The History of China - #6 - Shang 1: Them Bones, Them Bones, Them Oracle Bones

Episode Date: December 13, 2013

We take a "time out" from our forward-marching chronology to examine the evidence we have of the Shang state, and how we came to know what we know about his period. Mostly, it's about what we can learn from reading divine messages off of dragon bones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 6, Them Bones, Them Bones, Them Oracle Bones. Last time, we finished out our overview of the Xia Dynasty and ended on Tang, the Duke of Shang, banishing Jie of Xia into permanent exile before anointing himself the new dynastic emperor. This time, we're going to be pressing the pause button on this story of the Shang Dynasty itself. And my sincere apologies if any of you were banking on my delving into Tong of Shang, as I suggested last week. I promise, we'll get there next week. Suffice it to say, when looking over the information, I couldn't help but use this breakpoint to temporarily rest our narrative from its relentless

forward march. Instead, today we'll be panning out to the much broader and more meta story of what we know about the Shang, and even more interestingly, how we've come to know it. As I've been repeating over the past five episodes, both the Xia Dynasty and the pre-dynastic founding period are considered, at best, semi-mythical. Though we have evidence that people and cultures existed prior to the 17th century BCE, we have no way to tie them to the stories and cultural hero tales that have often been attributed to them. In terms of the Xia period, we know through the Arlito dig sites that some group of people lived in the Yellow River Valley at roughly the same time and place as the Xia dynasty. But that's literally it. We have none of their records, and what little

information has survived to the present was written thousands of years after the Arlito or Xia died out. I harp on this for two reasons. First, is that I realize that up to this point, I've sounded pretty superficial in terms of Xia culture. But that's both because I've wished to move the story along and not get bogged down in the minutiae, but even more so because there really truly is very little story to tell. The second reason is because it's more and more going to become a denser tale to sift through, as we have access to more and more real significant information on the developing Chinese cultures at play, rather than just the sort of Eastern Grimm's fairy tales.

That all begins now. At the end of episode 5, I dated the start of the Shang Dynasty at 1675 BCE. But that is, in fact, splitting the distance between several estimates of its time frame. One of the earliest known attempts to place the Shang dynasty on a timeline was done more than 2,000 years ago during the Western Han period

by a Confucian scholar named Liu Xin. Based on the traditional tellings and information available to him at the time, Liu Xin dated the beginning of the Shang at 1766 BCE, and lasting for almost six and a half centuries before being overthrown in 1122 BCE. Incidentally, along with being a historian, Liu Xin was also a notable mathematician of his age, most famously refining the value of pi. Prior to Leo, the Chinese had sort of good enoughed the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter as a flat 3.

But Leo estimated, through a methodology which unfortunately has been lost to time, the value down to 3.14157. Now today, we are literally in the hundreds of millions of decimal places for this irrational number, but even the staunchest mathematician will probably admit that the number reached by Liushin is more than sufficient for any practical application. Our second source is the bamboo annals, which were uncovered around two centuries after the death of Liu Xin.

This tome of knowledge gave a different set of dates for the Shang, namely 1556 to 1046 BCE. Most recently, in 1996, the People's Republic of China composed a grand multidisciplinary project aimed at determining the accurate locations and dates of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. And in a stunning display of creativity and naming, they called their enterprise the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project. Oh, academics! The project utilized more than 200 experts in fields such as radiocarbon dating, archaeological dating,

textural analysis, and astronomy. In 2000, they released their collective findings, which placed the Shang in power from 1600 to 1046 BCE. This particular project, however, generated considerable controversy amid allegations of politicization of the science and findings, specifically shoehorning data to fit with the long-standing Chinese cultural story of having an uninterrupted and unified 5,000-year history,

in spite of not insignificant evidence to the contrary. As always, take what you will from that. All of this just to say, I'm going to go with 1675 out of no more than an arbitrary convenience to fit my specific story's timeline. If you would care to take that, or any of the other years in the 200-year wiggle room the data allots us, go for it. So that brings us to the name itself, Shang. Those of you in the English-speaking world or the Western world, if you're familiar with early Chinese history, may have simply taken that name as a given.

