In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  It was soon clear that thousands of oracle bones had come out of the ground near Hsiao-tun. In 1922, the decade of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, Ur of the Chaldees and Mohenjo-Daro, excavations began which would be of no less significance in the history of China, and of the world. Here were the tombs of the last Shang kings and their royal kinsmen and women, packed with wonderful bronze funeral ornaments. Here too was evidence of human sacrifice; for as at Ur in Babylonia, Abydos in Egypt and in Central America, the early Chinese rulers had been buried with the corpses of their faithful retainers. And here too was the answer to the riddle of the dragon bones.

  The chemists in Beijing had been grinding up the ritual archive of the Shang Kings. These were oracle bones used by royal diviners to communicate with the ancestral spirits. They came partly from cattle but especially from turtles, the ancient symbol of immortality in Chinese culture. The bones were heated and then split with a sharp implement; the oracles were then interpreted according to the way the cracks ran. Afterwards the bones were annotated with the diviner’s comments in answer to questions about birth and death, fertility, sickness, health, even the outcome of royal campaigns, hunting expeditions, and the founding of cities. In these strange marks lay the beginnings of the I Ching, the great Chinese book of wisdom, still used throughout the world today. (The beginnings of historiography too, of astronomical and calendrical observations, were ‘close to divination and the worship of the spirits’ as the ancient historian Ssu-ma Chien noted.) Here then was a fundamental clue to the origins and early character of Chinese culture, for it was through the magic power of writing that the ancestral spirits could be raised. Indeed, the ancient Chinese word for these symbols – ‘wen,’ writing – would become the word for civilization itself. In the beginning, in China, was not the city, but the word.

  The second key find at Anyang was the bronzes. These exquisite and elaborate ritual vessels were used for sacrifices and ritual meals. Cast by the lost wax process, their extraordinary patterns and detail, their elegance of design and their luxuriant patina have made them among the most coveted of all art objects. Their inscriptions tell of lineage and of the worship of ancestors, basic preoccupations of the Chinese till today. ‘Ts’ai Shu, I myself made this,’ reads one inscription from the ninth century BC. ‘May my sons and grandsons for a myriad years treasure it and use it without limit.’ It was the possession of these things, the performance of the correct rituals, the monopoly of bronze and writing which gave the rulers access to the wisdom of the ancestors. This was the basis of political power, and only with this could the ruler possess the greatest of gifts, a gift to be kept only so long as he was just and cared for the people – the mandate of heaven.

  Excavations have continued at Anyang. The last big find was the extraordinarily rich tomb of Lady Fu Hao in 1976. And in the last few years Chinese archaeologists have been able to bring to life a whole prehistory which had previously been thought merely legend. Decipherment of the oracle bones has shown that the Shang kings whose names were handed down by tradition were real people. Several of their capitals have been identified; some indeed, like that at the modern industrial city of Zheng Zhou (ancient Ao?) still show great earth ramparts above ground. Tantalizingly, the ancestral ritual centre, the ‘Great City Shang’ itself has not yet been found, though clues suggest it lies buried in Honan under flood levels by the old course of the Yellow River at a place still called, intriguingly, Shang ch’iu. The discovery in the 1980s of a new Shang city at Yen Shih near Zheng Zhou confirms the impression that these were great enclosures for the performance of royal rituals, ‘the pivot of the four quarters,’ as later texts put it, ancestors of the imperial enclosures at Xian and of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Inside the walls were the palaces and dwellings of the royal kin. Commoners’ houses, bronze and bone workshops and pottery kilns were all outside. Much remains to be understood about Shang society: different clans within the royal lineage may have taken the kingship in rotation, moving the capital each time. But it seems clear that Shang society had two main strata: the ruling warrior nobility (with their ritual specialists) and the village farmers. This division would remain one of the chief characteristics of Chinese society for thousands of years.

