The Yellow River and the Shang

The oldest large body of Chinese writing came to scholarly attention in 1899 when inscriptions were recognized on "dragon bones" sold by pharmacies.

A river named for its mud

The Yellow River, Huang He in Chinese, rises on the Tibetan Plateau and runs more than 5,000 kilometres to the Bohai Sea. On its middle course it cuts through the Loess Plateau, a region of fine wind-blown dust, and picks up so much sediment that it is the most sediment-laden river in the world. That silt gives the water its colour and left the soil of the North China Plain soft and fertile, easy to work with simple tools. In the north the main early crop was millet, not rice.

The same silt is dangerous. It settles on the river bed, the bed rises, people raise the banks higher, and in places the river ends up flowing above the surrounding fields. When a bank breaks, the water spreads across the plain. Britannica estimates that the Huang He has flooded about 1,500 times since the 2nd century BCE, which is why it has long been called "China’s Sorrow".

Erlitou: the first state?

Near Luoyang in Henan, archaeologists found a large site at Erlitou with palace foundations and workshops that cast bronze ritual vessels. Most archaeologists see it as the first state-level society in China. Older radiocarbon dates put the Erlitou culture at about 1900 to 1500 BCE; newer measurements published since 2007 give about 1750 to 1500 BCE. Some Chinese scholars identify Erlitou with the Xia. Others reply that without inscriptions we cannot know what its people called themselves.

The Shang dynasty

The Shang is the first Chinese dynasty confirmed by its own writing. The Met dates it to about 1600 to 1046 BCE. Its last capital, near today’s Anyang, is the site called Yinxu, "the ruins of Yin". Shang kings ruled with the help of their ancestors. Before a hunt, a harvest, a war or a royal birth, diviners put questions to the royal ancestors and recorded the answers.

A diviner drilled small pits into an ox shoulder blade or the flat underside of a turtle shell, applied heat until it cracked, and read the cracks as the answer. The question, and sometimes the outcome, were then carved beside the cracks. These oracle bones are the earliest large body of Chinese writing. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art dates oracle-bone script to the 14th to 11th centuries BCE, and inscriptions from the reign of King Wu Ding have been radiocarbon dated to about 1254 to 1197 BCE. Many of the characters are clear ancestors of characters still used today.

Bronze and Lady Hao

Shang workshops cast heavy bronze vessels for offering food and wine to the ancestors, using clay moulds made in sections, a different method from the lost-wax casting common in western Asia. In 1976 archaeologists excavated the tomb of Fu Hao, a consort of King Wu Ding who is also named in oracle bones as a military leader. It is the only Shang royal tomb found intact, and it held more than 1,900 objects, including bronzes and jades, along with about 6,880 cowrie shells.

From Shang to Zhou

Around 1046 BCE the Zhou, from the Wei River valley in the west, defeated the last Shang king. The Zhou explained their victory with the idea of the Mandate of Heaven: Heaven grants the right to rule to a virtuous house and withdraws it from a cruel one. Chinese rulers used the same idea for the next three thousand years. The exact year 1046 BCE comes from the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project of 2000; not every historian accepts its dates.