But there's another name for this dynasty, specifically in Korea and Japan, the Yin Dynasty. The name, Yin, is in reference to the final imperial capital of the dynasty. And you're not going to be surprised, it's called Yin. It sits outside the modern city of Anyang in Henan province. Yin is the name given by historian Sima Qian in the Shiji, as well as the name of the Zhou dynasty, called the royal family they eventually crushed and succeeded. In Korea and Japan, Yin is used almost exclusively for this period, which is important because this is widely held as the period when the Chinese state

began exerting significant influence on its neighboring states. Korea, at this point known as Gojozone, adopted rice cultivation, superior bronzeworking techniques, jade carving, and pottery production style from the Shang or Yin cultures. For their part, the Shang knew of the Korean culture, but in typical fashion labeled them simply as the Dongyi, or Eastern Bar barbarians. Much like the Romans, the Chinese have a historical tendency to lump anyone who wasn't one of them together as a barbaric outsider, irrespective of cultural variation among them. So then why do we call the Shang the Shang,

when so many sources refer to them as the Yin? Well, we know that the dynastic rulers of this era referred to themselves and their kingdom as Shang throughout their reign. So in spite of the international naming discrepancy, we'll go ahead and call them what they called themselves. After all, Wen and Shang do as the Shang do. I keep saying we know this or that about the Shang dynasty, something I've strived to avoid up until now.

And I assure you the switch is not just semantic. We've come to a point in the history of China where we can start to say we know things about the period in question and aren't just relying on hearsay jotted down millennia after the fact. The question then is, of course, how do we know these things? Well, I'm glad you asked. Up until the 20th century, the Shang were just as fictitious, or at least as factually undocumented, as the Xia still are. Scholars

were certain somebody lived in the Yellow River Valley prior to the Zhou, but had no direct evidence of who they actually were. The Zhou were able to be verified through their own surviving records, the earliest Chinese period verifiable through such a means. As early as the Song Dynasty, from the 10th to 13th century CE, proto-archaeologists called antiquarians had unearthed several bronze relics, some of which even bearing inscriptions, that they attributed to the Shang Dynasty. But, as with the Arlito digs for the Xia, these relics only showed that a civilized state existed during that period, but not necessarily that specific civilization referred to in stories. But at the dawn of the 20th century,

that whole understanding shifted. And that was all thanks to the curious traditional medicine that has been a part of Chinese remedies since time immemorial, and continuing, often tragically, through the present. This was to grind up dragon bones, and use the resultant powder in tonics and poultices. Dragon scales were typically used to treat malaria, while other bones were used to treat lacerations such as knife wounds. Now, spoiler alert, these dragon bones were not actually from dragons.

Usually, they were Pleistocene fossils. But in 1899, a very unusual bone was purchased by the chancellor of the Imperial Academy, Wang Yirong. As the apocryphal story goes, Wang was suffering from a bout with malaria, and his good friend Liu'e came over to help him grind up his medicine. The two of them, however, noticed something bizarre on his particular bone. Markings etched into it in a strange script. And as an avid collector of ancient bronze works, Wang, even in his malarial days, recognized them as an early form of Chinese character.

It turned out to be the first recognized piece of the Shang oracle bones. Though he collected these fantastic bones avidly, it was only a short time before Wang Yirong found himself on the losing end of the Boxer Rebellion and committed suicide. His son, knowing of Liaoa's interest in the relics, sold them to his father's friend, who made rubbings of each and published his findings in 1903. What followed was an absolute explosion in the market of oracle bone pieces. For almost five years, the dealers and collectors of these fragments were largely able to conceal the source of the marked bones, even going so far as to provide false leads to investigators.

But in 1908, a massive cache of bone relics was uncovered outside the city of Anyang, Henan. Its discoverer quickly realized that he had stumbled upon the site of the last of the Shang capitals, the ruins of Yin. Unfortunately, due to the political turmoil of the period, meaning first the overthrow of the imperial system in 1912, and then the subsequent fragmentation of the nation into warlord states in 1916 and followed by its eventual reunification

as the republic in 1928 there was very little in the way of resources the government du jour could invest in the recovery of this incredible discovery and this state of limbo would last for almost 30 years. Meanwhile, the private and black markets ensured that unauthorized digs and, let's call a spade a spade, tomb plundering tore through the sites and the surrounding areas,

stripping bare and destroying many of the ancient locations. Despite the Chinese government's delayed reaction, when it finally got around to authorizing the Academia Sinica, an official dig on the site in 1928, they were still able to recover more than 20,000 oracle bone pieces, and later digs would turn up more than five times that amount overall. Now, as I mentioned, these were not actually dragon bones, but these specific ones were not fossils either. Instead, the Shang oracle bones come from two main sources. First is the scapula, or shoulder blade, of oxen.

