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THOUGH BY NO MEANS A GODLESS people, the ancient Chinese were reluctant to credit their gods – or God – with anything so manifestly implausible as the act of creation. In the beginning, therefore, God did not create heaven and earth; they happened. Instead of creation myths, China’s history begins with inception myths and in place of a creator it has a ‘happening situation’. Suggestive of a scientific reaction, part black hole, part Big Bang, this was known as the Great Beginning.

Before Heaven and Earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous [declares the third-century BC Huainanzi]. Therefore it was called The Great Beginning. The Great Beginning produced emptiness, and emptiness produced the universe. The universe produced qi [vital force or energy], which had limits. That which was clear and light drifted up to become Heaven while that which was heavy and turbid solidified to become earth…The combined essences of Heaven and Earth became the yin and yang.¹

A more popular, though later, version of this genesis myth describes the primordial environment as not just amorphous but ‘opaque, like the inside of an egg’; and it actually was an egg to the extent that, when broken, white and yolk separated. The clear white, or yang, ascended to become Heaven and the murky yolk, or yin, descended to become Earth. Interposed between the two was the egg’s incubus, a spirit called Pan Gu. Pan Gu kept his feet firmly in the earth and his head in the heavens as the two drew apart. ‘Heaven was exceedingly high, Earth exceedingly deep, and Pan Gu exceedingly tall,’ says the Huainanzi.² Though not the creator of the universe, Pan Gu evidently served as some kind of agent in the arrangement of it.

Further evidence of agency in the ordering and supporting of the self-created cosmos came to light quite recently when a silk manuscript, stolen from a tomb near Changsha in the southern province of Hunan in 1942, passed into the possession of the Sackler Collection in Washington, DC. The manuscript features both text and drawings and is laid out diagramatically in the form of a cosmograph. This is a common device that uses a model of the cosmos and its various phases to assist the reader in divining the best time of year for a particular course of action. Dating from about 300 BC, the silk stationery of the manuscript, though carefully folded within a bamboo box, has suffered much wear and a little tear. Not all of the text is legible, and not all of what is legible is intelligible. But one section appears to contain a variation on the same cosmogony theme. In this case a whole family – husband and wife ably assisted by their four children – take on the task of sorting out the universe. First they ‘put things in motion making the transformations arrive’; then, after a well-earned rest, they calculate the divisions of time, separate heaven and earth, and name the mountains (‘since the mountains were out of order’) and likewise the rivers and the four seas.³

It is still dark at the time, the sun and the moon having not yet appeared. Sorting out the mountains and rivers is only possible thanks to enlightening guidance provided by four gods, who also reveal the four seasons. The gods have to intervene again when, ‘after hundreds and thousands of years’, the sun and the moon are finally born. For by their light it becomes apparent that something is wrong with the Nine Continents: they are not level; mountains keep toppling over on top of them. The gods therefore devise as protection a canopy, or sky-dome, and to hold it up they erect five poles, each of a different colour. The colours – green, red, yellow, white and black – are those of the Five Phases or Five Elements, an important (if not always consistent) sequence that will recur in Chinese history and philosophy almost as often as those complementary opposites of yin and yang.

The relevant section of the Changsha silk manuscript concludes with the words: ‘The God then finally made the movement of the sun and the moon’. This enigmatic statement is about as near to creationism as the Chinese texts get. But it should be noted that the spirits, gods, even God, never actually create things; they only set them in motion, support them, organise them, adjust them and name them. In Chinese tradition the origin of the universe is less relevant than its correct orientation and operation, since it is by these that time and space can be calculated and the likely outcome of any human endeavour assessed.

Less relevant still in Chinese tradition is the origin of man. In another version of the Pan Gu story, it is not Pan Gu’s lanky adolescence which suggests a degree of personal agency in the creative process but his posthumous putrescence. In what might be called a decomposition myth, as Pan Gu lay dying, it is said that:

[his] breath became the wind and the clouds; his voice became the thunder; his left eye became the sun, and his right the moon; his four limbs and five torsos became the four poles and the five mountains; his blood became the rivers; his sinews became geographic features; his muscles became the soils in the field; his hair and beard became stars and planets; his skin and its hairs became grasses and trees; his teeth and bones became bronzes and jades; his essence and marrow became pearls and gemstones; his sweat became rain and lakes; and the various worms in his body, touched by the wind, became the black-haired commoners.⁴

India’s mythology matches this with a dismemberment myth. Out of the corpse of a sacrificial victim the Vedic gods supposedly hacked a hierarchy of caste, with the priestly Brahmin being born of the victim’s mouth, the martial ksatriya of his arms, the house-proud vaisya of his thighs, and the wretched sudra of his feet. The Brahminical imagination responsible for this conceit overlooked the possibility of a section of the human race being derived from an intestinal infestation. Perhaps only an elite as sublimely superior as China’s could have assigned to their raven-haired countrymen an origin so abject. When in later times foreigners came to resent the arrogance of Chinese officialdom, their grounds for complaint were as nothing compared to those of China’s unregarded masses.

From both of the above examples an early insistence on social stratification – on a superior ‘us’ and an inferior ‘them’ – is inferred; and it is thought to be corroborated in China by the numerous other myths emphasising that heaven and earth had to be physically separated. While Pan Gu could bridge the gap between them because he was so ‘exceedingly tall’, and while both men and gods later managed excursions back and forth, the distance eventually became too great. Only those possessed of magical powers, or able to attach such a medium to their persons or families, could hope to make the trip. Celestial intercourse, in other words, was reserved for the privileged few and this set them apart from the toiling many.

