Imagine that you found 'dragon bones' once used to predict the future, or wrote a poem in the Book of Songs, or uncovered the terracotta army guarding the tomb of the First Emperor. Read more about life in this fascinating culture in this pocket-sized introduction.
Imagine that you found 'dragon bones' once used to predict the future, or wrote a poem in the Book of Songs, or uncovered the terracotta army guarding the tomb of the First Emperor. Read more about life in this fascinating culture in this pocket-sized introduction.
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Overview
Imagine that you found 'dragon bones' once used to predict the future, or wrote a poem in the Book of Songs, or uncovered the terracotta army guarding the tomb of the First Emperor. Read more about life in this fascinating culture in this pocket-sized introduction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752470535 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 162 KB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Early China
From Beijing Man to the First Emperor
By J.A.G. Roberts
The History Press
Copyright © 2011 J.A.G. RobertsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7053-5
CHAPTER 1
On the Chinese Language
Chinese is a tonal language, which means that words which have the same sound may be pronounced in different tones and have a variety of different meanings. The official language of China, the language known in the West as Mandarin, has four tones. A common sound like ma in the first tone may mean a mother, in the second tone hemp, in the third tone a horse and in the fourth tone to scold.
Chinese is also written in characters. Each character has its own meaning and its own pronunciation. The famous eighteenth-century Kangxi dictionary listed 47,000 characters, a good dictionary may contain up to 8,000 characters and to be able to read Chinese one has to know at least 34,000 characters.
In this book Chinese characters have been transliterated into pinyin, the official system of romanization, rather than the traditional Wade-Giles system. Pinyin is now used in newspapers and is being adopted generally in scholarly works. All Chinese personal and place names have been transliterated into pinyin. Thus Mao Tse-tung is rendered as Mao Zedong and Peking is transliterated as Beijing.
For the most part, pinyin spelling approximates to the phonetic values of English, with the following notable exceptions:
c is pronounced 'ts' as in Tsar
i is pronounced 'ee', except when it follows c, ch, r, s, sh, z and zh, in
which case it is pronounced approximately 'er'
ian is pronounced 'ien'
q is pronounced 'ch' as in cheap
r is similar to the English 'r' but is pronounced with the tongue behind the
front teeth
x is pronounced 'sh' as in sham
z is pronounced 'ds' as in hands
zh is pronounced 'j' as in jasmine
When citing Chinese names, the family name is given first, followed by the given name. Following the usual practice, Chinese emperors are designated by their reign titles, not by their personal names.
Prehistoric man in China
The fossil remains of early man in China were found in the 1920s at Dragon Bone Mountain, Zhoukoudian, thirty miles from Beijing. These were of homo erectus, who lived between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago, who was a predecessor of homo sapiens, that is modern man. At this time north China had a relatively mild climate, buffalo, deer and sheep grazed the grasslands and wild pig and rhinoceros could be found in the undergrowth. Beijing man was a hunter gatherer who made tools of quartz and greenstone and could use fire. He had a flat skull, protruding mouth and a relatively large brain. In 1941, when China was at war with Japan, these finds were removed for safety and then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Many thousands of years later homo sapiens, who had probably come from Africa, began to occupy sites in China. Three skulls, found in the Middle Cave at Zhoukoudian gave an unconfirmed radiocarbon date of 16,922 BCE. Deposits of stone tools made by homo sapiens have been found in various places in northern Shaanxi.
From about 8,000 BCE the climate of East Asia became warm and moist. North China was covered with dense forests, elephants roamed the land and crocodiles could be found in the rivers. Neolithic cultures, marked by the cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals, began to appear.
In 1973 an example of an early Neolithic settlement was found at Hemudu in south-east China. Finds included terracotta pottery, the remains of pigs and buffaloes and articles made of wood and bone. The bone articles included whistles made from the bones of birds. These whistles, which emit a very high note, may have been used to lure birds rather than to make music. A notable feature of the Hemudu settlement was that its people were cultivating wet rice.
The best-known Neolithic site is the village of Banpo near Xi'an, which was occupied from about 4,500 BCE. Its inhabitants cultivated millet using polished stone hoes and knives. They had domesticated animals, the most common being pigs and dogs, but the remains of sheep and cattle have also been found. They supplemented their diet with fish and they also went hunting, killing deer and other animals. They clothed themselves with a fibre made from hemp and possibly with silk, as silkworm cocoons have been found on the site.
Banpo had a residential area comprising some one hundred houses and other buildings. The earlier houses were half underground, while the later houses stood on ground level and had a wooden framework. Each house had a central pillar to support a thatched roof, a fire pit and a door which faced south. Some of the floors were dressed with white clay and clay was used to make ovens, cupboards and benches. This part of the village was surrounded by an artificial moat for protection from wild animals. There was a cemetery, where adults were buried in individual graves, often with a ceramic vessel beside the body. Infants who had died were placed in pottery jars and buried near the houses.
