Hi
there guys, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show
Where I Say Things. Tonight: Origins of Chinese Civilization, Part
V: The Rise of the Shang.
Last
time we talked about the Xia Dynasty, which appears to be a
mythologized recollection of the real-life Erlitou culture of the
early second millennium BC. The dynasty was founded by my main man
Da Yu, and remained in the hands of his descendants. Four, maybe
five centuries passed, until an incompetent and sadistic alcoholic
named Jie became king. His favorite thing to do was get drunk
and—get this—force his officials to give him piggy back rides
around the palace(1):
Jie of Xia, gettin' str8 crunk.
Anyone
who said “No your highness, you’re a grown man, that’s
ridiculous” was put to death. Needless to say this did not endear
him to his vassals, who around 1600 BC got tired of his bullshit and
deposed him. The leader of the rebels was Lord Tang of Shang; the
dynasty he founded, therefore, was known as the Shang dynasty.
It
is worth noting here that 1600 BC more or less lines up with the
Erlitou culture’s collapse, further evidencing that it was the
center of what would be remembered as the Xia dynasty. Meanwhile,
sites at Erligang and Anyang came to prominence, mirroring the rise
of the Shang(3)(4). The question is less whether the Erlitou people
were later known as the Xia, and more whether they called themselves
the Xia. Did the Erlitou kings match those found in the Bamboo
Annals? Were they even Chinese speakers? We just don’t know,
and this is something that keeps me up at night.
At
any rate, as of the 16th century BC, there was a new
sheriff in town, one who aimed to clean up these here parts. Tang,
who was now king, seems to have been a pretty cool dude. During his
reign there was a drought so bad that the poor farmers had to sell
their kids off into slavery. When Tang found out he had a bunch of
gold distributed to the people so they could buy their kids back
(and, presumably, food, because otherwise they’d be back to square
one).
When
I heard this story I noticed something interesting. Whereas the
first Xia king had to deal with a flood, the first Shang king had to
deal with a drought—implying
a dualism
between the Xia andShang.
To
me at least, this invited a comparison with one of China’s most
widely recognized cultural exports:
The
ying-yang
sign.
The
ying-yang
is essentially a representation of how seemingly opposing forces can
complement one another. Chinese 陰yin1
can
mean, variously, femininity, darkness, negativity, overcast weather
(hence water?), female
genitalia or
the moon. On the other hand, 陽yang2
represents light, the sun, and masculinity. According
to the leading Sinologist Sarah Allan, the Xia dynasty was associated
with water and darkness, the Shang with light and fire(4).
It
is therefore possible that every time we see someone walking around
with a ying-yang
t-shirt or tattoo, we’re actually looking at a cultural concept
with extremely deep roots, maybe as old as the Shang dynasty
itself—or older.
The
idea of Shang-Xia dualism
could lead one to dismiss the Xia, and even the early Shang, as
mythological. But I think that just because a story contains
mythical elements
doesn’t make it completely untrue. Indeed,
I would argue that the presence of a palace complex at Erlitou more
or less proves the existence of a state later known as the Xia,
although we don’t know what they called themselves.
So,
the Shang are now in charge, and we’re going to talk some more
about them in the next video. The
Shang dynasty was a critical period in the Story of China. It was
during this period, after all, that we find the oldest written
documents thus far recovered in China. “Chinese History”, by its
proper definition, had finally begun. What were these written
documents, and what are their significance? Find out next time, on
Origins of Chinese History, Part VI: Roll the Bones. Bye everyone,
see you next time!
Ok,
it’s 12:00. Eyes, me, asses, down, lots to cover. We do in fact
have a lot to go over today. I’ve been trying lately to keep my
videos in the neighborhood of ten minutes, but we’ll probably have
to go longer today. So, let’s get cracking! This is Office Hours
with the Brofessor: The Show Where I Say Things. Today we’re going
to talk about the Xia, China’s first dynasty.
