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

by Michael Wood

Legend says Yu stopped here to organise the local people to build the terrace above the flood plain. From the gardens a stone stairway leads to the secluded courtyards of Yu’s temple, built in the Ming dynasty in 1517 after another Yellow River flood.

Of China’s many myths about superhuman prehistoric culture heroes, this one above all is concerned with state foundation. Castings of the famous nine ding vessels, intended for the ritual preparation of food during feasts for the ancestors and deities, were passed down through the early dynasties.

Until recently the Yu legend was believed to be pure fable, and a late one at that. But new discoveries in texts, bronzes and archaeology suggest the story is very ancient. The recent find of a ninth-century BCE bronze tureen with an inscription describing Yu’s deeds is worded in a way so close to the later Yu texts in the Book of Documents that it proves that the canonical story was well known at the start of the first millennium BCE.

The story takes many forms, but in all of them the beginning of ordered society is directly tied to Yu’s success in dredging channels and stabilising the communities of the upper plain.

Each region was called a zhou (a territory limited by water borders, usually rivers) and an early tribute list purporting to be his names all nine, with a description of the tribute from each, as well as the waterways or land routes by which the tribute was brought to the king.

What was handed down then was not historical fact but a cultural memory of the process of early state formation. Orally transmitted for many centuries before it was eventually put down in writing, it became the mythic backdrop to the tales of the early dynasties, a model for the conception of the ‘original’ China: China’s first great story.

Reshaped, re-edited and rewritten in the Iron Age, it became the foundational myth: ‘How beautiful are the deeds of Yu! Far reaching are the effects of his bright virtue. If not for Yu we would have become fish!’ said one text of the sixth century BCE;

Very recently, and totally unexpectedly, archaeology has provided us with evidence of real events that may be distantly mirrored in these later foundation myths.

In the ravine they discovered traces of an earthquake in prehistory which had caused a huge landslip at a place where the river makes a sharp turn as it winds through the gorges. Here, with still-surviving banks of sediment deposited on the sides of the gorge, scientists were able to map the landslide deposits and to identify an enormous and still visible landslide scar. Blocked to a height of maybe 240 metres, the water built up over six to nine months before it broke through in what they called ‘one of the largest freshwater floods of the Holocene’.

The flood, it is estimated, was felt more than 2,000 kilometres downstream, breaching natural levees, destroying Neolithic farming communities and causing a major shift in the course of the Yellow River in the plains.

While the evidence awaits full publication, what we can say for now is that a series of ecological crises between 2300 and 1900 BCE, including perhaps a great Yellow River flood, appear to coincide with dramatic political changes in the central plain.

Later written histories say the first king of the first dynasty was the son of Yu, whose name was Qi (‘Revelation’), and the date, it is generally thought, roughly corresponds to 1900 BCE in the modern calendar.

Twenty-nine Xia kings are named by the historian Sima Qian, who, writing in around 100 BCE, had assiduously gathered early written and oral traditions.

Tradition said the centre of Xia kingdom was in the plain near the confluence of the Yellow River and the Luo River in the original ‘Central Land’, the region of Luoyang where several later capitals stood in the lee of Songshan, the central peak of China’s five sacred mountains.

What was clear, though, was that these first ‘cities’ were not where the wider population lived; they were enclosures of royal power and ritual, containing palaces, storerooms and workshops where craftsmen produced ritual vessels and weapons of war.

the Bronze Age transformation in China, the emergence of civilisation, was not, as in Iraq and the Near East, due to sudden technological advances or great social change. The development of centralised power was political and based on a deep-rooted cosmology which would last until the twentieth century.

In about 1550 BCE the Xia were conquered by a neighbouring people who called themselves the Shang, the second dynasty, and one of the most important in the story of China, who profoundly influenced the shape of the early state over their 500-year existence.

To his surprise, he saw that some of the bones, which were from cows and sheep, were inscribed with primitive forms of the writing systems he knew from his ancient bronzes.

By 1915 the bones had been traced back to illicit digs at a little town in the northern part of the Yellow River plain, a site still known to the local people as Yinxu, ‘the ruins of Yin’ – the name of the last capital of the Shang. The place was Anyang.

On the northern edge of the Henan plain, Anyang was, and still is, a place with extremes of climate; thick snowfalls in winter, summers in the high forties and above all violent winds from all points of the compass, especially between April and June, when tremendous storms drive windblown sand into every building.

Carried out on a heroic scale with a huge workforce and armed guards, as nationalist armies were fighting regional warlords nearby, it was the most important excavation in Chinese archaeology and one of the most significant in the world.

the archaeologists struck sixth-century graves only 2 feet below the plough. Below them the archaeologists dug straight into the Bronze Age. They uncovered royal tombs, huge rectangular pits over 50 feet deep accessed by long ramps. Plundered long ago, the kings’ remains were gone, but from the pits the archaeologists recovered ritual bronzes, containers for food and wine for royal liturgies, bronze bells, ceremonial weapons and clan symbols, some showing almost incredible technical skill and imagination on the part of the bronze casters.

The key find was writing, in effect the archives of the Shang kings. Buried in pits were tens of thousands of oracle bones that had been used for divinat...

