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Hangzhou, a city of 6 million, lies south-west of Shanghai and about 150 kilometres (90 miles) south of the Yangzi delta. As the capital of Zhejiang province, it hosts a provincial museum, which is located on an island in West Lake, the most celebrated of many so-named water features in China, all of them rich in cultural associations and now ringed with modern amenities. Sidestepping the ice-cream sellers and the curio stalls, visitors step ashore to be greeted in the museum’s foyer by a shiny brass plaque with an English text introducing the ‘Hemudu Relics’. Hemudu is the name given to a local Neolithic culture that flourished from about 5000 BC. A whole floor of the museum is devoted to it, with window-dressed tableaux of Hemudu mannequins whittling and grinding among the artfully scattered ‘relics’ of their Stone Age settlements. But the new plaque also has a general point to make. After outlining the achievements of the Hemudu people in house-building, the firing of fine black pottery and the carving of jade and ivory, it concludes with a bold statement: ‘The excavations at Hemudu Relics have proved that the Yangzi River Valley was also the birthplace of Chinese nation as well as the Yellow River Valley [sic]’.

Until recently this would have been heresy. The Yangzi valley and the whole of southern China were held to be alien environments in prehistoric times, populated by non-Sinitic (non-Chinese-type) hunter-gatherers and too pestilential for settled agriculturalists. Rather were the more favoured (in ancient times) plains and valleys of the north the obvious candidates for the birthplace of China’s prehistoric culture; that was where fossils of an erect hominid known as ‘Peking man’ had been discovered in the 1920s; it was where a Chinese form of Homo sapiens was supposed to have developed, and where some of the earliest crop seeds had been sown. It was also where, much later, China’s recorded history would begin and whence its achievements would spread and its rulers project their authority. Not unreasonably, then, the same was taken to be true of the intervening Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.

It was only in the early 1980s, and then not without misgivings, that a Chinese scholar first publicly questioned this accepted view. He suggested it was ‘incomplete’, though one might now call it downright mistaken. Examples of dozens of distinct Neolithic cultures, like the ‘Hemudu Relics’, have been excavated at sites ranging from Manchuria in the extreme north-east to Sichuan in the west and Guangdong and Fujian in the deep south. None is significantly more ‘advanced’ than the others; and many more sites undoubtedly remain to be discovered. Indeed, later references to this period as being that of ‘Ten Thousand States’ (or ‘Chiefdoms’) may not be too wide of the mark.

As usual with Neolithic peoples, pottery provides a ready means of classification and so is used to distinguish them. Burial sites can also be revealing. But graveyards and ceramic workshops presume the existence of a settled population. The first conclusion to be drawn from the new discoveries is that settlement based on growing crops and husbanding domesticated animals was a development common to many regions of China and not just the north’s Central Plain. If millet was grown in the Yellow River region from perhaps 8000 BC, so was rice grown in the Yangzi region from about the same time. Silk production based on silkworm rearing, a form of animal husbandry unique to China, also has a remote provenance and is now known to have been practised in the Yangzi valley from at least the third millennium BC.

The links, if any, between these Neolithic cultures are as yet unclear. For the Indian subcontinent and for inner Asia, trails of diffusion have been proposed to fit the distribution patterns of pottery types and other distinctive artefacts; population movement in the form of migration, colonisation or conquest has often been inferred from them. But such theorising may owe something to retrospective assumptions. In both cases the incidence in later times of migrations, mostly inward in India, both inward and outward in inner Asia and Siberia, may have been projected back into prehistory. Consequently early settlement in these regions is supposedly fluid, with levels of technology uneven and population shifts frequent.

