It is commonly said that China is one of the oldest continuously existing civilizations in
the world. However, if you took a modern Chinese person, or even a subject of the
Middle Kingdom’s medieval dynasties, and transplanted them into China’s ancient bronze age,
they would likely find the people of that time utterly alien in language,
religion and custom. In this video, we will be examining the earliest origins of one of
the world’s most esteemed civilizations, with an emphasis on the Kingdoms of Shang and Zhou,
exploring exactly how far back in history a recognizably Chinese culture can be traced.
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While it is said that Chinese history is 5,000 years old,
many of its iconic features are comparatively much more recent. For example, the mandate of heaven,
the beating heart of Chinese historiography which frames the rise and fall of Imperial dynasties,
did not crystallize into a solid concept until the rise of the Zhou around 3,000 years
ago. Meanwhile, staples of Chinese social doctrine, like Confucianism and Buddhism,
only started becoming mainstream parts of society during the Han dynasty of around 2,000 years ago.
Throughout history, the territory, religions, cultures and languages that constitute “China”
have undergone massive change, which problematizes the idea of China as a linearly continuous 5,000
year old civilization. So, how far back can one go can still see something recognizably ‘Chinese?’
As it is with myriad other nations, the origins of Chinese civilization in the popular narrative
is shrouded in fantastic folklore, replete with various mythical Emperors and Sage Kings
possessed of various supernatural powers. Perhaps the most famous of these is Yu the Great,
who around 4,000 years ago stopped a devastating flood of the Yellow River by personally dredging
it with his superhuman strength. Thereafter, Yu became the first ruler of a hereditary domain,
known as the Xia, traditionally considered to be China’s first dynasty. In modern historiography,
Yu, and the Xia dynasty have been consigned to the realm of myth and folklore, as little
archaeological evidence and no literary records from this primordial era survives.
With that said, modern archaeology has discovered various prehistoric material culture complexes
along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers dating back at least 4,000 years, such as the Erlitou
culture. These societies may well have ties to the myth of Yu and his predecessors,
especially since they were farming cultures who relied on the capricious flow of the Yellow River.
However, as they were pre-literate communities, and left no written record of themselves, we have
no way of knowing if they were the cultural or linguistic predecessors of the Chinese.
Let us now set the clock to the dying years of China’s last imperial dynasty. In 1899,
a malaria epidemic erupted in Beijing. At the time, it was believed that the cure
to this disease was to grind up ancient dragon bones and mak e a soup from them.
Taking advantage of this fad, peasants from Anyang village in Henan Province began digging
old ox bones and turtle shells out of the ground and passing them off as dragon remains.
Many of these bones had odd scratchings on them. Fearing these marrings would lower their value,
the peasants of Anyang smoothed them off before selling them. However, some of these
specimens soon circulated into the hands of a scholar, who realized something remarkable:
these etchings were, infact, a hitherto unknown form of ancient Chinese writing, so different
from the modern Chinese script that the peasants had no clue what they were defacing. Henceforth,
archaeologists flooded into Anyang, and discovered something remarkable: an ancient settlement, and
3,200 year old seat of the royal house of Shang. The Shang state, which extended over only a small
portion of modern China, is considered the first historically attested Chinese polity
because unlike the Xia state which supposedly predated them by centuries, the Shang left
behind an observable written record in the form of those aforementioned bones. Known to scholars as
‘oracle bones’, the archaic characters written upon them represent questions posed by the people
of Shang to the spirits, such as if the lady of their royal family would give birth to a son,
whether they should attack neighboring tribes, or whether sacrifices should be made.
The oracle bones were then tossed into a fire, and the manner in which the heat cracked the bone
along the writing determining the spirit’s answer. Few in the historical community deny that the
3,200 year old remains found at Anyang represent a culture directly ancestral to modern China.
The most glaring testament to this lies in their written languages. The runes
etched onto Shang oracle bones represent clear, archaic versions of modern Chinese characters,
which allows us to infer that, at least amongst their elite and priestly castes,
their spoken language was ancestral to today’s Chinese dialects as well.
Moreover, our limited window into Shang spiritualism reveals many familiar
Chinese features. As is still the case in many contemporary households in Taiwan,
Hong Kong and the mainland, the worship of family ancestors was a core pillar of Shang society.
Shang Kings in particular appeared to draw their power from the spirits of their royal ancestors.
Through this, a hierarchy existed, in which the long dead outranked the recently dead,
who outranked the Shang King, who outranked all other living humans. The importance of
ancestors is further emphasized in how the Shang created great sacrificial vessels out of bronze,
in which was placed wine and various cooked dishes for the enjoyment of their long deceased kin.
