Читать книгу Asia Past and Present - Peter P. Wan - Страница 32

There were two major Stone Age cultures along the Yellow River: the Yangshao and Longshan cultures. They later merged, and their settlements developed into towns and cities surrounded by thick walls. The people of late Longshan cities produced fine pottery and bronzes, and cut characters into animal bones for divination purposes (oracle‐bone characters). It was these people who ushered Chinese civilization into the Bronze Age.

The people of the pre‐historic Xia Dynasty continued to use stone or wood to make knives, fishhooks, and spearheads, but they also began to use crude bronze and to build primitive irrigation projects. These are indications that they were in a stage of transition from the largely agrarian New Stone Age to an increasingly stratified civilized Bronze Age. Their family structure was also evolving. Patriarchy gradually replaced matriarchy while monogamy replaced polygamy. The nuclear family with a male head of household was becoming the basic unit of society as the status of women began to decline.

The Shang Dynasty (ca. 17th–11th centuries BCE) left us with a wealth of knowledge based on solid physical evidence. A significant historical discovery was made in 1899 when a Chinese scholar, walking into a traditional Chinese drugstore, noticed that the clerks were grinding up some flat pieces of bone to sell as medicine. Remarkably, he observed that the bones were inscribed with an archaic form of pictographic writing. These bones were known as “dragon bones” or “oracle bones.” Their source was traced to modern Anyang, and scientific excavations followed. Now known as the “Shang Ruins,” the site is the remains of a walled city that was the capital of the Shang Dynasty for its last three centuries. Buried underground are the graves of its last 12 kings, as well as palaces, ancestral temples, clan settlements, sacrificial pits, markets, and craft workshops. It has also produced huge collections of “oracle bones.”

Shang civilization has three distinguishing features: bronze metallurgy, writing on oracle bones, and the emergence of clearly definable social classes. Bronze appeared in China around the twenty‐first century BCE, likely introduced from Central Asia. The Shang people became superb Bronze craftsmen, and the beauty and sophistication of Shang bronzes have never been surpassed in quality. Shang bronze symbolizes Shang civilization, and lends its name to an entire age—the Bronze Age. But bronze did not contribute directly to the increase of Shang’s agricultural productivity, for its use was generally limited to making weapons and ceremonial vessels, because of its rarity and prohibitive cost. The Shang king was both the supreme secular ruler and the high priest. His power tended to be absolute. He relied on a state machine and a strong army to maintain his rule. He had the capacity to field an army of 3000 to 5000 strong.

Shang society divided people into social classes: the king, the aristocrats, the government officials, the warriors, and the multitudes of peasants and slaves. The divide between the upper and lower classes was sharp and wide. The Shang people developed a rudimentary calendar based on the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars. They had the concepts of day, month, and year. A year was divided into 12 months, and a month into 30 days. They also made the first recorded observation of an eclipse.

These ancient people lived in constant fear of the terrifying forces that surrounded them—thunder and lightning, flood and drought, frigid winters and scorching summers, disease and plagues, giant snakes and wild beasts, and war with neighboring tribes. They saw ghosts and spirits in everything. They believed in “afterlife” and buried articles of value and everyday use with their deceased owners. Their wide range of deities included “Heaven,” their early leaders and ancestors, as well as forces of nature. They believed that the gods controlled the forces of nature, the fertility of the land, the growth of crops, and the fate of humans. They also believed that the gods were persuadable. Accordingly, they diligently staged elaborate religious ceremonies to pray to their gods to court their favor. Archaeologists have found at a single site the remains of 300 to 400 men and women who were killed in a sacrificial ritual. The Shang people were notorious for using human sacrifice and out‐of‐control drinking.