The more static model preferred in China may likewise reflect later historical orthodoxy. Neolithic cultures are grouped into regional ‘spheres of interaction’ rather than into peripatetic societies tracking across the face of the country; and attention is directed to those cultures and sites exhibiting the most in the way of continuity and internal development. Perhaps because so much archaeological effort was initially expended on the Yellow River basin in the north’s Central Plain, the key locations in this context are indeed concentrated in the north. Here, notable for their red pottery, often with painted designs, the so-called ‘Yangshao’ settlements (c. 5000–3000 BC and so contemporary with Hemudu), were succeeded by larger concentrations of the black-pottery ‘Longshan’ culture from about 3000 BC. Some ‘Longshan’ sites have urban proportions. Though centred in Shandong they are scattered over a much greater area than the Yangshao settlements. They introduce a building material called hangtu that was produced by pounding the friable loess soil into a concrete consistency; it would remain in use for the construction of foundations and walls until replaced by concrete itself in the twentieth century. And to the delight of archaeologists the ‘Longshan’ people honoured their dead with lavishly furnished tombs.

The size of some ‘Longshan’ tombs and the wealth and nature of their grave goods betray a highly stratified society. Privileged clans (or ‘lineages’) evidently exalted their ancestors in order to legitimise their own position, and through the mediation of this ancestry enjoyed a monopoly on contact with the gods. In this context they lavished on their dead both exotica, such as carved ivories, and a great variety of ritual objects ranging from vessels for food and drink to musical instruments and jade objects. Many such items incorporate pictorial devices known to have been used in shamanic intercourse with the supernatural world of ancestors and gods.

It all sounds mildly familiar. ‘Longshan’ society, or some part of it, could well have been that over which the Xia kings ruled. Erlitou, a Longshan type-site near Luoyang on the south side of the Yellow River in Henan province, has been confidently dated to c. 1900–c. 1350 BC, which roughly synchronises with the revised dates deduced for the Xia dynasty from later textual sources. Erlitou has therefore been tentatively assigned to the Xia. Moreover the site has yielded two types of material evidence, one apparently primitive, the other highly sophisticated, that connect its culture unmistakably to that of the later (or more probably overlapping) Shang and Zhou dynasties. In fact these material finds constitute prime sources for the social, cultural and political history of the second and early first millennia BC.

The first of them is burnt bones, mostly the shoulder blades of various animals that have been subjected to fire so as to produce a cracking. The cracking was ‘read’, much like entrails by the Greeks, to discover supernatural responses to human predicaments. More will be said of the practice, for it led to the earliest extant form of documentation and the first certain appearance of a written script in China. The other source material encountered at Erlitou, however, is even more sensational. For here were discovered some of the earliest examples of bronze-casting, a technology that more than any other defines ancient China’s culture and whose hefty products – urns, tureens, jugs – age-blackened or verdigris-tinged but otherwise deceptively pristine, still grace the galleries of the world’s museums.

Robert Bagley puts it better in the Cambridge History of Ancient China: ‘Artifacts of cast bronze are technologically and typologically the most distinctive traits of material culture in second millennium [BC] China…[and furnish] a revealing index of cultural development.’⁷ Indeed, bronze came to occupy much the same position in ancient China as stone in the contemporary civilisation of Egypt or, later, those of Iran (Persia) and Greece. Enormous effort was devoted to producing bronze-ware, highly sophisticated ideas were expressed through it, some of the earliest inscriptions are found on it, and its durability has ensured that plentiful examples have survived. Bronze production in China, though inferior in its labour requirement to, say, the great megalithic constructions of pharaonic Egypt, was yet on a sufficiently large scale to be rated an ‘industry’. Single vessels weighing close to three-quarters of a tonne have been excavated at Anyang in Henan province; elsewhere the total bronze component in one fifth-century BC tomb (at Suizhou) was found to amount to 10 tonnes. ‘Nothing remotely comparable is known elsewhere in the ancient world.’⁸

Compared to quarrying and carving stone, the technology involved in casting bronze was infinitely more demanding. Earlier small-scale production in Gansu province suggests that China’s metallurgical skills may have actually originated in China; certainly the abundance of suitable ores argues for an indigenous development, as do the advanced ceramic skills needed to create the moulds and achieve the high furnace temperatures for bronze-casting. The most impressive products were large vessels, often incorporating an udder-like tripod base but taking a variety of different shapes – known as ding, gue, jia, etc. – depending on their function as food containers, cooking pots, ale jugs, etc.