On top of human ancestors, the Shang also worshiped a variety of nature spirits,
and had a chief deity, Di, who determined the natural order and the fate of Kingdoms. Di,
whose name shares the modern Chinese character for ‘Emperor’, would play an incredibly important role
in the Chinese psyche for millenia to come. In government, the Shang polity also seems to
have resembled an early version of later Chinese statecraft.
The ancient Shang were ruled by a hereditary monarch and his royal family, which presided
over a bureaucratic court of appointed individuals with specialized departments of responsibility.
This can be seen as a precursor to the highly centralized courts of later Chinese dynasties
such as the Han, Song, and Qing which would emerge thousands of years down the line.
Indeed, the literati of those later dynasties considered the Shang to be
their direct cultural predecessors. For example, in his sweeping work on the history of China,
the historian Sima Qian of the Han dynasty wrote a genealogical account of the house of
Shang, in which he names several of their Kings, including Wu Ding, who reigned around the time the
city at Anyang was at its height. However, unlike his accounting of the Yellow Emperor and the Xia,
Sima Qian’s attestations of the Shang can be corroborated with hard archaeological evidence,
as the names of the Shang Kings he writes about also appear on the oracle bones found at Anyang.
With all that said, the Shang Kingdom was still a drastically different state than what one would
expect from a typical Chinese dynasty, with many features of Shang society not considered part of
conventional Chinese cultural continuity. For one thing, Shang gender roles appear very different
from the later Chinese norm. This is exemplified by the perhaps the most remarkable of finds at the
Anyang archaeological site: the tomb of Lady Hao. Found interred in a massive mausoleum alongside
thousands of ornate luxuries of jade, ivory and bronze, Fu Hao was one of the sixty-four consorts
of the aforementioned King Wu Ding. However, far from lounging around in a royal harem, Fu
Hao was a renowned warrior who led her own armies and launched conquests into neighboring states,
all while owning and administering her own lands outside the capital, essentially making her a
critical member of the Shang military aristocracy. While many famous women would serve as warriors
throughout Chinese history, the remains of Fu Hao is evidence that in the Shang realm,
female fief-holders and military leaders were a normalized part of the state apparatus,
a highly unusual idea for China’s later dynasties, for whom, at least ostensibly,
women were far less politically active. In her campaigns, Fu Hao took many captives
from foreign tribes, who would then be used as ritual victims in cult rites. This brings us
to the topic of human sacrifice, a gruesome staple of Shang religion. The mass slaughter of hundreds,
if not thousands of captives was a common occurrence at the Shang capital,
and while human sacrifice would persist for some centuries after the Shang’s eventual collapse,
it would become a taboo and ultimately abolished practice by the time of the Han dynasty.
Perhaps the largest thing holding the Shang apart from later Chinese dynasties was that
in all likelihood, its demographic makeup was hardly Chinese to begin with. Deep in antiquity,
the area that is now modern China was far more ethnically and linguistically diverse than today,
with vast swathes of it inhabited by speakers of non-Chinese tongues potentially ancestral
to todays’ Viet, Thai, and Tibetan languages, among many others. This was likely the case
even in the Shang’s Yellow River valley heartland. Thus, while later Chinese dynasties ruled during
eras where the Chinese language and writing system had assimilated more evenly across the land, the
Shang state resembled more a deeply multicultural feudal confederacy, with the ancestrally Chinese
writing system seen on their oracle bones used mainly by their elite caste and royal house.
To add on to this, Shang Kings seem to have led highly mobile lives,
constantly riding around to ensure the loyalty of their many militant confederates. This is
a big contrast to later Chinese Emperors, who were largely confined to their massive palaces.
It therefore follows that the Shang were constantly absorbing foreign influences
into their culture. The use of chariots in war, for example, was likely adopted from an
indo-European speaking Caucasian people, native to the modern Xinjiang desert, and ancestrally
related to many of todays’ European and Northern Indian populations. Later Chinese dynasties would,
of course, absorb cultural practices from their non-Chinese neighbors too. However,
while from the Han Dynasty onwards, Chinese high culture was the sun around which all
east Asia orbited around, during the Shang Dynasty, the proto-Chinese world was but one
of many mid-sized realms, likely no more or less influential than many other states in the region.
Ultimately, the Shang polity’s relationship to the cultural continuity of Chinese civilization is a
complex one. It is perhaps best described as a Chinese state that existed before Chinese culture
had become aware of its own identity and special nature. A good historical parallel could be early
Rome when it was but a small city-state among the many diverse peoples of the Italian Peninsula,
oblivious to the thousands of years of deeply established Imperial tradition it was starting.
For China, the core of those Imperial traditions would begin
with the successors of the Shang, the Zhou. Originally, the Zhou were one of the Shang’s
many vassals. They were a semi-nomadic people, and perhaps speakers of a non-Chinese language.
