continues to shape the essential intellectual attitude of many in the field in North America, in China and Taiwan the scholarly traditions have grown farther and farther apart from that lineage. While blessed by the spirit of criticism which in many cases rescued North American scholars
from falling into the trap of traditional historiography, few have been really aware of the problems of logic that handicapped the “Doubting Antiquity” school and of the resultant loss of research opportunities. However, it is fair to say that scholars who hold the view of ultra-skepticism so thoroughly as to totally deny the value of the received textual tradition for understanding China’s early past are few, while the majority of Early China scholars continue to employ traditional textual records in their study of early Chinese civilization. In better situations, the transmitted textual records would be used in conjunction with excavated paleographical or material data to achieve a more balanced, and less partial, understanding of antiquity.
There has always been the question of whether the sinological traditions described above, those of China, Japan, and the West (European and American), are three distinctive domains of scholarship, or if they can be regarded as one coherent intellectual enterprise. This is a very hard question. But perhaps the arrival of the new millennium has made both the question and the possible answers to it less important if not irrelevant as the tendency towards globalization is affecting all areas of human life. The digitalization of both textual and epigraphic sources and the electronic publication of new materials have made it possible for scholars outside China to respond to new discoveries almost as quickly as do most scholars in China. The growing wealth of China has offered more Chinese scholars opportunities to study in Western universities and for more Western students to study in China; as a result, the younger generations of scholars will become more familiar with different scholarly traditions and be more receptive to different views. The study of Early China was the product of international effort from the beginning, and it will continue to see higher levels of international collaboration in the future.