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Until such time as sites like those in Xinjiang and Sichuan have been more extensively explored, the uncertainties outweigh the certainties and speculation has free rein. By way of contrast, the sprawling city-site located at modern Anyang in Henan has been subjected to exhaustive excavation. It lies at the heart of what was ‘core’ China, and at Anyang, more than anywhere else, the archaeologists could be reasonably confident of exciting finds.

Interest was first stirred, so the story goes, when in 1899 a pharmacist in Beijing was found to be supplying malaria sufferers with a medicinal powder supposedly ground from old ‘dragon bones’. Dragons never having been that plentiful, the bones were in fact an assortment of flat scapulas (shoulder blades) from cattle plus numerous plastrons (ventral or underbelly shells) from turtles; but they looked old, and some had what appeared to be writing scratched on them. This discovery was made by a malaria patient whose brother happened to be a noted scholar of ancient Chinese scripts. When the latter recognised the scratched characters on the bones as similar to those found on some of the later Shang bronzes, the hunt was on.

After much prevarication and long sleuthing, the bones and shells were traced back to villagers living in the vicinity of Anyang. Stocks from there seemed inexhaustible. Amateur collectors, many of them foreigners, found a surprising number for sale in Beijing’s antique stores; and since the scratched characters could be transferred to paper in the manner of brass-rubbings, scholars worldwide found ample employment in trying to decipher them. Meanwhile suppliers, instead of scraping off the squiggles that devalued good ‘dragon bones’, had begun scratching them on to take advantage of the curio market. ‘A hundred forgeries for every genuine piece’ was how the historian H. G. Creel described the situation in 1935; collections of bones, ‘not one of which was genuine’, were ‘being bought for many hundreds of dollars’.¹⁵

Happily this did not deter the archaeologists. Excavations at Anyang got under way in the late 1920s, and with interruptions for wars and revolutions, continued in the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1970s. Expectations that the site would prove to be a Shang ‘cult-centre’ were confirmed by uncovering the monumental foundations of more than fifty large buildings and by sensational finds like those football-pitch-size tombs and the opulent grave goods of ‘Lady Hao’. The Shang, whose historicity had previously been as suspect as that of the Xia, were thus handsomely authenticated; textual tradition was vindicated, and archaeology was acknowledged as the key to further validation of the supposed centrality and superiority of north China’s remotest past.

As noted, these hopes have not yet been fully realised. Subsequent discoveries elsewhere in China have undercut cherished traditions as often as they have corroborated them. But at least the ‘dragon bones’ did not disappoint. More finds and painstaking analysis of their incised characters established that the Shang elite was indeed literate and that the Chinese script of today is unique in being the direct descendant of one used in the second millennium BC. Moreover, China’s documented history is found to begin not with a collection of cryptic runes, not with some interminable Homeric epic, but much as it intended to go on – with an official and distinctly bureaucratic archive, albeit inscribed on shells and bones. Additionally the inscriptions have afforded telling insights into the complex world of Shang ritual and governance, which, by anticipating later trends, add further weight to that contentious claim about China’s three to four (if not six) thousand years of continuous civilisation.

More than 100,000 fragments constituting about 7,000 scapulas and plastrons, most of them considered genuine, have now been recovered. Over a quarter came from a single location, suggesting deliberate ‘safe-deposit’ storage. The bones span some 3,000 years, from the late-fourth-millennium BC Longshan culture to that of the Zhou dynasty in the early first millennium BC. But it was the Shang, while based at Anyang in c. 1240–1040 BC, who standardised their use and valued them as instruments of record. It was also they who first introduced turtle plastrons to supplement, and increasingly replace, scapulas. Perhaps plastrons, being rarer, were better suited to a royal art like divination; perhaps turtles, being exceptionally long-lived, offered a more appropriate symbolism; or perhaps shells simply produced a more articulate cracking. Additionally it was the Shang who established the practice of pre-boring small indentations in orderly sequence down the length of the bones and shells and sometimes numbering them, each such ‘bullet-point’ being thus readied for the application of the crack-producing fire. And finally it was the Shang who adopted the custom of engraving alongside each cracking a written summary of the divination, including the date and the name of the diviner, and of then storing – one might almost say ‘filing’ – the completed ‘documents’.