All at first replicated pottery designs but were then subjected to increasing elaboration in both shape and decoration. The ceramic moulds in which they were cast were themselves considerable achievements, with the decoration being incised on the inner side of the outer mould so that it emerged as raised on the finished product. (Engraving of the finished surface came later.) The moulds, both inner and outer, were cut into sections for the first pourings, typically three sections for the three-legged urn known as a ding but many more for more complex shapes. The vertical joins of the moulds ran up through the legs to the top of the vessel. Each section, including devices like spouts and handles, was cast separately but was recast as part of the whole in the final pouring. This eliminated any need for soldering or jointing while encouraging decorative designs, patterns and inlays, often with an animal motif, that were repeated within the subdivisions which resulted from the use of sectional moulds.

Ingenious as well as skilful, the technique underwent rapid development; so did the vessel shapes and the often fantastic ornamentation given them. Studying these variations, art historians have been able to chart the whole development of bronze-casting, to place surviving examples in a sequence of styles, assign rough dates to each style-type, and draw important conclusions from the distribution of the find-sites.

These find-sites are not, as once seemed likely, confined to the north’s Central Plain. Although the earliest style associated with Erlitou (1900–1350 BC) is little found outside the Yellow River basin, later styles, especially those associated with the Erligang culture (c. 1500–1300 BC), achieved a wide distribution. Some bronze-ware may have been gifted or traded; but the discovery of foundries producing almost identical vessels as far afield as Hubei province and the Yangzi argues for some more fundamental contact. It is reasonable to assume that where such a specialised and prestigious technology was transferred, cultural beliefs and social assumptions must also have been transferred, and this in turn could imply some form of political hegemony. The bronze record thus suggests that in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC ‘a state’ in the north’s Central Plain with a highly sophisticated culture expanded its influence over a large part of the region immediately to its south and east.

Archaeologically this expansive entity is known as Erligang after the name of its type-site at Zhengzhou, a city on the Yellow River in Henan province. Focusing exclusively on such excavated sources, Bagley declares Erligang ‘the first great civilisation of East Asia’;⁹ and most historians, latching on to its dates and location, take their cue from this and gratefully identify Erligang culture with the dynasty known in written sources as the Shang. But as with Erlitou and the Xia dynasty, so with Erligang and the Shang dynasty: the two do not quite fit. Erligang’s expansion and primacy look to have been shorter-lived than Shang’s. Although bronze production continued to increase, and nowhere more so than in the north, elsewhere as of about 1300 BC distinctive individual styles emerged, suggesting a resurgence of cultural and political autonomy in the Yangzi region, Sichuan and the north-east at a time when the texts would suggest that Shang reigned supreme.

Besides such tantalising glimpses of political activity, the bronze industry reveals something of the nature of Erligang, and so perhaps Shang, society. Since bronze is an alloy, deposits of copper and tin (plus some lead) had first to be located, mined and then, in the casting process, carefully combined to ensure an ore ratio suitable to the size and type of vessel desired. Abundant fuel for the furnaces was also essential; and because foundries were located within the oversight of the supposed ‘capital’, the transport requirement must have been considerable. Society was by now, therefore, not just hierarchically stratified but organised into productive functional groups, reasonably stable and closely controlled. Skilled artisans had to be trained and maintained, a labour force that was both servile and surplus had to be mobilised, and a ruling lineage clique with a steady demand for finished products of exceptional quality had to direct operations. Only sparingly were metals used for weapons and scarcely at all for tools or agricultural implements. Bronze-casting was the prestige monopoly of a demanding elite. The bulk of all production went to the manufacture of the vessels required for ritual purposes by this elite; and to judge by their find-sites, many of these vessels were ultimately or specifically destined to accompany deceased members of the elite to their graves.

