Three Dynasties

Excavation of Shang and Xia

Xia - 2200-1750 BC
Shang - 1750-1040 BC
Zhou - 1100-256 BC

What do they tell us about China's origins?

First, there seems to have been a rather smooth transition from the innumerable Neolithic villages of the Longshan culture to the Bronze Age capital cities of the Three Dynasties, all of which we can view as successive phases of a single cultural development. Looking at the tools and weapons, the pots and bronze vessels, the domestication of crops and animals, the architectural layout of settlements and burials, and the evident practices of religion and government, we can see a high degree of cultural homogeneity and continuity. One dynasty succeeded another through warfare, but there is no evidence of violent intrusion by an outside culture. Moreover, Xia, Shang, and Zhou centered in three different areas and seem to have co-existed (see Map 6). The Shang and Zhou "succession" consisted of becoming the dominant center of ancient North China.

Second, these ancient capitals testify to the power of a kingship based on sedentary, land-locked agriculture, not on mobile, waterborne trade with other areas. To be sure, cowry shells found at Anyang must have come from the seacoast; and the Neolithic East Asians were seafarers when opportunity arose. We know this from the fact that a Neolithic site in northern Taiwan dated 4000-2500 BC (and a later Neolithic South Taiwan site dated 2500 to 400 BC BC) were uncovered on an island that today is 100 miles of the coast of Fujian province. As there was no land bridge from the mainland, and as the sea, though more shallow, did not vary sufficiently in depth to make crossing much easier than it would be today, we have to conclude that the Neolithic peoples living on the sea developed a nautical technology parallel with the Neolithic capacity for agriculture. So why did a robust sea trade not grow up in China comparable to that in the Middle East and Mediterranean? The difference lay in an accident of geography: few other early communities in East Asia could be reached from Cnina by coasting or by sea trade. Chinese shipping developed on the Yangzi, between Shandong and South Manchuria and along the coast, but no great sea trade could grow up in the absence of accessible foreign countries.

The Rise of Central Authority

The deposits of Yangshao and then Langshan types of pottery in half a dozen or more areas on the North China plain and along the Yellow River and Lower Yangzi show the differentiation of local cultures. As contact grew among these Neolithic farming villages, networks of kinship and allied relationships created an opportunity for broader government from a central capital. Judging by what came later, it seems that family lineages, derived from large tribal clans, each set up their separate walled towns. The Shang oracle bones name about a thousand towns altogether. One lineage headed by a patriarch would establish relations by marriage with other lineages in other walled towns. Branch lineages could also be set up by migration to new townsites; and complex relations of subordination and superordination would ensue.

Toward the end of the third millennium BC the making of bronze from copper and tin deposits widely mined in North China coincided with the rise during the Xia and Shang dynasties of the first central government over a broad area. Bronze metallurgy was probably a natural further step in a technology that had developed techniques for shaping and firing Yangshao and Longshan pottery and then producing small copper objects such as knives. Whether the techniques of bronze metallurgy were indigenous or imported (or both), the central fact of bronze production was that only a strong authority could ensure the mining of ore. Judging by nineteenth-century examples, premodern mining required laborers, on hands and knees, to drag their heavy ore-sleds out through cramped and unventilated tunnels - work fit for slaves or prisoners. When it came to bronze casting by the piece-mold process, hundreds of skilled artisans would be needed to prepare and handle the molten metal. Making ritual vessels of bronze thus had several implications - first, that a royal authority was vitally concerned with rituals as an aspect of its power; and, second, that it was able to assign manpower to the onerous tasks of mining ores and refining metals.

We know that in both Xia and Shang the ruling family made use of elaborate and dramatic rituals to confirm their power to govern, especially the rituals of shamanism by which a priest (or shaman), often the ruler himself, would communicate with the spirits of the ancestors to secure their help and guidance. In this function the shaman would be helped by certain animals considered to have a totemic relation to the ancestors. On the Shang bronze ritual vessels these were represented by animal designs, especially by the bilateral animal masks (taotie, echoed much later, for example, in Amerindian totem poles). By practicing a religious cult of the ancestors, local rulers legitimized their authority. Some became lords over groups of towns, and group vied with group as well as region with region, until a single ruling dynasty could emerge in a distinct area.

