Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

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  Box 3.1 The Bingong Xu and the Memory of History

  This rare bronze can be dated to the mid Western Zhou period (c. 950–850 BC) by its typological and decorative features, being one of the earliest examples of a xu square tureen. Although it was acquired in the antique market in Hong Kong, the technological features shown by the vessel guarantee its authenticity. When the vessel was brought back to Beijing and cleaned in early 2003, its emergent inscription took everyone by surprise by offering a lengthy commemoration of the virtues of Great Yu, the legendary founder of the Xia Dynasty, paralleling much of the received tradition about his revered rule (Fig. 3.3).

  Although this inscription cannot be taken as evidence of the historicity of the Xia Dynasty, it is a concrete piece of evidence that certain beliefs about the rule of Great Yu already existed and were perhaps widespread during the Western Zhou period. More importantly, the inscription shows how, in Zhou mentality, the earliest history of the state and civilization was crystallized in the role of such cultural heroes like Yu whose superior virtue continued to live on and provided the foundation for the current kingship of Zhou. With regard to the latter point, the inscription unusually goes beyond the horizon of the religious–intellectual system of the Zhou which, as shown by numerous inscriptions from the period, was framed largely on the reverence for Zhou’s own ancestors.

  Heaven commanded Yu to spread out the soil, and to cross the mountains and dredge the streams.

  Thus, he (Yu) cut off the trees to open land for plantation, taxed the subjugated people, and oversaw virtues.

  He made himself the partner [of Heaven] and rejoiced in the people, being [their] father and mother, and gave birth to our kingship.

  He showered himself with nothing but virtue, and the people also loved the bright virtue – [he] worried about all under Heaven.

  [He] used his illuminating goodness to expand and strengthen the fine virtue, and to strengthen fully those who were not diligent.

  [He] was filial, friendly, open, and bright; [he] was constant and even in loving sacrifice, having no ugly heart.

  [He] loved virtue and promoted marriage, which was also in harmony with Heaven and to be respectful to the deities.

  [He] again used fortune and wealth, to forever live (?) in peace.

  Bin Gong proclaims: “May the people use this virtue! No regret!”

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  Fig. 3.3 The Bingong xu and its inscription.

  It is intriguing, and indeed natural, for any scholar to want to see whether there is a link between the two processes: the development of state-level society evident in the archaeological data, and the establishment of a dynastic royal state as learned from the transmitted historical tradition. Chronological studies of early Chinese history certainly project the three to four centuries before Shang back onto the Xia Dynasty, depending on the dates of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1554–1046 BC). This suggests a time-frame into which the range of carbon-14 dates of the Erlitou culture (c. 1900–1600 BC) mentioned above fall perfectly. In fact, in several sites the deposit of the Erlitou culture overrides the strata of the Longshan culture, and in other sites it is intruded or overlapped by Shang strata. Moreover, the ancient sources also indicate that the various centers associated with activities of the Xia kings, based on historical–geographical studies, were located largely in the same region as the sites that belong to the Erlitou culture – western Henan and southern Shanxi.9 In short, the evidence places the Erlitou culture into the same time period and space in which the Xia Dynasty described by the received tradition is supposed to have been the rule.

  To many scholars in China and still some in the West, this temporal and spatial coincidence provides a suitable base for identifying the Erlitou culture as the material culture of the Xia Dynasty and the Erlitou site as the Xia royal capital. In fact, there were not a few studies published in China in the past thirty years that took the identification of the so-called “Xia Culture” as their basic research assumption. However, this identification of the Erlitou culture with the Xia Dynasty would appear to lack any ground to other scholars; some have written strong rejections against the identification, in effect continuing a scholarly debate that has its origins in the “Doubting Antiquity” movement (see Chapter 1). The strongest point against the identification has been the complete lack of any written evidence from the Erlitou site or any other sites of the Erlitou culture that may be connected to the historical records about Xia. In the absence of such clear written evidence there is no way to link Erlitou to Xia. Except for a few, this latter view has been widely shared among scholars in the West.

  Therefore, the issue is not only intriguing, but can be academically and politically contentious.10 It is, however, our intellectual responsibility to disassociate scholarly discussions from any politically toned claims or accusations which are invariably based on ideology, not evidence. On the other hand, we need to be realistic about the current condition of the evidence and be aware of the full range of possible interpretations. First, there is no way at present, lacking written evidence from Erlitou or other culturally affiliated sites, to determine that Erlitou was indeed the capital of Xia. Before such evidence is brought to light and a direct link, rather than logical reasoning, can be established, the question will remain open. On the other hand, our current evidence has not proved that Erlitou was not Xia by, perhaps, identifying Erlitou with another polity that existed in the relevant time period and space. If one wants to make a strong argument that Erlitou was not Xia, then the only evidence that he/she can draw on is that there is no evidence that it was Xia. The point regarding contemporaneous written evidence is well taken, but it is itself ultimately an assumption that Xia, if it existed, did have a writing system and did produce the needed records; there is no evidence for this either.