Last
time we talked about the Chinese Flood Myth, and how it symbolizes in
the historical consciousness a shift from the hunting and gathering
Big Man society of the past to the intensive agricultural, stratified
society of the present. According to the story, a terrible flood
spread over the earth, and the previous society was utterly
destroyed.
That’s
where one of my historical Chinese bros comes in: Da Yu, or Yu the
Great. I talk about him in another video, and you should check it
out if you haven’t, because Da Yu is awesome. Here’s the short
version: having worked tirelessly under the former ruler to stem the
ceaseless flow, he was chosen as the heir to the throne. Having
assumed power, Da Yu kept at his work until at last all of the
floodwaters were tamed. He was remembered through the ages for his
diligence and dedication, such that he was later described by
Confucius as a perfect, enlightened sage-king. When
he died, the throne passed to his son, thus establishing China’s
first royal line: the Xia Dynasty.
That
said, however, Da Yu is very much a mythical figure rather than a
historical one. For one thing, he lived hundreds of years before
“history” as defined by modern scholarship—that is,
contemporary written documentation—emerged in China. And even
then, the very earliest written documents contain no mention of even
Da Yu or the Xia. In fact we don’t hear about them at all until
the Zhou dynasty, a thousand years after their supposed time.
Therefore it seems more likely to me that Da Yu was a mythical
culture hero, perhaps somehow associated with water, than a real man.
Regardless
of his historicity, I would posit that it’s more important to
discuss the figure
of Da Yu, the way he would be remembered, and that memory’s
influence on Chinese culture. Even
if he himself did not exist, he may as well have. The same is true
for the Xia dynasty.
What
is for certain is that sometime around four thousand years ago,
nascent Chinese civilization had reached a turning point. Around the
time of Da Yu is thought to have lived, the Longshan culture
mysteriously collapsed. Some sudden natural or social upheaval
occurred which, in folk memory, may have been conflated with the
changing climate into the Flood Myth. Urban centers emptied
seemingly overnight, or at least drastically shrank(2). But at the
same time, around four thousand years ago a new urban center emerged
to the south, at Erlitou in east-central China’s Henan province.
Judging by the pottery and other artifacts left behind at Erlitou, it
was related to, or at least influenced by, the Longshan culture(3).
Another extremely important development occurred during this time:
the emergence of kingship.
In
2011, archaeologists at Erlitou discovered a sprawling palace complex
that seems to indicate that around this time, one of the Big Men got
bigger, and made himself into what we’d call a king. There was, at
some point, one Big Man who achieved hegemony and made himself into
something new, a position maintained not by gift-giving but by
coercion. To this day, the written
symbol
王wang2
“king” is
a pictogram of a battle axe(4) which should tell you a little about
how these guys maintained their power.
And
not only did the kings have axes, but these axes were made of bronze!
This was a material that the rulers of the Erlitou culture seemed to
consider central to, and perhaps symbolic of, their regime. This
importance is evidenced by the presence of what appears to be a
bronze foundry just south of the Erlitou palace complex(6). Bronze
would continue to play a central role in Chinese ritual culture even
to the present day. If you ever go to a Chinese temple, you will see
incense offerings placed into these beautiful bronze cauldrons,
a direct continuation of the Erlitou culture’s practices:
Another
interesting thing about the Erlitou culture is that its boundaries
more or less match up with those of the Xia dynasty in later
accounts. This, coupled with the presence of what appears to be a
royal palace, seems to imply that the Xia did in fact exist, and that
Erlitou was their capital; or at least that the Erlitou culture would
later be remembered as the Xia.
But
ultimately, due to the absence of written documents at Erlitou, we
just can’t be sure. Were these rulers in fact the Xia dynaasty?
Or were they someone else? Did they even speak Chinese? We may
never know. The
most frustrating thing about the lack of written evidence is that it
probably did
exist, but doesn’t anymore. I say this because the very earliest
written Chinese that we have is from the 14th
or 13th
century BC, only a few centuries after Erlitou. However, the writing
system from this time period is a fully mature script, and that sort
of thing doesn’t just pop up overnight—at least, not usually.