Once under way, the expanding authority of the state would encompass settlements still at a Neolithic stage of pre-Bronze Age culture. Bronze weapons would help, and in their conquests we know that the late Shang after about 1200 BC used the two-horse war chariot that had empowered conquerors in West Asia about 1500 BC. No doubt its concept had come across Central Asia. The spears and arrows of foot soldiers accompanied the chariot. Three men manned it - a driver in the center, flanked by a swordsman (or halberdier) and a bowman. Bronze fittings made the chariot motile. Men from each cluster of familes in a lineage seem to have formed a military unit. Thousands of soldiers are mentioned as having taken thousands of prisoners, hundreds of whom might be sacrificed. The king claimed that his primacy rested on his personal merit, but there is no doubt that military power helped him.

In addition to warfare, the Xia and Shang expanded their domain by building new towns. Towns were not unplanned growths caused by trade or by migration of individual families but were planned and created by local rulers. Typically a king might decree the building of a town in a new region where farmland was to be opened up, and a town populace would be selected and dispatched to do the job. In the Classic of Poetry (Shijing) is a description of a town-founding in terms not inappropriate for a barn-raising by American pioneers:

...left and right
He drew the boundaries of big plots and little
He opened up the ground, he counted the acres
From west to east...
Then he summoned his Master of Work
Then he summoned his Master of Lands
And made them build houses.
Dead straight was the plumb line
The planks were lashed to hold the earth;
They made the Hall of Ancestors very venerable
They tilted in the earth with a rattling
They pounded it with a dull thud...
The raised the outer gate
The outer gate soared high.
They raised the inner gate
The inner gate was very strong.
They raised the great earth-mound
Whence excursions of war might start...

On balance, warfare and trade seem to have been no more important as factors in expansion than the overall superiority of the king's ritual and liturgical functions in his intercession with the ancestors and other forces of nature. Perhaps like the early Carolingian kings of France, the king's extensive travels suggest, as David Keightley observes, that he was head of a patrimonial state that was not yet fully bureaucratic, a state that was sill more theocratic than secular in its institutional activity.

Xia

In 1959 excavations at Erlitou (in the city of Yanshi not far from Luoyang and just south of the Yellow River) uncovered another site with large palaces that seems likely to have been a capital of the Xia dynasty. The Erlitou culture was widespread in the region of northwest Henan and southern Shanxi. It was a direct successor to the Longshan Black Pottery culture and preceded the early Shang, with radiocarbon dates of ca. 2100 to 1800 BC. With this all-but-final indentification, the Xia and Shang components of the legendary Three Dynasties have taken tangible form.

Shang - "The Shang dynasty's 30 kings and seven successive capitals were listed in chronicles compiled during the Zhou or shortly after."

Song interest in the bronze ritual vessels inherited from the Shang, some with inscriptions

But not until 1899 did scholars note that Chinese pharmacists were selling "dragon bones" inscribed with archaic characters. By the late 1920s private buyers had traced these "oracle bones" to a site near Anyang north of the Yellow River in Henan province. In 1928 archaeologists of the national Government's Academia Sinica began scientific excavations of the last Shang capital at Anyang that continued until Japan attacked China in 1937. After 1950 an earlier Shang capital was found near present-day Zhengzhou.

In these Shang capital cities were royal palaces and upper-class residences of post-and-beam construction on stamped-earth platforms, built in the basic architectural style we admire today in Beijing's Forbidden City. At Anyang were found the stamped-earth foundations, as hard as cement, of 53 buildings, with many stone-pillar bases. Subterranean pit houses nearby evidently were used as storage and service quarters. The aristocracy had the services of artisans who specialized in a highly developed bronze metallurgy, pottery, and many other crafts. The Shang Bronzes, never surpassed in craftsmanship, are still one of humankind's great aristic achievements. The Shang king was served by diviners who handled the writing system and took the auspices by scapulimancy (applying a hot point to create cracks in animal shoulder blades, interpreting these cracks as the advice of the ancestors, and inscribing the results on the bones). This produced the famous "oracle bones" that first led to excavation at Anyang. Some 100,000 such bones reveal that the Shang aristocracy lived a superior life, fighting in horse chariots, hunting for sport, performing rites and ceremonies, while served by scribes and artisans and supported by the agricuture of the surrounding village peasants, who lived in semisubterranean dwelling pits. Shang society was already highly stratified.