In the Shangshu, the fourth-century BC ‘Book of Documents’ that provided twentieth-century etymologists with a Chinese word for ‘panda’, such myths slowly begin to gel into history. Here a named ‘emperor’ is credited with having separated Heaven and Earth by commanding an end to all unauthorised communication between the two. The link was duly severed by a couple of gods who were in his service. There was to be, as he put it, ‘no more ascending and descending’; and ‘after this was done’, we are told, ‘order was restored and the people returned to virtue’.

The ‘emperor’ in question was Zhuan Xu, the second of the mythical ‘Five Emperors’ whom tradition places at the apex of China’s great family tree of legitimate sovereigns. All of the ‘Five Emperors’ combined in their persons both divine and human attributes. Their majesty was awesome and their conduct so exemplary that it would inform political debate throughout the millennia to come. In fact, providing an unassailable example of virtuous and unitary rule seems to have been their prime function. Of the five, the first was the revered ‘Yellow Emperor’; Zhuan Xu was second; the third and fourth were the much-cited Yao and Shun; and the last was Yu. Unlike his precursors, each of whom had deferred to a successor who was not his own son, Yu yielded to the principle of hereditary succession, named his son as his heir, and so founded China’s first recognised dynasty, the Xia.⁵

The Xia were kings; the title of ‘emperor’ is not given them and would remain in abeyance for the next 1,400 years. They have, however, been given approximate dates (traditionally c. 2100 BC – c. 1600 BC but probably a few centuries later) and a rough location in the lower Yellow River basin, otherwise the Zhongyuan or ‘Central Plain’ that stretches across northern China from Shandong province to Shaanxi province. Unlike ‘the Five Emperors’ the Xia are not considered semi-divine; they may have actually existed. They left no documentary evidence or any material remains that can certainly be attributed to them; even China’s earliest historians could find comparatively little to say about them. But archaeologists have unearthed cultures one of which could have been Xia, and there is evidence of what may be some early form of writing that could have been in use at the Xia court.

On the other hand, excavation has failed to substantiate a unitary kingdom or culture that was anything like as unique, widespread, dominant and long-lasting as that which later textual tradition awards to the Xia; and with important reservations, the same may be said of the still more illustrious Shang (r. c. 1750–c. 1040 BC) and Zhou⁶ (r. c. 1040–256 BC), who, together with the Xia, comprise the first ‘Three Dynasties’. Rather, all the material evidence now points to a plethora of localised Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, some distinct and some less so, that arose and coexisted both within the Central Plain and far beyond it. The dawn of Chinese history is thus badly obscured by a major contradiction. The written record contained in classic texts dating from the fourth and third century BC (and generally accepted ever since) does not always coincide with the material record as excavated and analysed by the highest standards of modern scholarship in the twentieth century.

This contradiction has fundamental implications for the whole understanding of China’s civilisation, of its dynamics, and even of who the Chinese were and are. The stakes are so high that protagonists have occasionally overstated their case; scholarship may have been sullied by partisanship as a result. Basically all the written texts imply a single linear pedigree of rulership; it is comprised of successive ‘dynasties’ centred geographically on the north’s Central Plain, whence their superior and quintessentially ‘Chinese’ culture supposedly spread outwards; and it stretched chronologically, like an apostolic succession, from ‘the Five Emperors’ to ‘the Three Dynasties’ of Xia, Shang and Zhou and on into less contentious times. Archaeology, on the other hand, recognises no such neat pedigree. Chronologically the Three Dynasties appear more probably to have overlapped with one another; geographically the kingdoms of the Central Plain were not as central nor as influential as once supposed; and as for the developments that led to a distinct ‘Chinese’ culture, instead of radiating outwards from the Central Plain they germinated and interacted over a much wider area and among peoples who were by no means racially uniform.

It is as if, standing in some outer portal of the Forbidden City or any other traditional Chinese architectural complex, one group of scholars were to focus on the inward vista of solemn grey courtyards, airy halls and grand stairways all centrally aligned in receding order, while another group, looking outwards, were to gaze down on the real world with its typically urban profusion of competing vistas, all traffic-clogged, architecturally chaotic and equally intriguing. Reconciling the two seems scarcely possible, although recent moves in that direction offer some encouragement.

Archaeologists have become more mindful of the limitations of their discipline as new finds overturn confidence in their own earlier hypotheses; the survival of relics from the remotest past is acknowledged as being as arbitrary as their often accidental discovery; and such evidence as may be lacking is not taken as proof of its never having existed – or of its never one day coming to light. Meanwhile the textual scholars have been coming round to the idea that their sources may be selective and that those who compiled them long after the times they describe may have had their own agendas. For instance, ‘Xia’, the name of the first dynasty, is the same as that used by the people of the Central Plain in the last centuries BC (when the historiographical tradition was taking shape) to distinguish themselves from other less ‘Chinese’ peoples (often described as di, man, rong or yi, words that are habitually translated into English as ‘barbarian’). Much later the word ‘Han’ would make a similar transition from dynastic name to ethnic tag and is now used as the official term for China’s supposedly mono-ethnic majority. Both examples suggest that the validity of the ethnic tag derives substantially from the prominence accorded to the original dynasty. Thus talking up the Xia dynasty in the texts may have been a way of enhancing a sense of privileged identity among those who regarded themselves as inheritors of the Xia kingdom and so the ‘Xia people’.

Modern scholarship is well placed to recognise such special pleading. It cannot be a coincidence that throughout the Nationalist and communist era champions of the linear textual tradition have generally been resident in China and employed there, while those who emphasise a regional and pluralist interpretation of Chinese identity have generally been foreigners, often Westerners, Japanese or Chinese residing outside China. Deconstructing China, questioning its cohesion and puncturing its presumption, has a history of its own – which of course in no way vitiates the research or invalidates the findings of its scholars.