The second is turtle plastrons, or their belly shells. Now these two particular parts were so popular for this purpose for the simple reason that they provided a large, relatively flat surface of bone on which to write. So important were these particular bones and shells to the Shang royalty that they would often be considered a form of tribute tax on vassal states. Some pieces have been marked as such, with one particular example having the notation quote, Chui sent 250 turtle shells etched into the tail edge of a plastron, likely indicating a minor state under imperial influence. So, why were these bones so terribly important to the Shang

that they'd painstakingly etch more than 100,000 of them? The answer to that is that the oracles all record attempts to divine knowledge from the future, a form of divination known as pyromancy, or divination through fire. In a highly ritualized ceremony, the bone pieces were scored with several pits in regular patterns. Then the bone was anointed in animal blood, and the divination began. The practitioner in charge would etch an inquiry into the bone. Its preface would typically give the day and year

according to the stems and branches system of time used in ancient China. And as a quick aside, this 60-part cycle of the stems and branches dating system can still be found, in part, in the Chinese zodiac and lunar calendar today. The body of etching would give the question proper. The vast majority of oracle bones inquire into relatively mundane things. Future weather, crop harvests, the fortunes of the royal family, military outcomes, but most often, whether or not certain ritual practices

were being performed to the spirit's satisfaction. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America, and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company,

and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution, and regicide, which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth, and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax. Pyromancy, cool as it sounds, is actually somewhat less overt than flinging fire from your fingertips.

The Chinese incarnation, in any case, centered around applying a white-hot metal rod to the inscribed bone's pits and reading the spirit's response through the cracking of that bone due to thermal expansion. It does remain unclear whether the answer was derived from the patterns of the rocks, or the specific sounds produced during the bone's splintering. Regardless, the answer was interpreted by the priest or king heading the ritual, and typically inscribed on the bone alongside the initial inquiry. On special occasions, the bone was sometimes etched a third time

to record the actual outcome of the foretold event, known as verification. Here are a couple examples of the translated inscriptions. Preface. Crack making on Gui S dei chui divined inquiry in the next ten days will there be no disaster prognostication the king reading the cracks said there will be no harm Coming of alarming news. Verification. When it came to the fifth day, Dingyou, there really was the coming of alarming news from the west. Zhiguo reported the Dufang, which are our border people, are besieging on our eastern borders and have harmed two settlements.

The Gongfang also raided the fields of our western borders. Another reads, Preface Crack making on Jia Shen Day Inquiry Will Lady Hao's childbearing be good? Prognostication The king read the cracks and said,

If it be on a Ding Day that she give birth, there will be prolonged luck. Verification After 31 days, on Jiayin day, she gave birth. It was not good. It was a girl. Such inquiries were directed at one of six sources of supernatural knowledge. The first was the highest god of the Shang pantheon, Di. The second were natural powers and forces such as the sun, the moon, mountains, the wind, etc.

Third were former lords and kings, deified humans who had ascended to godhood and joined the pantheon. Fourth were pre-dynastic founders and ancestors. Fifth were ancestors within the dynasty. And finally, dynastic ancestresses, such as the wives and concubines of former lords and emperors. When the ritual was completed and the answers revealed, the prophetic bone would be interred in a pit,

separated by type. One for turtle shells, another for ox shoulders. These repositories of divine knowledge were occasionally granted an eternal guardian, as evidenced by a 1936 find containing over 17,000 bone pieces along with a complete human skeleton. The practice of pyromanic divination neither originated with nor ended with the Shang. Indeed, the practice of ritual bone cracking in Asia can be traced as far back as the 4th century BCE,

and as far forward as the Qing Dynasty on the mainland, and the 1970s in Taiwan. What makes the Shang Oracle bones special, then, is the fact that they were engraved. Toward the end of the Shang, and thereafter, cinnabar ink on bone became the preferred method of asking the gods for information likewise it is inferred that a similar ink system was in effect during the pre shang era any markings on them had long since been obliterated. Only during the Shang period do we have access to such a painstaking and enduring form of communication with their ancestors and gods. And although pyromancy would remain part of Chinese imperial culture up until the end of imperial culture itself in China, it would gradually lose favor to numerological and bibliomantic divinations drawing from such sources as the I Ching.