  Since no solid ground can be gained from proving or disproving the Erlitou–Xia relation, it would seem inevitable that we return to the basic facts in archaeology and take a general consensus as the starting point – that is, Erlitou was a state-level society that possessed a level of power and wealth unrivaled by any other societies in its contemporary time context in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. It is quite probable, from the perspective of anthropological study of other regions in the world, for such a society to have left deep impressions on the cultural memory of the people who thereafter continued to live in North China. There is also the possibility that the Erlitou people never called themselves “Xia,” a term that could have been bestowed on them by their enemies and passed down into the Western Zhou dynasty, and this can make the “Erlitou–Xia” debate lose its focus. But the transmitted historical records, if we do not take them at face value and are not trapped by the superficial “Erlitou–Xia” debate, seem to transmit a true historical moment well known in anthropological literature – the transition from the pre-state society of free-standing chiefdoms to the state. The Erlitou state before Shang happened to have dominated at this particular moment a region to which the historical records ascribe the transition to the state. In the end, it is not the spatial or temporal overlap, but the parallel historical and archaeological processes in their shared time and space that offer us a meaningful piece of understanding of the possible relationship between Erlitou and the received tradition about the first royal dynasty in China – pending the name “Xia.”

  Certainly there is the possibility that Erlitou was not the capital of Xia but was the center of another state-level society which the received tradition did not record or failed to preserve. But then the question is: what is this Bronze Age state that archaeology has pulled out in front of us? Until archaeological research turns up another Bronze Age society with comparable power and wealth in the middle Yellow River region before Shang, the possibility that Erlitou was associated with activities of the early state transmitted in the name of “Xia,” though it cannot be substantiated, cannot be ruled out either.

  The Founding of the Shang Dynasty
and Early Shang Migrations

  The city of Erlitou had fallen in the later sixteenth century BC. Recent systematic carbon-14 dating has fixed the end of the last period of the cultural deposit in Erlitou at around 1530 BC, which comes very close to 1554 BC as the first year of the Shang Dynasty previously suggested by historians.11 With the founding of the Shang Dynasty, we enter into a historical period when North China was ruled by a royal dynasty whose outline history, most typified in the list of the Shang kings (Fig. 3.4), is testified by the excavated written records in a close match with the received tradition on Shang royal genealogy. In the Shang case, though this list was reconstructed on the basis of the divination records from the late part of the dynasty (see Chapter 4), there seems little doubt that it manifests rules and stipulations that go back to the early centuries of Shang.

  Fig. 3.4 The Shang king list.

  However, the narrative account of the origins of the Shang people by Sima Qian in The Grand Scribe’s Records has a clear mythical element. According to this account, the genitorial ancestor of the Shang people was named Qi, who was born because his mother swallowed an egg laid by a blackbird (swallow) – the “blackbird” myth is celebrated in a poem in the Book of Poetry. The early Shang people are reported as being engaged substantially in trading activities, but because they lived in an area frequently threatened by floods, probably on the eastern plain, the Shang people had moved their capital some eight times contemporary with the Xia Dynasty to their west. One of the trading trips took Wang Hai, six generations after Qi, to a polity of a greedy chief probably in present-day northern Henan where he was treacherously murdered and his fortune stolen. His nephew, Shang Jia, avenged his death by conquering that polity.

  Shang Jia happened to be the first pre-dynastic ancestor to whom the late Shang kings made frequent sacrificial offerings (Fig. 3.4, P1). He must have been critically important to the Shang people’s rise as a state and power, although further information on this had been lost. After five more generations, the Shang eventually grew into a major power under the leadership of Tang, known as Da Yi in the oracle-bone inscriptions (Fig. 3.4, K1). Tang, from his capital in a place called “Bo” and helped by his eastern allies, thus conquered the Xia Dynasty and founded the Shang Dynasty around 1554 BC. However, even after the founding of the Shang Dynasty, for various natural or political reasons as the tradition says, the Shang people continued to relocate their political center five times in different places including most importantly Zhong Ding’s (K9) capital at Ao, Jian Jia’s (K11) capital at Xiang, and finally Pan Geng’s (K18) capital at Yin, which is present-day Anyang.

  Except for the last Shang capital in Anyang in northern Henan where the Shang oracle bones were found, archaeology has yet to determine the locations of other Shang centers. In addition to the possible limitation of archaeological work, there is perhaps also the issue of interpretative meaning of the so-called “moves of capital” in the traditional records. Very likely, some of the Shang kings might have at some point of time constructed more than one base and frequently traveled between them. Some of these centers might have been very minor and only temporarily occupied by the Shang king, and therefore they are hard to determine during field archaeological survey. There is strong evidence, however, for two Shang centers, both located not very far from Erlitou, which are likely to have been counted among the Shang capitals mentioned above.

  Urban Civilization of the Early Bronze Age

  In the archaeological records, concomitant with the fall of Erlitou, there arose two large-scale urban centers in the middle Yellow River region, Yanshi, only 5 km from Erlitou and located on the north bank of the Luo River, and Zhengzhou located some 90 km further to the east. While archaeological research has shown undoubted continuity in terms of the typological progression of pottery from Erlitou to these new urban centers, the relocation of the political centers in the post-Erlitou era and its possible connections to the founding of the Shang Dynasty in the middle of the sixteenth century BC have puzzled scholars for nearly half a century.