If tradition is to be believed, then around 1100 BC, their King, Wen, pursued a deliberate
acculturation policy to make his people imitate the language and patterns of the prestigious
Shang. So prosperous and powerful did King Wen become that he began to outshine his overlord.
When he died in 1050 BC, his son and heir, King Wu, would bring tensions with the Shang to a head.
If the hilariously anachronistic account of Sima Qian is to be believed, then he accomplished
this in a single morning, slaughtering over 500,000 loyal Shang soldiers in the process.
King Wu of Zhou had overthrown the house of Shang, but establishing rule over the multitudes
of vassal states the Shang had once controlled would be no easy feat. The Zhou needed to make
a case as to why the tribes who had once bowed to the Shang now owed their loyalty to this new
house of overlords. To that end, they utilized the chief Shang god Di, rebranding him as Tian,
which directly translates to ‘sky’, but is generally translated in English as ‘heaven’.
King Wu and his successors promoted the idea that their ascension to power had occurred only because
almighty Heaven, ever omnipotently controlling the fate of the civilized world, had deemed it
to be so. Furthermore, if the last Shang King had not been so ruthless, corrupt, or depraved,
then Heaven would not have seen fit to cast him down and replace him with a new ruler. Thus
was born one of the longest enduring political philosophies in the world, the mandate of heaven.
This philosophy might have died in the crib, if not for the fact that, when King Wu of Zhou died
in 1043 BC, a rebellion broke out in an attempt to overthrow his heir, who was a powerless child.
This rebellion was put down by one of the late King’s brothers, known to history as the Duke of
Zhou. After emerging victorious, the Duke of Zhou could easily have deposed his underage nephew and
ruled himself, but he didn’t, and ensured the son of King Wu was restored to his rightful throne,
because it was the child who had been given Tian’s mandate, not he. This set the precedent that the
Mandate of Heaven, by which monarchs could only be deposed by divine will, not human machinations,
would become a real and active force in Chinese politics for millenia to come.
If Shang was an archaic, dubiously Chinese state not yet aware of its own nature, then the Zhou
was when that awareness began to truly blossom, and the prestige of cultural continuity began to
cement in the minds of the Chinese literati. Many elements of Shang courtly life, such as
ancestor worship, divination through bones, and the written language, were directly continued by
the Zhou royal family, however, the Zhou pushed the boundaries of their realm further than the
Shang ever had, thereby expanding the influence of an ever-evolving written Chinese language,
all while improving on the efficiency of the Chinese feudal bureaucracy seeded by the Shang,
and maintaining their prestige with all manner of religious and cultural rites.
In theory, the Zhou Dynasty was the longest lasting of all Chinese dynasties,
clocking in at nearly 800 years. In practice, its power was effectively crippled about 200
years into its rule, when the Quanrong, likely a group of Tibeto-Burman nomads,
sacked their western capital in 771 BC, forcing them to move their power base east, ultimately
losing control over their vassals and becoming one of many fractureous Chinese states in the ensuing
Spring and Autumn period and warring states eras. Nevertheless, compared to the Shang, the Zhou era
occupies a titanic place in the Chinese peoples’ concept of their own cultural continuity. Even a
certain Confucius, who was born in the 6th century BC, 200 years after the collapse of Zhou unity,
predicated his entire philosophy on a nostalgia for the enlightened rule of the wise Zhou Kings of
eld, wishing to return to a time when their proper ritual and observance of heaven’s will defined
Chinese statecraft, rather than the capricious warring armies of the divided China he lived in.
Centuries later still, when Buddhism arrived to China via the silk road in the late Han Dynasty,
many Chinese literati questioned why this strange, foreign Indian religion should be allowed to take
root in their ancient and prestigious culture. In response, Chinese Buddhists drew upon the
lessons of the Duke of Zhou to explain why their faith had a place in society.
All of this serves to route us back to our original question:
how far back in time can one go, and see a recognizably ‘Chinese’ state?
Based on the information explored in our video, we can confidently conclude that the answer is
a definitive ‘it depends’. As we have seen, the idea of what Chinese culture is is ever evolving,
constantly absorbing foreign influences, while old cultural elements evolve internally or fade away.
If one considers the most archaic written language and courtly rituals sufficient, then China begins
with the Shang, but if one believes China needs to be aware of its own cultural continuity to be
China, then it only truly begins with the Zhou. If Confucianism need to be part of the equation,
then we need to go even farther forward, and this is all before accounting for the many,
many diverse languages and cultures which have existed within the Chinese state apparatus
all throughout its history, whose members may interpret their place in Chinese history
differently than the elite Chinese-speaking literati. With all that said, that China is
a deeply storied civilization with incredibly ancient roots is a fact that cannot be challenged,
and regardless of how the way we interpret her story involves, this will always be true.
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