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 omen was understood by the Zhou diviners as a sign that Heaven’s approval had left the Shang and gone to the Zhou. King Wen then declared that the kingship of Zhou had separated from the Shang regime and prepared to challenge his overlord.

Still, the final confrontation did not happen while Wen was alive. He died in 1049 BCE, while the Shang were embroiled in campaigns in the northeast. Finally, after an abortive campaign was called off in 1048 BCE due to torrential storms and inauspicious omens, his son, King Wu, ‘the martial king’, launched the attack in winter 1046 BCE.

The story of what followed is the first great historical narrative of Chinese history. It comes from an account of the Zhou conquest, known as the Yi Zhou Shu, the ‘Lost Book of Zhou’. In ancient times this text was excluded from the canon, but it has recently been reclaimed as one of the key sources of Chinese history.

its rejection began with early historians such as Confucius’ follower Mencius, whose idealised view of Zhou history could not accept the gruesome evidence of cruelty and ...

However, it is now clear from linguistic analysis that the core of the ‘Lost Book’ was specifically composed at the behest of King Wu immediately after the war.

The Zhou and their allies were outnumbered, but the loyalty of the Shang army wavered and their enslaved or press-ganged forces gave way under the massed chariot attacks of the Zhou.

The Shang king retreated to his palace, where he donned his jade suit and, according to the ‘Lost Book’, took his most precious treasure, the ‘Heaven’s Wisdom’ jade, along with other jewels and ‘wrapped them thickly round his body’. Then he immolated himself and his concubines, setting the palace on fire.

In all, he had captured thousands of pieces of precious Shang jade, the ancestral treasures of the dynasty.

After four days mopping up resistance around the capital, King Wu declared ‘the establishment of government’. Then he held victory ceremonies at an important temple near the Shang capital, rewarding his loyal leaders with captured treasures and metals, out of which they would cast bronzes for the use of their own clans at commemoration feasts.

Amazingly, one of these was discovered near Xi’an in 1976, a sacrificial vessel known as the Li Gui.

One of China’s greatest treasures, it was made of bronze melted down from Shang weapons after the victory, and its insc...

The surviving Shang leaders were then hunted down by the Zhou generals with attacks on outlying regions and subsidiary capitals. Each returned with captives and tallies of ‘ears taken’, the left ear cut off the dead.

Even if the figures are exaggerated, it was a killing spree: ‘King Wu hunted and netted 22 tigers, 2 panthers, 5,235 stags, 12 rhinoceros, 721 yaks, 151 bears, 118 yellow bears, 353 boar, 18 badgers, 16 king-stags, 50 musk deer, 30 tailed deer and 3,508 deer.’

‘King Wu had pursued and campaigned in the four directions. In all, there were 99 recalcitrant countries, 177,779 ears were taken and registered and 310,230 men captured. In all, there were 652 countries that willingly submitted.’ These figures approach, but perhaps do not quite reach, the incredible.

On 30 April came the terrible denouement, a carefully prepared and dramatically orchestrated ritual on a grand scale, accompanied by solemn ritual music, bells, flautists and sung refrains. King Wu arrived in the morning and performed a burnt-offering sacrifice in the Zhou temple. Then followed a grim and sombre scene, the Zhou ancestral temple prepared for human sacrifice, smoking with incense, banners hung outside the city gates.

Later Confucians rejected the ‘Lost Book of Zhou’, believing the founding fathers of the Zhou were too virtuous to engage in such violence. Still, the text leaves no doubt that they practised human sacrifice on the scale, and with all the formal liturgical precision, of the Shang.

It was a watershed moment in Chinese history, not so much for how it was seen at the time, but for how this great turning point was construed and interpreted over the next three millennia. As King Wu had declared, ‘the rule was established’. From now on we are dealing with the history of China.

The overthrow of the Shang was a turning point in Chinese history to which all later dynasties would look back. The key to this was the Mandate of Heaven: the idea of the succession of dynasties, each of which was believed to have received divinely ordained authority, which in due time was passed on.

After their defeat, the surviving members of the Shang royal lineage, led by Weizi, the good brother of the last king, were permitted to stay on the site of their ancestral cult centre, the place of their dynastic origin.

That site still survives, and so, incredibly in the twenty-first century, do traces of the cult of the Shang ancestors.

On the outside of the old bus station, above signs for cheap hostels and restaurants, are two huge Chinese characters. The first is derived from the sign for an offering table; the second is a pictograph of a mound. Together they spell a name to tantalise the seeker after China’s early history: Shangqiu – ‘the Ruins of Shang’.

The word shang is still commonplace in ordinary speech, its meanings embracing a wide sematic cluster centring on words for commerce, trade, merchants and business – shang chang, for example, is a shopping mall.

the character ‘shang’ carries its prehistory in the makeup of its brush strokes. Originally it appears to have designated the act of performing a ritual to the ancestors.

The original meaning in the early Bronze Age, then, was, perhaps, ‘the place where we communicate with the ancestors’.

Until recently, Shangqiu was a small, down-at-heel, out-of-the-way country town. However, in the past twenty years or so, it has been transformed by gleaming new rail junctions at the intersection of the high-speed link between Beijing and the south and the revamped east–west Longhai railway.