None of these advances should be underestimated. The skill involved in getting bones and shells to produce a tidy cracking may have been no less than that involved in interpreting the result. Recent experiments, mostly with bones, have rarely been reassuring. A Japanese scholar, while hosting an academic barbeque, tried charcoal briquets, then a red-hot poker, on a scapula pre-drilled with indentations to the standard depth. Nothing happened. ‘I got rather fed up,’ he says, ‘and threw the whole damn thing in the whole mess of charcoal…Divination was not auspicious.’ Later, because of the smell, he removed the smouldering bone. As he did so, it began to crack. ‘“Pak! pak! pak!” It was terrific. We had truly reconstructed the Archaic Chinese [character] pak.’ Pace the pak, though, this was obviously not how the Shang did it; the barbequed facsimile was burnt to a cinder and quite incapable of being either ‘read’ or annotated. Shang bones, it was concluded, must have been much drier and the heat source, possibly some oleaginous hardwood, much hotter.¹⁶

On the reasonable assumption that today’s recovered hoard of bones and shells represents only a small fraction of the original archive, another scholar has suggested that the Shang may have consulted their gods daily.¹⁷ The solemnity of a ritual that would usually have been performed in one of the ancestral halls to the accompaniment of music, incense, offerings of food and drink, and perhaps animal sacrifice, was apparently undiminished either by frequent repetition or by the seemingly trivial nature of the information that was sometimes sought.

Since ‘reading’ the oracular cracks themselves is a skill quite lost to posterity, all that is known about these transactions comes from what scholars have been able to make of the inscriptions recording them. These inscriptions were added to the bones and shells after the firing and were positioned as close to the relevant cracking as possible. They were often first painted on with a fine brush, then inscribed with a knife, and the resulting incisions were sometimes filled with a pigment. Whether for future reference or display, the Shang clearly intended their records to look impressive.

In the modern quest to understand them, about 4,000 individual characters of ‘Archaic Chinese’ script have been isolated, and around half of these have been ‘translated or identified with varying degrees of certainty’. ‘There is no question that the language [as] written is Chinese’, according to a leading authority.¹⁸ Some of the characters contain a pictorial element, many anticipate later forms of the same character, and like classical Chinese they are arranged in columns to be read from top to bottom; crucially each character represents a meaning, not (as in most other scripts) the sound, alphabetically represented, of the word used to express that meaning. Finally there is sufficient evidence in the characters themselves and in their grammatical relationships to suggest that this writing had been practised for some time. Presumably it was used on more perishable materials such as bamboo, bark or textiles that have not survived. It seems, then, that the importance attached to literacy in China and the use of a recognisably Chinese script, perhaps the two most characteristic features of ‘Chinese civilisation’, had a long pre-Anyang (c. 1240–c. 1040 BC), and probably pre-Shang (c. 1750–c. 1040 BC), history. A few tentatively identified characters found on stone and dated to Neolithic times may yet substantiate this.

Considering the difficulties of translation, and considering the ‘shorthand’ form of expression necessitated by the cramped confines of a corner of bone, it is surprising how many of the inscriptions are intelligible. Perhaps the most frequently asked ‘charges’ (that is ‘questions’, but phrased as statements) merely invite reassurance from the other world: ‘Tonight there will be no disasters’ or ‘In the next ten days [i.e. a Shang ‘week’] there will be no disasters’. To these the desired ‘answer’ is the character meaning ‘auspicious’, that is ‘affirmative’; the cracking has been ‘read’ as approving the ‘charge’; no disasters tonight. Often the charge is formulated in a ‘will it/won’t it’ form for double reassurance: ‘On the next day…[we] should not make offering to Ancestor Yi’ is followed by ‘On the next day…we should make offering to Ancestor Yi’. In asking the same question twice any ambiguity in one cracked response might be clarified by the other. Sometimes multiple-choice charges are posed – Fu is to inspect the district of Lin; it should be Qin who does it; it should be Bing who does it. An ‘auspicious’ endorsement of any of these settles the matter.¹⁹