In another sector of the village was the pottery. Six kilns have been found and over half a million fragments of pottery have been dug up. The kilns made pots for drinking, cooking, storage and burial. One type of pottery, a coarser variety made out of grey clay, was decorated with cord marks, or incised patterns. Some pots have scratch marks on them, which have sometimes been interpreted as an early form of writing. Finer pots, made out of red clay, have human or animal designs painted on them using manganese dioxide for black and iron oxide for red designs. The pots were then fired at a temperature of 1000-1400 degrees centigrade. The most famous piece of painted pottery is a basin which bears a drawing of a fish on its side and a human face in the bowl. The human face was very rarely depicted, one of the few other examples being that of a modelled human head with a painted mask on the lid of an urn found on a site to the west of Banpo. A snake appears to run up the back of the head and the person depicted appears to be wearing a collar or ruff round his or her neck.
The people of Banpo belonged to the Yangshao culture, Yangshao being the name of a village in the province of Henan which was excavated in the 1920s by the Swedish archaeologist J Gunnar Andersson. Yangshao culture, which spread over Henan and Shaanxi between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, was marked by the appearance of villages defended by moats, which had sophisticated methods of producing and storing food and which had a well-organized society, possibly headed by women.
Soon after Andersson made his discoveries at Yangshao, archaeologists found a completely different type of Neolithic pottery at Longshan in Shandong province. Longshan pottery was black and decorated with rings and grooves. It was much finer than Yangshao ware, was elevated on a circular foot or on legs and may have been made on a potter's wheel. Longshan culture, which seemed more advanced than that of Yangshao, spread along the middle and lower Yangzi valley. When an excavation at Miaodigou in Henan found that Yangshao ware was found below Longshan pottery, it was suggested that Longshan had developed from Yangshao culture. However no links have been found between the two cultures and the modern theory is that they developed separately, but gradually Longshan spread westwards and overtook the Yangshao culture which was already dying out.
From legends of China's origin to the beginning of history
According to Chinese legend, the world was created by the giant Pangu. When he died his flesh became the earth, his blood the rivers, his bones the mountains and his hair the stars in the sky. From the parasites on his body came the different races which inhabit the earth. Many years after Pangu's death the Three Emperors were said to have ruled China. The first was Fuxi, who introduced fishing, writing and music. He married his sister, to whom one can trace the institution of marriage. To this day portraits of Fuxi may be found in Daoist temples, with him holding a picture of the eight trigrams, used for fortune-telling. He was followed by Shennong, who instituted agriculture, trade and medicine. The third emperor was the Yellow Emperor, to whom was credited the invention of medicine, ceramics and the calendar. His wife developed sericulture, that is the breeding of silkworms.
Some centuries later, perhaps in about 2300 BCE the Emperor Yao was on the throne. He ruled wisely and introduced flood control. Believing that his own son was unworthy to follow him, he chose as his successor a humble sage called Shun. In later years the reigns of Yao and Shun were regarded as a golden age in Chinese history. Shun in turn passed the throne on to his faithful minister Yu, and it is at this point that China's prehistory begins to merge with history.
According to Chinese tradition, ancient China was ruled by three dynasties, the first being the Xia, followed by the Shang and then the Zhou. For a long time modern historians believed that the Xia dynasty was a myth but archaeological discoveries of palace-like buildings and tombs at Erlitou in Henan are now thought to be the work of the Xia dynasty which flourished between approximately 1900 and 1350 BCE. The genealogy of its rulers, preserved in the Historical Records compiled by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian, who lived between 145 and 90 BCE, named Yu as its first ruler.
Furnaces for smelting bronze and producing bronze vessels have been found at Erlitou. A notable example of their output was a ceremonial vessel called a jue which stood on three legs and had a handle and a spout.
The appearance of bronze smelting at Erlitou raises a very interesting question. Was the development of metal technology in China the result of diffusion of knowledge across Central Asia, or was it an independent discovery in China? Because bronze implements were made in Mesopotamia from about 3000 BCE and because the earliest bronze artefacts which have been found in China were made at least a thousand years later, and are quite sophisticated, it has often been assumed that the technology for their production came from abroad. However, the shapes of early Chinese bronze vessels echo Longshan pottery prototypes and the technique for casting bronze vessels, which involved the making of ceramic moulds for sections of the vessel, and then joining them together, was quite different from the 'lost wax' process used in the West. If one accepts these arguments, bronze casting was invented independently in China.
The Shang Dynasty
The traditional dates of the Shang dynasty are 1766-1122 BCE. Zhengzhou in Henan province was the Shang capital in the early and middle periods of the dynasty, and Anyang, about 150 miles to the east, was the capital from about 1300 BCE. These two cities are the most important Bronze Age sites in the whole of Asia. At about the same time, in Egypt, the New Kingdom flourished and Akhenaten and later Tutankhamen sat on the throne. As in Egypt, and again as in Mesopotamia, the Shang civilization developed along the banks of a great river. The Central Plain had been created by the Yellow River, which had spread a thick layer of fertile soil over the land, soil which could be worked using the limited technology of Neolithic and early Bronze Age farmers.