In the warmer and moister climate of the time, water buffalo were the principal domestic animals, and large herds of cattle must have been maintained to supply the bones for scapulimancy and the animals used by the hundreds in ritual sacrifices. Reverence for ancestors was expressed by rulers in the form of a fully ritualized religious observance. Royal tomb chambers deep in the earth were supplied with precious objects and many animal and human sacrifices. K. C. Chang concludes that these burials indicate most vividly a stratified society in which members of a lower class were sometimes the victims of ritual sacrifice. The Anyang excavations seem to have revealed only the royal core of a much larger capital area. Many Shang sites have also been found elsewhere in North China and Sichuan.

The power of the Shang king was also attested in the use of vast bodies of manpower for public works. The Shang capital at Zhengzhou had a roughly rectangular wall 4 miles around and as high as 27 feet, built of stamped earth. Pounding thin layers of earth within a movable wooden frame made a product as hard as cement. This building technique, which was found first in Longshan sites, has been used throughout China's history. Three thousand years later the walls of the capitals of the Ming dynasty (AD 1368-1644) at Nanjing and Beijing were also built of stamped earth. They were some 40 feet high and respectively 23 and 21 miles around, bigger and faced with brick but still built by massed labor. In other parts of the ancient world massed manpower was used to build many wonders, such as the Egyptians pyramids, but in China this custom has persisted to the present day.

Zhou - only Zhou (Chou) was known directly from its own written records.

Western Zhou

With the conquest of the Shang dynasty by the Zhou, the Chinese state finally emerges. Here again, the new archaeological evidence such as inscriptions on bronzes and newly excavated Zhou oracle bones fit together with the literary record of ancient places, people, and events long know from the classics and earliest histories.

In its origins, the small Zhou tribe interacted with nomads on the north and with proto-Tibetan Qiang people on the west. They early learned how to tolerate and work with peoples of different cultures. After they finally settled in the Wei River valley, the Zhou rulers became vassals of the Shang until they became strong enough to conquer Shang in warfare in about 1040 BC. Each side mobilized from seven to eight hundred villages or petty "states." The victorious Zhou built a new capital at Xi'an (Chang'an). They transported many Shang elite families to manage the work of building and made use of Shang skills in ritual and government. Other Shang families were transported to populate and develop the west. Cho-yun Hsu and Katheryn Linduff (1988) conclude that the former Shang elite and the Zhou ruling class coalesced.

After conquering the eastern plain, the Zhou's power expanded by defeating nomads on the northwest and by campaigns southward into the Han and Yangzi River areas and southeast along the Huai River. Zhou rule was established by setting up what has been called a "feudal" network, enfeoffing (fengjian) sons of the Zhou rulers to preside over fifty or more vassal states. The Zhou investiture ceremony was an elaborate delegation of authority of a contractual nature. Along with symbolic ritual gifts the Zhou king bestowed upon a vassal lord the people of a certain area. The people, so bestowed, however, were more important than the land, and whole communities composed of descendants of a lineage might be moved to another area and be superimposed upon the local people to create another vassal state.

While the Zhou thus continued, like the Shang, to use kinship as a main element of political organization, they created a new basis of legitimacy by espousing the theory of Heaven's mandate. Where Shang rulers had venerated and sought the guidance of their own ancestors, the Zhou claimed their sanction to rule came from a broader, impersonal deity, Heaven (tian), whose mandate (tianming) might be conferred on any family that was morally worthy of the responsibility. This doctrine asserted the ruler's accountability to a supreme moral force that guides the human community. Unlike a Western ruler's accession through the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which rested on birth alone, the Chinese theory of Heaven's mandate set up moral criteria for holding power.

Expansion of the Zhou central power involved a degree of acculturation of those who submitted, not least in the spread of the Chinese writing system and the rituals and administration that it served. The mainstream culture was that of the Central Plain (zhongyuan), the core region of Shang-Zhou predominance. In peripheral areas were many non-Chinese whose different cultural status was marked by the fact that their names were not Chinese but were recorded in transliteration. They included both seminomads of the north, northeast, and northwest and tribal peoples of South China. By degrees, intermarriage, acculturation, and a beginning of bureaucratic government created the successor states that followed the Shang-Zhou dominance. These states inherited various cultural mixes and emerged as distinct politicl entities during the Warring States period, which began about 400 BC.