‘One reason the king divined so much was precisely because he had so much to divine about,’ says David Keightley.²⁰ Everything, from the vagaries of the weather to the likely source of the royal toothache, the best day for a successful hunt or the prospects of victory over an enemy, had to be submitted for consideration by the supernatural concourse of gods and ancestors. It was as if the king conceived of himself as the pivotal persona in a transcendental bureaucratic hierarchy; its lower, earthly, departments were comprised of clan subordinates with their own local jurisdictions and its higher, celestial, departments of those ancestors and deities with a superior and sometimes specialised knowledge whom only the king, via divination, could approach. ‘The living and the dead were thus engaged in a communal, ritually structured conversation in which, just as the king’s allies and officers made reports to him, so the Shang king made reports to his ancestors…’²¹

Though constituting a hierarchy of their own, ancestors, spirits and deities are not easy to distinguish. Di, the supreme deity equivalent to the king, was usually invoked indirectly and may or may not have been equated with the progenitor of the Shang lineage. But he seems to have fallen out of favour towards the end of the Anyang period and would disappear altogether under the Zhou dynasty. Other spirits responsible for the crops and the rivers were also consulted, as were once-ruling ancestors of the direct lineage plus a few Great Lords who were not royal ancestors. All these might be asked to intercede with Di or to act on their own. The ancestors, in particular, were expected to show loyalty to their lineage and to engage in its temporal concerns as actively as they had in life. Thus the stocking of royal tombs with food and drink in ritual bronze or ceramic vessels may not have been intended simply to provide sustenance for the deceased but also to ensure that they had the means to fulfil this inter-cessionary role by conducting their own ritual offerings.

Many such ancestors are named in the divinatory inscriptions. It was by identifying the names of some of them with those of kings as given in later texts that scholars were able to corroborate the Shang’s historicity. But if the ancestors were usually on the side of the Shang, the supernatural concourse as a whole was far from being a rubber stamp. Royal proposals were not invariably endorsed, and Di especially could be a stern master. He might incite the Shang’s enemies rather than connive with the Shang against them, or inflict catastrophe rather than avert it. A famous example concerned ‘Lady Hao’, who is identified in the inscriptions as a consort of King Wu Ding and who is presumed to be she of the extravagantly furnished tomb excavated intact at Anyang. When Lady Hao became pregnant, Wu Ding hoped for a male heir – the Shang succession was patrilinear – and duly lobbied the gods to that effect. His ‘charge’ that ‘Lady Hao’s child-bearing will be good’ did not, however, bring the desired response. As ‘read’ by Wu Ding from the cracking, it said only that ‘If it be on a ding day that she gives birth, there will be prolonged luck’. This was much too vague, so the king tried again. The response was still ambiguous: all now depended on the baby being born on either a ding day or a geng day, these being like, say, Thursday and Saturday in the Shang’s ten-day week. The odds were still stacked against a happy outcome, and sure enough, ‘After 31 days, on jiayin day, she gave birth and it was not good; it was a girl.’

Verificatory comments like this, added some time after the divination, are comparatively rare. Occasionally a weather forecast proved accurate – ‘It really did rain’ – or a hunt productive – the whole bag is listed. But the outcome of weightier matters, such as wars, is often uncertain and has to be inferred. Evidently the solemn performance of ritual consultation was more important than the efficacy or accuracy of the response. The object of the exercise was to exalt the Shang lineage, both living and dead, by demonstrating to dependants, subjects and enemies alike how long and distinguished this lineage was and how diligently the king strove to engage and mobilise it.

Such reassurance was needed in an environment that was both physically and politically hostile to the formation of a proto-state and a sophisticated culture. It has been deduced that the climate of the Yellow River basin was warmer and wetter in the second millennium BC than it is today. Average temperatures could have been as much as 2–4 degrees Celsius higher and scrub and woodland that much thicker. But the winters must still have been harsh. The usual grains were millets and perhaps wheat, rarely rice. Presumably because of the frosts, freshwater turtles were in short supply and plastrons had to be solicited from the Shang’s southern neighbours; when some arrived alive, they were kept in ponds, but it does not appear that they bred. Other game was plentiful; buffalo, boar, deer and tigers are specified. But the tigers were probably of the Siberian species; and tropical trophies such as elephants and peacocks are rarely mentioned. Written sources from the succeeding Zhou period describe rivers so frozen that armies could march across the ice. Early autumn snowfalls and late spring frosts were accounted occupational hazards, critical for farmers and dynasts alike since no natural disaster was devoid of political portent.