  Recent excavations have taken the tale back further still. Before the origins of the Shang, legend names a shadowy dynasty called the Hsia. The Hsia were said to have originated near the sacred mountain of Songshan. Here small defended enclosures from around 2000 BC have now been uncovered. This was the very heartland of China, the ‘Middle Kingdom’, Zhungwo, which gave the land its name.

  Set beside the long development of prehistoric humankind in China, these new discoveries show that Chinese classical culture was a continuous indigenous development out of a very ancient past. Just like India, its culture was autochthonous, born in its own soil, with a deep-rooted continuity from prehistoric times. This in turn may help explain, as in India, the exceptional tenacity of belief and custom which can be seen throughout Chinese history. The myths have been proved to have a historical kernel. The central concerns of the culture from the earliest times for which there is record were writing, divination, ritual, ancestor worship, history and poetry. The sacred books of classical Chinese civilization reflected these concerns: Li Chih (ritual) Shi Chih (history) I Ching (divination) Shih Ching (poetry), books which still provided the ideological basis of the state down to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the empire came to an end.

  The civilization of classical China turned these ancient beliefs into one of the greatest achievements of humanity. As with India, it was rooted in the folk culture of the Bronze Age, which lent it an amazing resilience, longevity and distinctiveness. And as in India and ancient Greece, these central concerns and traditions were codified early, in the fifth century BC, codified in a way which defined the path China would take. And their codifier was Kung Fu Tzu – Confucius.

  CONFUCIUS: SHAPER OF THE TRADITION

  Today graves are dug again in the cemetery of the Kung family in Qufu, Shandung province, their gaily coloured paper decorations fluttering in the wind. Extending over 500 acres, containing 2500 years of ancestors, this unique place was vandalized in the Cultural Revolution, the bones of the dead dug up and execrated in a futile attempt to exorcise the continuing power of their spirits. But today it is still a monument to the most influential figure in Chinese history, and to those who have faithfully conserved his legacy.

  It was Confucius who transformed the magic of the Bronze Age into the conception of the state as a moral order sustained by virtue and ritual. Confucius lived in that astonishing Axis Age when the Buddha was alive, as were Pythagoras, the Greek philosophers, and the Jewish prophets. He was not a religious leader, but the codifier of China’s traditions in history, poetry and ritual. His teachings were the ideal of Chinese government for two thousand years, and even though (like the Buddha and Jesus) we only have his reported sayings, what has come down to us is an unmistakable and individual voice.

  At the centre of Confucius’ message was a simple and original idea. He was not concerned with God or the afterlife or heaven. ‘I don’t know anything about those things,’ he said. His concern was that of every government today: how to build a just and stable society here on earth. And his answer was this: goodness, moral virtue, was the essential quality needed to keep society together. Jen, humanity, was the most valued goal to which we can all aspire as citizens.

  People are not born good, Confucius thought, they need to be taught goodness – both rulers and ruled. It was essential that the rulers were taught goodness, spiritual and intellectual, because if rulers rule with unjust harshness and severity, meting out excessive punishments and oppressing the people (like the wicked Chòu), then people lose their faith in the law, they lose their respect for themselves, they have no sense of shame. But if people are taught goodness and self-respect, then they have all those qualities and they regulate themselves. Confucius’ vision then was of a moral society b
ound together by mutual respect and trust. And though an aristocrat, his was in a sense an anti-authoritarian idea because the control of the ideology would rest with the scholars, not with the emperors who themselves had to obey that golden mean or risk forfeiting the mandate of heaven, as even today’s rulers of China have found out.

  The seriousness with which these ideas were followed by China’s best rulers is shown by a passage in the last testament of the K‘ang-hsi emperor composed in the winter of 1717:

  The rulers of the past all took reverence for Heaven’s laws and reverence for their ancestors as the fundamental way in ruling the country. To be sincere in reverence for Heaven and ancestors entails the following: be kind to men from afar and keep the able ones near, nourish the people, think of the profit of all as being the real profit and the mind of the whole country as being the real mind, be considerate to officials and act as a father to the people, protect the state before danger comes and govern well before there is any disturbance, be always diligent and always careful, and maintain the balance between leniency and strictness, between principle and expediency, so that long-range plans can be made for the country. That’s all there is to it.

