The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

The Chinese name for their country, Zhongguo, was first recorded by the Western Zhou in about 1000 BCE and denoted this middle land long before it came to signify the whole nation and, in time, even a China-centred world.

China has many cultures and many narratives, but it has one great narrative, and this is the area where Chinese history, as a shaped, structured story, handed down by the early historians, really begins.

running alongside the inner expressway is a long stretch of massive, tamped-mud walls recalling the city’s role as one of China’s Bronze Age capitals during the Shang dynasty three and a half millennia ago. In terms of history and archaeology, Zhengzhou now promotes itself to visitors as the earliest of China’s historic capitals, the focus of a local ‘Ancient Capital Group’ of eight neighbouring historic sites which are part of a wider ‘Central Plain City Group’, taking the national narrative back ever further into prehistory.

Still today among the gleaming silos, water tanks and warehouses of modern agribusiness one can find clan villages where people plant their strips by hand, in the age-old routine, putting sweetcorn seedlings between the rows of wheat so they have two weeks of root growth before the wheat is gathered in, but escape the scythe.

A million people, ordinary farming folk from the Henan countryside, converge on a lakeside temple complex to celebrate the cult of China’s primordial deities Fuxi and Nüwa.

such local cults are part of a dramatic revival of religion in China where three or four hundred million are thought now actively to belong to the main faiths – Buddhism, Christianity and Islam – with many more participating in Daoism and folk cults.

Here the emperors worshipped not only their own ancestors, but China’s mythic kings and culture heroes: the Yellow Emperor, the Five Primordial Rulers, and the ‘First Farmer’ Shennong, the ‘Divine Peasant’ who taught the people agriculture and is still revered as a deity in folk religion.

Popular worship here survived among the country people until the 1950s, when the temple fairs were still big events, times for buying and selling, dancing and singing, celebrating the onset of spring in the second lunar month. Then the fairs were stopped and the temples closed down during the Cultural Revolution; the cult statues were destroyed and the buildings vandalised or turned into workshops and factories.

through the ’80s under Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Opening Up’ policy, secular fairs were once more allowed, in part to encourage local economies.

Today this ‘Farmers’ Festival’ is one of the big events in this part of Henan. In the town are grand new pilgrim hotels, their palatial atriums decorated with murals showing the deities and the sacred stories. A reception desk in the marble foyer greets the tour bus visitors with welcome packs, goodie bags containing a map, badges, folders and notes on rituals explaining what the participant needs to do.

Fuxi is a powerful ancient deity who ‘laid down the laws of humanity’ in the first days of primitive humankind, when, as a Han dynasty text, the Bai Hu Tong, says, ‘there was no moral or social order’.

Because of her influence on marriage, childbirth and auspiciousness, however, the veneration of Nüwa is the most important of the pilgrimage rituals.

In her other arm she holds a baby, the first human being, which she made by mixing her own blood with the yellow clay of the Yellow River. In front of her temple a sacred stone is touched by women hoping for children – part of a deep stratum of myth to be found the world over.

Most revered are the old women in black jackets who sing and dance with a carrying pole over their shoulders from which hang baskets of flowers. According to these women, their dance was taught to their female ancestors by Nüwa herself and only women know and perform it.

At the souvenir stands, glazed pottery images of the deities are on sale along with baskets of little clay dogs and chickens painted black, red and yellow, a reminder of the story that after she had made humans, Nüwa used the leftover clay to make these two animals.

Shrines like this are being restored all over China, their rituals reconstituted by the older generation, for whom the thirty years of Maoism has turned out to be, after all, only a small period of time in Chinese history.

And, indeed, special ceremonies for today’s elites have been newly invented, recycling practices from pre-1911 ritual handbooks; events for the local bigwigs conducted in private, night-time ceremonies with a prayer leader calling out movements and gestures for rows of devotees draped in yellow silk sashes, each bearing a flickering lamp.

In prehistory there were many different cultures within what is now China, and many different languages, besides the still fundamental ethnic and linguistic divide between north and south.

beyond those divisions are deeply shared continuities – beliefs about ancestors and patriarchy, civility and conformity, the collective over the individual, family and auspiciousness.

So how did China, unlike Europe, develop a sense of being a unitary civilisation, with one ‘Han culture’, one ‘Han language’, and o...

This process, which is fundamental to China’s identity, it could be said began with the creation of one state out of many smaller states in 221 BCE under the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, who is famous today the world over for his giant tomb near Xi’an guarded by the Terracotta Army.

before the First Emperor lay a long prehistory.

Gu saw the process as the product of continuous institutionalised warfare, the conquest and annexation of one state by another, over many centuries.

Gu, of course, was writing before modern archaeology and new textual discoveries revolutionised our knowledge of China’s story. But he gives us a model to help us imagine the way Chinese society developed from the Neolithic down to the First Emperor, with the gradual concentration of wealth, technology, writing and coercive power in the hands of powerful lineages.

In the third millennium BCE, modern archaeology has shown that there were indeed thousands of villages and dozens of small ‘states’ dotted across the river valleys of central China, rectangular walled towns of rammed earth, each with its own ruler.