Elsewhere in the ancient world, the famous zones of precocious literacy and urbanisation in the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus valleys were spared such conditions; there, as the weather warmed, the rising rivers obligingly irrigated the fields; when it cooled, gentle rains watered winter crops; the living was easy and the seeds of civilisation might germinate almost spontaneously. But five to ten latitudinal degrees farther north, upper China was no such incubator. Here life was precarious and survival laborious. Irrigation was almost unknown in Shang times, harvests were hit and miss, and meat, both hunted and reared, figured prominently in the dietary and sacrificial regimen. It may not be fanciful to suggest that the confidence with which the Shang used fire to melt bronze and crack bones owed something to discrimination acquired in fuel foraging and to long cold nights huddled round a glowing hearth.

The political climate was no more benign. The late Shang polity is usually described as ‘a segmentary state’, meaning that those under its direct rule were few while those under its outlying subordinates could be many. Subordinates and allies were usually joined to the Shang lineage by ties of kinship; they were the sons or brothers of kings, or descendants of such. They upheld Shang ritual observance and were in turn upheld by it. They revered the same divine-cum-ancestral host, followed the same mortuary customs and doubtless used the same script and calendar. Yet such shared interests did not guarantee their unflinching loyalty nor preclude their taking independent local action.

In between these centres of Shang power, numerous scattered and despised communities, probably speaking a different language, retained a full and sometimes formidable autonomy. Because of this presence, the Shang territories were neither contiguous nor easily defined. Kinship, not territory, linked the Shang domains. But from place-names and lineages mentioned in the oracular inscriptions it seems that at the end of the second millennium BC the Shang realm reached no farther than what is now northern Henan province and south-eastern Shanxi. Beyond were other ‘segmentary states’, some of them just as powerful with, as already noted, their own bronze-casting capacity and perhaps their own literature. Small and vulnerable, both within and without, the Shang were at best ‘first among equals’ and by the eleventh century BC possibly not that.

More ‘segmented’ than ‘state’, then, Shang rule depended heavily on the energy of the sovereign. Judging by their divinations, the late Shang kings well appreciated this. As well as fulfilling their hectic ritual schedule, they ‘went out’, as the bones put it, repeatedly – to hunt, to fight, to oversee agriculture and to inspect their subordinate domains. They also removed their ‘capital’ (or cult centre) whenever it was thought to have become inauspicious, usually by reason of an enemy threat or some natural visitation. How often it moved is unclear since the site of the ‘capital’ was always called just ‘this place’ or ‘Shang’ (and latterly ‘Yin’) regardless of its location. Later texts mention seven removals, of which the Anyang site was certainly not the first but possibly the last. In fact Shang kingship has been well described as ‘peripatetic’.²²

For all the lineage boasting, for all the mortuary consumption, the technological precocity, the ritual rectitude and the despotic power, the late Shang kingdom was but a local proto-state and one among many. It may have enjoyed greater dominion prior to 1200 BC but not thereafter. In no way did it anticipate the great unitary empire of ten centuries later. Yet by 1045 BC, the currently preferred date for Shang’s defeat by the Zhou, it had demonstrated many of the cultural traits that have come to be seen as typically, even peculiarly, Chinese; and it may well have been for this reason that later textual tradition selected the Shang for inclusion in that apostolic succession of dynasties.

The emphasis on kinship and lineage, on ancestor-worship, ritual observance and a calendrical system based on these, is obvious. Keightley also notes in the Shang’s ritual dealings what he calls ‘a characteristic this-worldliness’ that would colour later Chinese philosophy and religion.²³ The ancestors and the gods had a practical part to play in human affairs; they were not so removed and transcendent as to be credited with impossible responsibilities like the creation of the world or the imposition of moral ‘commandments’; they were there, in and about their tombs and temple-tablets, to be consulted, activated and used – for their example, their wisdom and their considerable influence.

Shang bronze-casting and its astounding artistic achievements provide early evidence of China’s technological genius and aesthetic sophistication; but as is now clear, these skills and sensitivities were not exclusive to the Shang. Writing, on the other hand, may have been. It is remarkable enough that over three thousand years ago the Shang used a script that is recognisably Chinese today; that this script must have had a long pre-Anyang history is even more remarkable; and the use the Shang made of it is especially relevant. From the first, literacy was put to bureaucratic purpose. It was used to record official transactions and so, in effect, to produce historical documentation. Into the new era of textual record in the first millennium BC, literacy, authority and history went hand in hand.