Through the questions and answers posed on the oracle bones, along with the ruins and relics found at sites like yin, we have been able to reconstruct a remarkably complete picture of the Shang society. Theirs, like many other Bronze Age societies, was largely agricultural, augmented by hunting and domestication. The state was frequently, indeed almost constantly, in a state of some kind of war or hostility with neighboring states and tribes. A very common inquiry posed to the spirits is about the movements, intentions, and plans of the barbarian people along the borders of the empire.

They had an economy sophisticated enough to have currency rather than barter. Their currency came in the form of a sea snail shell called cowries. The early Chinese character for money, pronounced in Mandarin as bay, is in fact a stylized rendering of a cowry shell. Major structures, like palaces, were constructed using a combination of earth and wood, and this is not nearly as unsophisticated as it might sound. The architects formed the foundations, and in some cases walls, of the building, using a process called rammed earth. Rammed earth construction is found on every continent except Antarctica,

and is still used today as a cost and material effective means of building. To construct the rammed earth structures, temporary wooden frames were set up, and a specific combination of dirt, clay, and gravel were poured in. Then, the slurry was forcefully compacted to about half its initial height and twice its initial density Then the process is repeated until the wall is fully built Modern constructions using rammed earth have the benefit of pneumatic machinery to apply the tremendous force necessary But pre-modern structures relied on muscle power, and as you can imagine, we're talking about back-breaking labor. Ultimately, though, it was worth the effort.

The set and compressed mixture could be close to the strength and hardness of concrete. Rammed earth structures are, in fact, deemed to be some of the most enduring structures on the planet. Though they are structurally weak to earthquakes and to water erosion over time if not properly sealed and maintained, they are otherwise thought to be able to last essentially indefinitely. On the tops of these foundations, wooden palaces were built, though they have long since been destroyed or rotted away. As I mentioned before, it was almost 30 years before the Chinese government found itself able to launch an official investigation of the ruins of Yin. That period had been an ongoing bonanza for private collectors and tomb robbers to pick much of the location clean.

Moreover, hundreds or thousands of years ago, others had found the ruins as well, and they had likewise ravaged what they found. Though there was still much to be learned from the site, it was feared that many of its most important details had been lost forever. But in 1976, archaeologists opened what they had then deemed Tomb 5 and stumbled into an

unimaginable jackpot. Tomb 5 had been completely undisturbed for more than 3,000 years, and was one of the most lavish chambers they had ever come across from the period. Sealed within were almost 500 bronze pieces, including 200 ritual vessels and 160 weapons. More than 700 intricately carved jade pieces were arranged throughout, as well as 6,900 cowrie shells. In short, everything a member of the royal family might need in the next world. The occupant had been accompanied to the afterlife by six dogs placed beneath the main sarcophagus, as well as 16 human skeletons carefully positioned along the perimeter of the chamber,

a sacrificial honor guard of slaves buried with their master. The inscriptions on the bronze pieces revealed the identity of the noble that had been interred in Tomb V, and revealing perhaps one of the biggest surprises. It was Lady Fu Hao, Queen of Shang, and consort to Emperor of Wuding, and, here's the surprising bit, Supreme General of the Imperial Army. As the stories of Fu Hao are told, she was the most powerful military commander of her era, leading her husband's

armies in campaign after campaign against their enemies and to victory each time. Though Emperor Wuding was said to have had as many as 60 wives, Fu Hao was his most trusted and treasured. He even went so far as to allow her to preside over several pyromanic rituals, a task of such immense importance to the Shang, usually only the emperor himself was deemed worthy to fill it. When she died before her husband, Wu Ding would pray to her spirit before battles, asking her the outcome of the conflict to come, and beseeching his departed wife to grant his armies more victories. The religious beliefs of the Shang were a multi-layered mixture of ancestor worship,

shamanism, and sacrifice. The Shang kings would eventually come to inhabit the role of high priest in religious ceremonies, as they were deemed the closest to heaven and thus best qualified to offer sacrifices and seek the favor of the spirits. As with Fu Hao, the death of an emperor entailed ornate burial practices aimed at providing the monarch all he would ever need in the hereafter, including servants and guardians. In a scaled-up version of the human sacrifice offered to Lady Fu Hao, Shang kings are known to have been buried with as many as 400 of their servants, as well as a complement of horses.

