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. By the way, there’s a quirk of old Scottish
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help support the channel. 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. Thanks again to our sponsor, Established
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