Zhengzhou had a four-mile-long city wall constructed using the 'stamped earth' technique. Stamped earth walls were made by pounding thin layers of earth within a movable wooden frame. The earth then becomes as hard as cement. Its base was sixty feet thick and it was at least twenty feet high. Within the walls were large buildings and villages which specialized in making pottery, bronze artefacts, wine and textiles. There were also several large tombs, deep pits in which coffins were placed, surrounded with bronze weapons, musical instruments and other objects indicating the status of the deceased. In some tombs there was also evidence of human sacrifice, possibly of prisoners of war.
The archaeological site at Anyang was discovered in 1899 by a doctor searching for 'dragon bones' to grind down for Chinese medicine. When full-scale excavation began in 1928 at Xiaotun, just outside the city, the remains were found of the ceremonial and administrative centre of the late Shang state. A few miles to the north eleven large cruciform graves were found, and these are believed to be the tombs of the eleven kings of the late Shang.
The 'dragon bones' which the doctor had found were in fact the shoulder blades of cattle, or the under-shells of tortoises, which had been used for scapulimancy or plastromancy, that is divining by interpreting the cracks which appeared in the bones or shells when a heated bronze tool was applied to them. Before this was done an inscription was scratched on the bone, asking questions such as whether the king should send troops against his enemies, whether a hunt should be undertaken, or whether it was the right time to start harvesting crops. One bone bears the inscription 'on a certain day it is divined whether it will rain or not rain.' The answer to the question, obtained by experts who interpreted the cracks, was 'not rain'.
The inscriptions were in Chinese characters, some of which are little different from those in use today. The language used is also unmistakeably Chinese, as it is monosyllabic, and sense is conveyed by word order, not by the use of tenses. The simplest characters are pictographs, that is drawings of actual objects, for example the moon or a tree. Others are ideographs, characters which conveyed ideas, such as the numerals or 'up' and 'down'. Some ideographs are complex, the concept 'bright' being conveyed by the combination of the characters for the sun and the moon, while 'peace' is expressed by showing a woman under a roof. A third category of characters is based on the phonetic principle, whereby a character which is pronounced in a certain way may be combined with a signifier (or 'radical') indicating a different meaning. For example the character for an, which can mean peace, may also be written with the character for 'hand' alongside it, whereupon it means 'to press down'. Over three thousand different characters have been found on the oracle bones, about half of which may be translated with some degree of certainty. The characters include a dating system based on a ten-day week and a sixty-day cycle.
From these inscriptions and from other archaeological finds a detailed picture has been obtained of Shang civilization. The names of the Shang kings have been found and the record agrees almost completely with the list of Shang kings compiled centuries later. The royal succession passed from older to younger brother rather than from father to son, so that although there were thirty Shang kings, they represented only eighteen generations.
Shang kings performed two functions. On the one hand they were rulers, who ruled their state with the assistance of officials. They were supported by aristocratic clans, with whom they had family connections. They headed a warlike society, with aristocrats practising military skills and fighting using war chariots. However the life of the ordinary people was very different. They cultivated the fields using wooden or stone implements, as their Neolithic ancestors had done, and lived on what they could produce or gather. If their villages were near to centres of Shang rule, they might be subject to direct rule by royal officials; if they lived further away, overlords appointed by the king might have some authority over their lives.
Shang kings were also religious leaders whose role was to promote the well-being of their people. They performed religious ceremonies and may even have played the role of shaman, or priest. One aspect of their religious duties was the regulation of the calendar, which was important for determining the right time to make sacrifices and when to plant and to harvest crops. The calendar was based on the observed movements of heavenly bodies. Ten 'heavenly stems' and twelve 'earthly bodies' were identified and these combined to produce a cycle of sixty days. This cycle, later extended for counting years, became the basis of the traditional Chinese calendar and is used for casting horoscopes to this day.
The Shang people worshipped many gods, many of whom were royal ancestors, some were nature spirits, while others were addressed as 'mother of the east' or 'lord of the south'. They also worshipped a high god called Di or Shang Di, who was the protector of towns and armies and controller of the wind and rain. The practice of veneration of ancestors, 'ancestor worship' as it has become known, remains an important part of Chinese culture to this day. Ancestors are not regarded as gods, but for Chinese it remains extremely important to honour recent ancestors, that is dead parents and grandparents, by providing for their needs in the afterlife.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Early China by J.A.G. Roberts. Copyright © 2011 J.A.G. Roberts. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,On the Chinese Language,
Prehistoric man in China,
From legends of China's origin to the,
beginning of history,
The Shang Dynasty,
The Zhou Dynasty – the Western Zhou,
The Spring and Autumn Period, 771-481 BCE,
The Warring States Period 481-221 BCE,
The Age of the Philosophers,
The Rise of Qin,
Daily life in China at the time of the Qin,
The Rise and Fall of the Qin Dynasty, 221-206 BCE,
After the Qin Empire,
Bibliography,