The vast complex of tombs at Anyang, north of the Yellow River but still in Henan province, has been dated to around 1200 BC. Although Erligang’s cultural reach had by then retracted, this indisputably late Shang centre betrays no signs of decline. More thoroughly explored than any other site, Anyang’s necropolis and the cyclopean foundations of its adjacent city convey a compelling, if gruesome, impression of late Shang might. The largest tomb occupies an area nearly as big as a football pitch. As if from each opposing goal and touchline, four sloping subways or ramps converge on a central vertical shaft, at the base of which lies the collapsed burial chamber. This was cruciform, about 200 square metres (240 square yards) in area, 3 metres (10 feet) high and 10.5 metres (34 feet) below ground. Five sacrificial pits were found within it, and the central area had been floored with timbers to accommodate the sarcophagus. Unfortunately tomb robbers had got there long before the archaeologists. The site had been largely cleared of grave goods, and the same fate had befallen most of the other Anyang tombs. To date there is only one notable exception.

Dying just 150 years after Tutankhamun, a Shang royal consort called Fu Hao was interred at the Anyang site around 1200 BC and remained undisturbed until AD 1976. The tomb is a small one, without ramps. ‘Lady Hao’ – her name is found engraved on her bronzes – may have been cherished but she was too gender-handicapped to merit more than ‘a lesser tomb’ with a simple shaft of room-size dimensions about 7.5 metres (25 feet) deep. Her burial chamber was nevertheless richly furnished. The nested coffins, though badly decayed by seepage, had once been lacquered red and black; the walls had probably been painted and textiles draped over the coffin. Most of the surviving grave goods must have originally been inside the outer coffin. Yet the inventory for this fairly small space included 195 bronze vessels (the largest of which weighed 120 kilograms – 265 pounds), more than 271 smaller bronze items, 564 objects of carved bone and an extraordinary 755 of jade, the largest such collection ever found. ‘If the [bigger] tombs were richer than this, their contents are beyond imagining,’ says Bagley.¹⁰

Sixteen skeletons were also found in the tomb. They were distributed within, around and above the coffin. The Shang elite did not like its members to leave this world alone; relatives, retainers, guards, servants and pets accompanied them as part of the grave offering. Ritual demanded, and spectacle no doubt encouraged, human sacrifice on a grand scale. In the larger tombs the victims have been counted in their hundreds. Some skeletons are complete, others dismembered or decapitated, the cranium often having been sawn off, perhaps for bone carving. Some of the mutilated victims may have been convicts or captives taken in war. The killing of prisoners is thought to have been common practice, and the skeletons include different racial types. The quality of Shang mercy, if such a thing existed, was ever strained and made no clear distinction between friend and foe. Men (and occasionally women and children) were as conspicuously expended in the cause of ritual as were bronze and jade.

How all this extravagance was funded is unclear. No great agricultural revolution occurred at the time, no major irrigation effort is known, and no significant introduction – the ox-drawn plough once had its champions – has been generally accepted. Nor do trade or conquest seem to have been important contributory factors. The Shang apparently just used existing resources of land and labour to greater effect. ‘This leads to the inevitable conclusion’, writes Kwang-chih Chang of the Academia Sinica, ‘that the Shang period witnessed the beginning in this part of the world of organised large-scale exploitation of one group of people by another within the same society’; it also witnessed ‘the beginning of an oppressive governmental system to make such exploitation possible’.¹¹

While members of the ruling clans frequented the great buildings whose pounded earth foundations testify to ambitious architecture and gracious living, the ‘black-haired commoners’ lived in covered pits, used crude clay utensils, and laboured in the fields with Stone Age tools of wood and flint. Malnutrition has been noted in many skeletons. Leisure must have been rare, insubordination fatal. Cultural excellence came at a price in Bronze Age China; the bright burnish of civilisation was down to the hard rub of despotic power.