These things happen organically, in a process that takes centuries of
development from preliterate symbols (e.g. III) to writing (e.g. the
written word “three”). The implication, therefore, is that the
written text attested from the 14th
century had been in development for at least several centuries before
that. The most likely location for that development is at Erlitou.
Another
reason I strongly suspect that the Erlitou civilization was literate
is because of the accuracy of later records. The Bamboo Annals,
a fourth-century-BC classic of Chinese history, contains a list of
Xia kings, along with those of the immediately succeeding Shang
dynasty. Both Xia and Shang were considered legendary by Western
scholars until the 20th century, when documents dating
from the Shang were recovered. Incredibly, the dates and names of
the kings in these texts closely matches those of the Annals.
Furthermore, the Annals accurately date the Mt. Tai earthquake
of the 19th century BC—that is, the early Xia dynasty.
There must have been an older source used by the writer of the
Annals, but that primary source has now been lost. If the
source used for Annals accurately listed the Shang kings, it
does not seem like too much of a stretch to say that it may have
accurately listed the Xia kings as well—which after all was only a
few centuries prior. This would imply that somewhere down the line
was a primary, or at least near-primary, source.
So,
what happened? Where did these ancient sources disappear to? There
are a few ways we can answer this question. The first, and most
probable, is that the original documents were written on slips of
bamboo, which then decomposed. Organic material doesn’t last long
in the warm and damp climate of eastern China. Of course, these
works would have been copied and circulated widely enough to be
accessible to the writer of the Annals. So just to say that
the source material rotted away isn’t enough.
That’s
where hypothesis number two comes in. Less than a century after the
composition of the Annals, a psychopathic dictator named Qin
Shi Huang became the emperor. As part of his cult of personality, he
decided to press the reset button on history and have everything
begin with him. The atrocity that followed is called the “Burning
of the Books and Burying of the Scholars”(6). Any written document
that mentioned a history prior to Qin Shi Huang was outlawed and
destroyed. Meanwhile, the intelligentsia was rounded up and killed.
Kind of
like another, more recent, fiasco in Chinese history.
Ironically,
the reason we have texts like the Annals today is because Qin
Shi Huang kept a personal library that he conveniently forgot to
barbecue(7). Evidently this library included the Annals, but
not the sources used thereby.
Hypothesis
number three is that the written material of the Erlitou culture/Xia
dynasty did exist, but at some point in the intervening four thousand
years was found, ground up, and used as medicine.
The
reason that we have documentary evidence of the Shang dynasty, which
as I say came immediately after the Xia, is because during the Middle
Shang period a new technique emerged for recording information:
documents were engraved onto animal bones, which of course last a lot
longer than bamboo slips:
(8)
However,
this was a relatively late development, and no examples of Pre-Shang
bone inscriptions have been identified.
But
that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Farmers in Henan province
have been digging up inscribed bones for centuries(9), but it wasn’t
until recently that they were recognized as being written documents.
Prior to that, people were kind of dumbfounded. They didn’t know
what to make of these mysterious bones covered in cool symbols, so
they decided that they were dragon bones.
And
what do you do when you find a dragon bone? Well, that’s a silly
question. Obviously you grind it up and use it as medicine. What
else would you do? It wasn’t until the early 20th
century that anyone realized that the cool doodles on the bones were
actually written symbols—indeed, an early form of written Chinese
directly ancestral to the hanzi of today. But it was too
late. We will never know how much ancient knowledge was lost, what
secrets will remain forever hidden, because some pharmacist wanted to
make a quick buck. Perhaps on one of those bones evidence for the
Xia dynasty was recorded, but someone unwittingly used it to treat
malaria, rather than its intended purpose of revolutionizing Chinese
historiography. Oh well.
That
said, I remain optimistic that someday concrete proof will be
unearthed linking the Erlitou culture to the Xia dynasty. So that’s
it for today, thanks for joining me. Up next: Origins of Chinese
Civilization, Part V: The rise of the Shang dynasty. See you next
time.