Beyond the high-rise apartment blocks, the new hotels and car showrooms, is a Ming dynasty walled town built in 1513, after one of many destructive floods of the Yellow River, which in these parts have overlaid the physical remains of several millennia of history.

Though Anyang was the administrative and ritual centre for the last 200 years of the Shang dynasty, it was one of several capitals.

Over the 500 years of the dynasty, the Shang had moved capital several times in response to strategic necessities, wars, floods, or internecine struggles between branches of the royal kin; but also, perhaps, driven by fears expressed in the oracle bones of the withdrawal of auspiciousness.

From time to time they returned there for what the oracle bones call ‘telling’ rituals to the pre-dynastic founders. Since the decipherment of the oracle bones in the 1930s, there has been a big debate about the site of ‘Great City Shang’.

The cavernous ramshackle market with its stone lions and canopied alleys of cheap clothes and the decaying lanes of low-rise Qing dynasty houses are soon to be ‘upgraded’, to the regret of many locals, who still prefer its homely, old-world charm. To the traveller wandering its streets and alleys, nothing visible above ground today appears earlier than the Ming town, built after its predecessor was destroyed by flood.

In the northwest corner inside the walls, however, stood a small Ming temple which was demolished in the 1950s. Now only a stone stele survives recording its rebuilding in 1527, and again by the Kangxi emperor in 1681, along with the history of its Yuan and Song predecessors, going back a thousand years.

The inscription tells us that the temple was dedicated to none other than Weizi, the virtuous brother of the last king of the Shang, who went into exile ...

A short bus journey south into the town’s dusty hinterland is Weizi’s tomb, a grand complex recently restored with three temples and a memorial hall with steles from the Ming dynasty.

Though destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, it was rebuilt in 2002 by a wealthy and famous overseas Chinese family, the Soongs, who claim descent from Weizi and now come back on the Qingming Festival, Tomb-Sweeping Day to perform rituals at their ancestors’ grave.

A cluster of pillared halls and shrines lie at the end of a Ming spirit way, a sacred path. Around them is a grove of nearly 200 cypress trees, which were planted in the Tang dynasty, according to the custodian, who can recite the ancient names of the most venerable ones. Mercifully unmodernised, unprepossessing local shrines like this can be seen all over the deep countryside in China these days, open for worship once more.

Nevertheless, it could not better illustrate the fact that in China the physical fabric of buildings is of less importance than the sense of place. They may be rebuilt many times, but the key thing is to hand on the stories.

the Shang ancestors and their stories are still commemorated over 3,000 years after the dynasty’s fall.

One of the key royal cults of the Shang age still survives on the south side of old Shangqiu. Standing on a huge artificial mound is a temple built at the end of the thirteenth century in the Yuan dynasty, the replacement of earlier shrines. It is called Ebo Tai: the temple of Ebo, an archaic culture hero who is both the Chinese Noah and the Chinese Prometheus.

The mound itself was here in the Han dynasty and may be much more ancient. It is 30 metres high today, but with aggregation of the plain clearly it was once much higher.

His cult is specifically linked to Antares, the Fire Star, the tutelary star of the Shang. It is tied to an ancient myth of the origins of the dynasty, who, when they established themselves here, took over the duties of Ebo.

a new attempt was made using resistivity and magnetometry, which revealed the outline of the walls of a late Bronze Age city of far greater extent than the Ming settlement, nearly 20 feet below the surface.

Without a massive excavation it will not be possible to establish whether this lay on the lines of an earlier city still. What is certain, though, is that in no other place in China is such a concentrated group of cults and traditions connected with the Shang.

So, with a combination of local legends, inscriptions, texts and archaeology, Shangqiu is a test case for how traditions have been passed down in China.

After their fall, the surviving Shang clan were coopted by the Zhou into their picture of the way Chinese kingship was understood and handed down.

The sixty-year-old had served in the Zhou court after the conquest, but was buried with ancestral Shang rites, including human sacrifice – thirteen people and a dog, which was buried under the coffin with one of the humans.

Many later ideas of Chinese governance were shaped by their Zhou conquerors, but the foundations were laid by the Shang, whose legacy in customs, rituals and beliefs would persist in so many areas.

In the eight centuries between the fall of the Shang and the rise of the First Emperor, there were many important developments in Chinese civilisation as a patchwork of kingdoms coalesced towards a single state. The period saw the emergence of a distinctive political philosophy based on older historical traditions and rituals of rulership.

The key figure in shaping this ideology, the most important person in Chinese civilisation, was Confucius. Seeing himself simply as a codifier, a transmitter of much older traditions, Confucius had an incalculable influence on Chinese culture, and still does today, even though China ceased to be a Confucian state in 1911.

This move towards a unified state came out of a period of incessant internecine fighting, which has been illuminated in the past few years by fascinating archaeological and textual discoveries.

During digging for a new underground station, a huge pit was uncovered containing eighteen chariots with ornamented chariot boxes and spoked wheels, the horses still harnessed to their yokes and draft poles. Pride of place was a six-horse span pulling a magnificent imperial chariot.