  The city in Yanshi was a major archaeological discovery in the 1980s. In particular, its proximity to Erlitou on the south bank of the Luo River naturally raised questions about the political relationship between the two cities. Continuing research in the 1990s has confirmed that the construction of the city wall at Yanshi can be divided into two phases. In the initial phase (Period I), a rectangular wall-enclosure of 1100 × 740 m was built centering on building group no. 1, identified as the “Central Palace Zone,” which was itself surrounded by a thinner wall about 20 m wide. During Period II, the city was expanded on the northeast with an additional wall constructed to protect this new area, and the whole city thus measured 1200 m E–W and 1700 m N–S. This history of continuous construction in Yanshi is confirmed also by the fact that in a number of building compounds architectural remains belonging to two subsequent periods were excavated (Fig. 3.5). The central palace zone was connected by ditches to the moat which surrounded the outer city wall, forming the drainage system of the city. About 100 m to the west and indeed near the southwest corner of the city was located another group of fifteen rectangular building foundations, considered by the excavators to have functioned as the main warehouse of the city. A number of other foundations were discovered in the north half of the outer city, possibly serving as religious centers, and remains of a bronze casting foundry have been located at its northeastern corner. Recent carbon-14 dating has dated Period I (the initial construction phase) to 1605–1490 BC and Period III to 1425–1365 BC. This suggests that the whole city in Yanshi was probably under occupation for some 250 years, postdating the fall of Erlitou, during which it was the most prominent political and cultural center on the Luoyang plain, but might not be the most impressive in North China.

  Fig. 3.5 The city of Yanshi. Circled numbers show excavation trenches 1996–8; inset shows palace foundations D1–D8 and D10.

  The Shang city in Zhengzhou was discovered in the early 1950s. The wall, which still stands above ground today, runs about 1700 m N–S and 1870 m E–W, having a total area of 3,179,000 m2 (317.9 ha), being much larger than the city in Yanshi. While this wall-enclosure has been known for forty years, new research conducted in the 1990s has made it perfectly clear that the wall only encircled the core area of what was once the great metropolis in Zhengzhou. A section of the outer wall was found to the south, running for some 5,000 m, which if complete, would have encircled an area of some 2,000 ha (Fig. 3.6). In other words, the entire area of the Zhengzhou city was nearly ten times larger than the city in Yanshi. Located about 500 m to the south of the inner city was the famous site called Erligang, excavated in 1953, where the material culture of the period was first identified, giving rise to the term “Erligang culture” which, based on stratigraphic evidence, was further divided into two phases – the Upper Erligang Phase and the Lower Erligang Phase during which the inner city in Zhengzhou was constructed.12

  Fig. 3.6 The Shang city in Zhengzhou.

  However, the quality of archaeological data from the inner city of Zhengzhou is not as good as those from Yanshi due largely to the difficulty involving fieldwork in the area now buried under the modern city. Between the two wall circles, numerous settlements, burials, and workshops have been found. These include more than twenty elite tombs that contain sets of bronze vessels, in addition to hundreds of tombs that contain only pottery. These tombs suggest that, in comparison to Erlitou, burying bronze vessels and weapons was now rather a common practice in relatively large tombs. However, bronzes in Zhengzhou were frequently also excavated from specially prepared storage pits or caches which have yielded some of the masterpieces of the Zhengzhou bronze industry. The most important are a cache discovered at Duling in 1974 and another in the Nanshuncheng Street in 1996 (Fig. 3.7). Bronzes from these pits are considerably heavier and technically more advanced, suggesting that the bronze industry at Zhengzhou had advanced to a higher level of development than at Erlitou. This is best indic
ated by the introduction of square vessels of large magnitude which are technologically more difficult to produce.13

  Fig. 3.7 Bronze vessel from Zhengzhou.

  Based on the dates of fifteen carbon-14 samples, the Lower Erligang Phase can now be placed with considerable accuracy at between 1580 and 1415 BC. In other words, the construction of the inner city of Zhengzhou began at about the same time as the inner city of Yanshi, and thereafter the two centers separated by 90 km coexisted for some 200 years covering the early part of the Shang Dynasty, by historical chronology. Although only three pieces of inscribed oracle bones have been found in Zhengzhou, which failed to link the immense city to the Shang Dynasty through contemporary written evidence,14 the great continuity in the material culture and the writing system from Zhengzhou to the late Shang capital Anyang certainly offers grounds for scholars to consider the historical contexts woven behind the construction of this urban center prior to Anyang. To some it was the ruin of capital Bo, the political center of Shang since its founding king, Tang (K1); to others, it was the second Shang capital Ao, constructed by the ninth king, Zhong Ding, who ruled during the middle Shang period.15 In recent years, the gap has been significantly narrowed and it looks more plausible now to associate the middle Shang period with another important site that is later than Zhengzhou (see Chapter 4), leaving the early Shang as the only time-frame in which the Zhengzhou Shang city can fit. But its historical name still cannot be properly determined.