  Confucius’ golden rule of personal virtue sounds very old-fashioned today, as too does his emphasis on ritual. But of course it is still true today that personal virtue is the basis of civilization. As for ritual, it gives definition to relationships; it expresses respect; it gives form to the link with the ancestors which all humans seek. ‘Without rituals,’ said Confucius, ‘we may as well be dead.’ But in the end he thought it all depended on goodness: if we are not good, what use are rituals? And here’s the rub: what is goodness? What is a good person? Confucius’ pupils were given a simple answer. ‘He who loves others,’ said the master. ‘The good person wishing to stand himself helps others to stand; wishing himself to arrive, helps others arrive. The ability to see the parallel to your own case is the secret of goodness.’

  In Qufu today on Confucius’ birthday, grand ceremonies take place once again, sponsored by the state. In the last few years the rulers of China have revived a number of the old Confucian traditions, at least in their outward form. Performance of such rituals ceased after the Communist revolution; indeed, as a state cult they ended with the Republic in 1911. Today they are done by actors and the ceremonies in Confucius’ home town are for tourists: largely foreign Chinese tourists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, rediscovering roots severed, temporarily it would now seem, in 1949. It is a vision of a splendid past which the rulers of China in our time attempted to do away with, in the belief that new traditions could replace them. But just when we think we have shaken it off, the past has an uncanny habit of coming back to restate its old claims on our loyalties. ‘Appreciate the past,’ said the master, ‘and understand the present. Only then can you learn virtue and goodness.’

  TAOISM: THE WAY

  Long before Confucius, the ancient Chinese believed that earth, nature and the cosmos were part of a harmonious natural order, the Tao, the way or path. The search for the right path, Taoism, is the second great stream of Chinese thought; a natural mysticism to set beside the practical common sense of Confucius. The early Taoist classics, such as the Tao te Ching and Chuang Tzu indeed look like reactions against Confucian civil morality, and what they saw as the artificial and restrictive structures of society. But Taoism came to be seen not as an alternative, but as the other half of a necessary balance in life. Indeed it was said that the complete person was a Confucian by day (in public life) and a Taoist by night (in private).

  The pilgrim path up the sacred mountain Taishan is a symbol for that search for the Tao. It is the easternmost of the five sacred mountains which define the heartland of Zhungwo, the Middle Kingdom. Taishan has been sacred since prehistory. It has been walked for thousands of years by Chinese people, rich and poor, from Confucius and the first Emperor to Chairman Mao. And today tourists and pilgrims are coming again.

  The ascent of Taishan prompts questions about the way the great eastern civilizations have viewed humanity’s place in the natural world, and the divergence of traditional eastern and western conceptions of spirituality. For so long western culture has seen nature in terms of control and exploitation. But for the ancient Chinese it was the source of all harmony and balance. They thought it was our duty as human beings, through art, religion and science, to understand the harmony: not to abuse it or needlessly to change it, but to go with the force of nature, the yin and yang as they would say.

  All the way up the mountain paths on Taishan there are shrines to the traditional deities of the land. Smashed during the Cultural Revolution, they have been rebuilt and people are once more stopping to light incense, make prayers and leave offerings. The little Taoist temple on the top of Taishan, dedicated to the Goddess of the mountain, was wrecked by the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. It is now lived in again, not by actors but by real Taoist monks and nuns who came back in 1985, committing themselves to the old way. In 1990, with the help of a government grant, they reroofed the main shrine. All over China, with freedom of worship again allowed, such acts of restitution, of reclamation of the past, are taking place. How they will fare it is too early to say. ‘In the end,’ said the Taoist sage Lao-Tzu, ‘all creatures return to their distinctive roots, that is called returning to one’s destiny. It is knowledge of what is constant which is true wisdom. Woe to him who wilfully innovates and ignores the constant.’