After all, we can't just have the king walk into the afterlife, can we? The sacrifices were meticulously arranged, with groups of skeletons found all facing the same direction. Moreover, they were armed, although not with the standard bronze weaponry. Instead, spiritual guardians were equipped with spears and halberds of jade, long revered for its powerful metaphysical properties. But apart from the death rituals and religious practices, the oracle bones also revealed more practical and mundane aspects of the Shang society. For instance, though bronzeworking had been known to the Xia, the relative dearth of tin had made it a rare commodity used

only for ritualistic purposes. But during the Shang period, the bones indicate that more tin and lead sources had been discovered, leading to a massive increase in bronze production and use. In terms of bureaucracy, managers had to be capable of overseeing both the hard laborers of the mines and the skilled craftsmen who would refine and shape the raw ore. Bronze, strong as it was, made it an excellent choice for the military, and quickly became integral to the army. There were four weapons chiefly used by the infantry. First, and most ubiquitous, was the spear, or qiang. Due to its simplicity of design and manufacture, along with its versatility in

combat, led it to be known as the king of weapons. In terms of design, the q Qiang spear was a thin, leaf-shaped blade, often with a red horsehair tassel at its base. Aesthetically, the tassel denoted elite troops, but it was also functional. In combat, the motion of the hair would obscure the movement of the spear shaft, decreasing the likelihood of an enemy being able to grab the weapon and disarm its wielder. Additionally, it acted as a sort of mop, sopping up blood from the blade so that it would not slicken the shaft in battle. Qiang spears varied in length from 9 feet all the way up to 21 feet.

The second weapon commonly used was the po dao, which was a curved blade like a broadsword, but with a handle four to six feet long. The slashing power such leverage gave the weapon could easily bring down a horse, and as such it was lovingly known as the horse cutter. Most infantry were also equipped with a composite bow and a complement of arrows tipped with either stone, bone, or even bronze heads. The final weapon commonly used in this era was the ge, and it's definitely the coolest of the bunch. This has often been translated as a Chinese halberd, but can more accurately be described as a pulled dagger axe. The blade was affixed perpendicular to a spear shaft so that it jutted down from the side, similar to a scythe. Infantrymen would lunge with the spear tip at enemies' heads, but this was just a feint.

More often than not, the spear thrust would miss the small target, and that's where the dagger axe came into play. The infantryman would then pull back on his shaft, and the perpendicular blade would slice backwards, beheading the foe from behind. Bronze also became increasingly common for defensive items as well While low-ranking soldiers and conscripts could expect leather armor and helmets officers would often don shining helms and breastplates of bronze

The tougher alloy found additional use in the spokes of chariots which enabled them to become practical battlefield weapons in this era. But despite this technical advantage, the Shang were not known to have ever widely engaged in its tactical use, and instead relegated their chariots to royal command vessels. In terms of command structure, the Shang military was a feudal conscript system. The emperor personally commanded as many as 1,000 troops from the capital. Beyond that, he relied on his vassal lords to raise their armies from among the populace. The commanding lords were obligated to outfit their own armies

and provide them with the necessary equipment for their campaign, be it defensive or for conquest. The size of the levy raised depended on the type of engagement. Anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 troops would typically be sent to deal with border conflicts, while as many as 13,000 troops could be called on to suppress a rebellious state. So there we have it. More or less the entire overview of what we know about the Shang society, how we know it, and the story behind how medicinal dragon bones not only became our first definite verification of the Shang society, but also revealed the inner workings of their culture to an extent previously thought

impossible. In spite of the podcast's name, up until now, we've really only been telling the story of China. But from here on out, we can begin peering into its history in earnest. Next time, we'll do exactly that, beginning with the ascension and reign of the first emperor of Shang, Tang. Thank you for listening. Hi everyone, this is Scott.

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