Using cow shoulder bones, or turtle shells, hollows were made at the bottom of the shell – the plastron – and a burning hot point inserted to make fine cracks. The shape, number and position of the fissures were then interpreted by the diviners and the questions and answers written on the bones.

Forms of tortoise shell divination still exist in rural Taiwan and in the teeming tenements of Hong Kong’s New Territories.

The writing on the oracle bones allowed a full chronology to be established for the seventeen generations of the kings of the Shang dynasty, which we now know lasted from around 1553 to 1045 BCE.

Writing is only found in the late period, after about 1200 BCE, although it is likely there was a long development of which no trace survives, perhaps because earlier texts were recorded on bamboo, wood or leather.

The aim of the divination was to know the mind of heaven and the ancestors, and the spirits of nature, in order to understand and control future events. The form has changed today (diviners now more often use the famous Book of Changes and cast their horoscopes with dried yarrow stalks), but divination is still a very important part of Chinese life, and fortune-tellers are a respected part of social and business life, performing the function of psychotherapists for people in personal doubt or distress, and even helping with business decisions.

Some ceremonies were grand rituals: sixty head of cattle, for example, were sacrificed in one ceremony for the pre-dynastic ancestors and the Yellow River ‘Power Spirit’. Laconic, and at times inscrutable, the oracle bones provide us with a partial account of the daily lives of the Shang elites and even perhaps their voices.

the Shang legacy can still be discerned in the later political culture of China, and indeed in folk religion too. In attitudes to life and death today, for example, the core belief that the ancestors live on after death and that they have the power to influence the life of the living is still widespread, as is the conviction that the ancestors need food and sustenance from the living, to keep the world on track.

In that sense, then, the Shang are not only China’s first political state; they are its first ancestors.

Everywhere at Anyang there was evidence of human sacrifice, piles of skulls and rows of ‘beheading sacrifices’ often taken from subject peoples and from enemies defeated in war.

The animals would be eaten, their bones recycled in bone workshops, while the humans were disposed of in earth pits specially prepared in one part of the royal site.

we should not think the early Chinese were uniquely cruel in such practices. Human sacrifice is part of many early civilisations and can be found in pre-dynastic Egypt, the Royal Tombs at Ur, Bronze Age Crete, and of course the Central American and Inca civilisations.

The astonishing finds at Anyang were proof that there was substance in the ancient myths, and that the early Chinese historians had passed down a picture of the Chinese past that had a firm basis in reality.

it is hard to avoid the perception that the oracle bones are replete with what we might call a cultural anxiety; wary of threats both external and internal, excessive rain or drought, floods of the ‘Great River Spirit’ and blasts of the ‘Great Wind’, infestations of locusts and raids by hostile peoples.

It was a feeling that their world was always in danger of disorder, and that auspiciousness had to be sought continually and earnestly in a world where the unseen was palpable, forever threatening to burst over the frontier of dreams into the land of the living.

To answer these incessant enquiries, the king’s own role as interpreter for the spirits was the key to his political and religious authority.

The oracle bones, then, depict a kind of ritual conversation between the living and the ancestors. Just as the king’s generals and officers made reports to him, so the king made reports to his dead ancestors, who acted as his intermediaries with Di, the Lord of Heaven.

here perhaps is the germ of the ruler’s future role in Chinese history as the sage-monarch, the ultimate repository of power and wisdom. As we shall see, this way of thinking was never forsaken in Chinese civilisation, even into the twentieth century.

In China, from the beginning civilisation was shaped by political necessity, the rituals of power and the interpretation by the elite of the will of heaven.

The Shang state lasted from the 1550s to 1045 BCE, the contemporary of Bronze Age Greece, the world of Mycenae and Troy.

This astounding continuity is paralleled in patterns of thought which were to prove incredibly durable in the long struggle in Chinese civilisation between the threat of chaos and the need for order.

The Shang state fell in 1045 BCE in the first great war of Chinese history, which recently has been illuminated by remarkable discoveries in texts, excavations and the new science of astro-archaeology, which has established an absolute chronology from computer-derived maps of the movements of the heavens.

Like all early historic states, the Shang were sustained only by tribute from their subject allies and from warfare against their neighbours.

As the story was told later by the victors, the last king of the Shang, Di Xin, sank into megalomania and vicious cruelty, to the point where his own ministers and family members opposed him. Di Xin was even abandoned by his brother Weizi, who, as we shall see, was a key figure in the transmission of the traditions of the Shang to later times.

So the rebellion was not only between one state and another; it was a war between a subject king and his overlord.

Zhou tradition said that the decision to rise up was inspired by a tian ming, literally a heavenly sign which came to be interpreted as the Mandate of Heaven, which all Chinese rulers must possess.

Recent discoveries have pinned down this celestial event with thrilling precision. In late May 1059 BCE, a remarkable astronomical phenomenon was observed by the Zhou seers: a five-planet conjunction, ‘in less than the width...

This persisted for several days, one of the densest gatherings of planets in human history. Other omens came with it. A later chronicle known as the Bamboo Annals records that, in the reign of Di Xin, the last king of Shang, ‘the Five Planets gathered in the constellation known as the Chamber and a great red bird alighted on the Zhou altar to the Earth’.