  From the top of Taishan is a wonderful vista: to the west the Yellow River plain; to the east the Yellow Sea; all around great wooded precipices and fairy-tale crags crowned with little pagodas; below, the path makes its dizzying descent to the foot of the mountain, and the immense Sung temple, the Tai Miao. On the summit the pilgrims wait for the first glimpse of the dawn, as the great did before them. It was up here that Chairman Mao proclaimed ‘The East is Red,’ but that was before his Great Leap Forward turned the dawn yellow with pollution. Over two thousand years ago the first emperor; Chin Shi Huangdi, surveyed his kingdom from here as the sun rose and announced, ‘Now I have united the whole world.’ Confucius said simply, ‘Now I realize how small the world is.’

  THE UNIFICATION OF CHINA

  China was unified in 221 BC by Chin Shi Huangdi, after centuries of warfare among the Yellow River states. The ideology of the Chin emperor’s rule came from the legalists, who rejected Confucian morality on the grounds that a state could only be governed by a ruthless system of law applied to all. The tension between these two conceptions of government still continues.

  The Chin emperor standardized the Chinese script and weights and measures; he built a massive canal system still visible north of Xian in Shaanxi province, and the earliest Great Wall to keep out northern nomads. But his rule was remembered with fear and bitterness for a thousand years. Most reviled by posterity was the burning of books: a systematic attempt to confine written knowledge within the imperial library and allow access only to practical subjects such as drugs, medicine, oracles, agriculture and forestry. Any critical or heterodox literature was burned. The Chin emperor’s special wrath was reserved for history. ‘Fearing the power of the past to discredit the present,’ he buried the historians alive with their books, even exhuming and execrating the dead. By this, it was hoped, only one version of the past might survive.

  Towards the end of his life, Shi Huangdi’s megalomania led him on a search for everlasting life, climbing Taishan to drink the ambrosia of dawn from magic bowls on the summit. Outside Xian he built an immense tomb guarded by an army of life-size terracotta warriors, a sensational discovery when excavated in 1974. Inside the tomb was a stone labyrinth with pits and blind alleys and crossbows set to fire automatically if disturbed. In the central chamber the ceiling represented the sky with pearls for stars; on the floor was a stone map of the world with the hundred rivers of the Empire flowing mechanically with mercury. Buried with the king were his childless wives and concubines, and all the craftsmen who
knew the secrets of its construction. Whether the tomb was opened and looted, in the rebellion which followed the emperor’s death is unknown: it may still hide some of its secrets.

  The Chin emperor failed in his attempt to rewrite Chinese history. In the first century BC the great Ssu-ma Chien was able accurately to reconstruct many of the pre-Chin traditions and chronology, beginning what is perhaps the world’s richest and longest continuous historiographical tradition. But the spell cast by the first emperor would remain on China’s rulers, right down to the ‘last emperor’ Mao and his successors, whose revolution was in some senses just that: a complete circle going back to Shi Huangdi and his fear of history and its power to give meaning to the present.

  FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE WEST

  The Silk Route in the Gobi Desert, in the far west of China, is one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the world. Across this desert from the second century AD came the ideas, goods and people which ushered in China’s first international age. China had never been wholly immune to influences from the west, even in prehistory. But the desert, the Himalayas and the great massif of the Tibetan plateau were a great obstacle to close and regular contacts. And so, more than any other Old World civilization, China had developed in relative isolation, uniquely itself; neither wanting nor needing anything from the outside world. But now contacts opened up with central Asia, Persia, even Rome, and especially with India. For what the Chinese were looking for was not material riches but spiritual enlightenment: the wisdom of the Buddha.