The diviner of a tribe was the mediator between humans and the gods and spirits. He frequently communicated with the gods in a divination ritual: He would take questions from people of importance, cut the words into a flat bone, heat up the bone over a fire till it cracked and produced a pattern of lines, and then he or the king would “read” and interpret the cracks. The “oracle bones” are usually turtle shells or cattle collarbones. They contain mostly questions that relate to the weather and crops, war and peace, the health of the king and the childbirth of his wives, even someone’s toothache. They only occasionally contain answers, interpretations, or the outcome of a prediction. They also contain the names of virtually all the Shang rulers and the dates of many eclipses. The pictographic writing on oracle bones and bronzes shows that the Shang people had already developed a sophisticated writing system. The Shang characters have such a striking resemblance to modern Chinese characters that an educated modern Chinese person can take a fair shot at the meaning of some of them.

Many concepts that existed in Shang thinking would evolve to dominate Chinese thinking in the future. For example, they believed in a deity called “Heaven” or the “Deity Above,” and that he had installed the Shang king and given him the “Mandate of Heaven” to rule; hence, the title of the “Son of Heaven” for the ruler of the land. This linking of the ruler to Heaven would give astronomy a special place in traditional Chinese thinking. And since the ancestors of major tribes were often elevated to the status of gods and worshiped, “ancestor worship” was prevalent in traditional Chinese culture as well.

Traditional accounts of late Shang portray a series of ignorant, incompetent, and cruel kings. They launched wars they could not win, and instigated rebellions they could not suppress. As the dynasty became drained of its vitality, conditions were ripe for one dynasty to fall and another to rise.

Map of China during the later Zhou Dynasty.

The rising star was the Zhou clan. It was originally a small clan located in backward regions along the Wei River west of the Shang domain, but it gradually grew in strength and size. Its king saw an opportunity in the weakness of the Shang, and successfully led his army in the capture of the Shang capital. He founded the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BCE–221 BCE), and set up his capital near modern‐day Xian. He declared himself the “Son of Heaven,” and justified his seizure of power on the grounds that Heaven had stripped the Shang king of the “Mandate of Heaven” for his wickedness, and bestowed it on him for his virtue. Future rulers of all stripes and colors down to the twentieth century would all make a similar claim.

Early Zhou Dynasty is characterized by its full‐fledged feudal system. The “Son of Heaven” headed a clan‐centered, hierarchically structured government and society. He was the supreme ruler of the state, the supreme commander of the army, the chief priest, and the owner of all the lands and populations within his territory. He staked out the best lands to be his own domain, and exercised direct control over it. He granted lands to his family and loyal followers, making them aristocrats. The aristocrats had their own domains and enjoyed considerable autonomy therein, but they were required to pledge their loyalty to the king, and funnel taxes, labor service, and troops to him. The cultivators of the land worked on land that belonged to the king and lords, paid their taxes in kind, and did labor and military service.

The Zhou king built an elaborate centralized system of government to govern his vast and complex kingdom. He laid down detailed rules for the ranking of the nobility and government officials, primogeniture, farming, criminal law, army composition and discipline, and social rituals and etiquette. Improved farming technology contributed to increased crop yield and population growth. Commerce, especially barter trade, also increased.

The Zhou people were more enlightened than their Shang predecessors. Belief in ghosts and witchcraft had lost some of its sway. Human sacrifice had become less common. Schools were set up for the education of the children of the elite. The content of education included morality, rituals and etiquette, and practical skills. It was during this time that some of China’s most important classical works were written, and they would become a major source of Confucianism.

A natural tension existed between the agricultural Han Chinese and their nomadic neighbors. When the ethnic Chinese were strong and united, they would forcibly push back the nomadic tribes, and bring their grasslands under agricultural cultivation. And when the nomadic tribes were strong, they would launch looting and killing raids on the sedentary Han Chinese (a term typically used to indicate ethnic Chinese people, who constitute more than 90% of today’s Chinese population). This would be a recurring pattern over the millennia. In general, the sedentary lifestyle of the farmers made them poor soldiers, while the rough‐and‐tumble lifestyle of the nomadic tribes made them much better warriors.