There have been human beings in China since the first spread of Homo sapiens into East Asia.

However, the rise of villages and the development of organised societies in China took place comparatively late in the story, later than in the powerhouses of the western ancient world, Egypt and Mesopotamia, which thrived from the fourth millennium BCE with large-scale monumental architecture, writing and cities.

The growth of all three of these early civilisations, with their rapid population rise, was made possible by large-scale irrigation, which made it feasible for the first time in human history for thousands of people to be fed, and for surplus to be created.

‘Civilisation’ is a problematical word these days with its connotation of ‘high culture’ and its suggestion of the superiority of one form of human society over another. It is worth bearing in mind, however, the common markers of ‘civilisation’ as anthropologists and archaeologists define it.

These are common to almost all early civilisations across the world; only the Inca lacked a writing system.

LOL nope

In China in prehistory the conditions for settled growth were more precarious, and population groups were far more scattered than in West Asia and the Nile Valley,

In the fourth millennium BCE, in what is known as the Yangshao culture, villages appeared, often protected by large, ditched enclosures. Then, after 3000 BCE, in the so-called Longshan period, a spurt in population growth saw an enormous number of small settlements springing up, many of them in the uplands to the west of the Yellow River plain, some with tamped earth walls that look like centres of local power.

Shimao is the largest walled settlement of its time in China. Back in the 1920s and 1930s the site had become known as the source of rare, prehistoric carved jades (some of which found their way into Western collections), but until recently it lay unrecognised, as its eroded and collapsed stone terraces were mistaken for sections of one of the early Great Wall systems that run through the region.

Dominating the site is a pyramidal hill circled by eleven manmade terraces, which from a distance resemble the cultivation terraces of the Cycladic islands of Greece.

On top of the hill, reinforced with stone buttresses, was a platform of rammed earth with traces of wooden pillars that may have supported palatial buildings.

The ‘stunning monumentality’ of the complex, as its excavator has described it, is without any parallel in early Chinese archaeology. Four hundred hectares in extent, in its time Shimao was politically and economically the most important centre in China, reaching its peak in 2000 BCE when the site was expanded with a second outer wall.

Shimao is far away from the Yellow River plain where the traditional narrative of Chinese civilisation says the first dynasties arose. So these dramatic finds, which were only announced in a provisional summary in 2014 and are yet to be fully published, call into question the long-accepted idea that Chinese civilisation spread from the central plains of the Yellow River to other regions.

the first state of early China may not have been in the plains, but in what is often seen as the ‘barbarian’ uplands.

the chain reaction of ideas and political power that gave birth to Chinese civilisation resolved itself in the Yellow River plain after 2000 BCE. The narrative of Chinese history was created there, and to see how that happened, we must go to a second seminal discovery at the village of Taosi in Shanxi.

The site was occupied from 2500 to 1900 BCE, when it was violently destroyed, so it ended around the time later written traditions say the first Chinese dynasty, the Xia, began.

The sequence of buildings at Taosi covers a span of 500 years, with evidence of metal working and craft production; the excavated cemeteries contained over 10,000 human remains. The archaeologists also detected clear evidence of social stratification, with a separate quarter of elite residences or palaces.

On the basis of these finds the excavators’ impression was that over 90 per cent of the wealth was concentrated in a small elite making up less than 10 per cent of the population.

Thirteen pillars arranged around the southeastern arc of the circle provided sight lines converging on an observation point in the centre. Here a red painted wooden pole over 7 feet long was probably used as a gnomon for measuring shadow length on the summer solstice.

This way they could establish the correlation between lunar months and the solar year and create a combined lunar/solar calendar with the extra intercalary thirteenth month inserted in the year cycles.

Taosi is one of the earliest observatories confirmed by archaeology, if not the oldest – the Stonehenge complex in Britain is older and was evidently used for observational purposes at solstice rituals, but this was not its main function.

Indeed, it is possible that the Taosi altar was seen as the centrepoint of the very first zhongguo: ...

Many scholars have argued that significant aspects of early Chinese civilisation, including notions such as the Mandate of Heaven, were linked to astronomical ideas, notably the series of Five Planet conjunctions, which the ancients believed had foretold the rise and fall of the first dynasties, beginning with the Xia in February 1953 BCE.

Taosi was the centre of a pre-dynastic kingdom where crucial developments were made in observing the heavens, bequeathing to later generations one of the fundamental ideas in Chinese civilisation that lasted until the end of the empire in the twentieth century.

Taosi was destroyed around 1900 BCE, its last phase marked by political turmoil. The massive mud walls were breached, the palaces and state altar levelled and the population massacred. Fifty skeletons were found butchered in the palace area, the corpses in the royal cemetery were removed from their graves and a massive hole dug at the top of the observation mound, as if to destroy its numinous power.

Leaving the old walled city of Kaifeng in Henan by the south gate, a walk of a mile or so takes the visitor past the railway station through a clutter of alleyways, machine-tool factories and car-repair yards into the wooded grounds of a massive, squat, tenth-century brick pagoda, built in the days when Kaifeng was the Song capital and the largest city on earth (see below, here).