Ancient China

Front matter

BR ANCIENT CHINA

JOHN S. MAJOR and CONSTANGE A, COOK

Ancient China

Introduction to Ancient China

Introduction 1

Diversity and continuity in ancient China 2

Eras, cultures, nations, states, and dynasties 4

Dynastic rule in the ancient East Asian Heartland Region 5

Two historical myths: “isolated China” and “unchanging China” 7 Why study ancient China? 8

Geography, climate, and the physical setting of Chinese history Introduction 10

The Northern Heartland Region 10

The Southern Heartland Region 14

The Extended East Asian Heartland Region: The northeast and north 15 The Extended East Asian Heartland Region: The northwest and west 17 The Extended East Asian Heartland Region: The south 17

The climate of the East Asian Heartland Region 19

The human landscape 21

Focus: Loess 23

Focus: The Qinling Mountains 24

Focus: Millet 25

Focus: Rice 25

Focus: Ox Mountain 27

Introduction 28

Overview 28

The end of the Paleolithic, and the Neolithic transition 30 The Neolithic transition in East Asia 32

The Early Neolithic 33 vi

Contents

Representative Early Neolithic sites 36

The Middle Neolithic and the beginning of the Jade Age 40 The Late Neolithic: Longshan 47

Focus: Shamanism 54

Focus: Signs on Neolithic pottery 55

Focus: Jade 56

Focus: Ritual jades and cosmic symbolism 57

The Early Bronze Age 59 Introduction 59

The Three Dynasties and the Bronze Age 59

The Xia enigma 60

Erlitou 61

The Erlitou economy 63

Bronze and bronze production 63

Religion, rituals, and cosmology at Erlitou 65 Erlitou in context 67

Focus: A tomb at Erlitou 67

Focus: Yu the Great and China 5 flood myth 68 Focus: Bronze casting by the piece-mold method 69 Focus: The Erlitou sky 69

Focus: Early Bronze Age warfare 71

Focus: The sixty-day cycle and the ten-day week 72

The Shang dynasty 75 Introduction 75

An overview of Shang history 77

Characteristics of Shang government and society 80 Shang religion 84

Shang and its neighbors 86

The decline and fall of Shang 89

Focus: Oracle bones 90

Focus: The discovery of the Shang dynasty 91 Focus: Shang bronzes 92

Focus: What is Chinese writing? 93

Focus: The tomb of Fu Hao 94

Focus: Human sacrifice 95

Focus: Were Shang kings shamans? 97

Focus: The chariot 97

The Western Zhou Period 99 Introduction 99

The Zhou founding myth 104

An historical overview 107

Inscriptions and literacy 110

The ritual state 112

Women, commoners, and slaves 115

The Western Zhou legacy 116

Focus: A Western Zhou tomb 116

Contents vii

Focus: What is De 4%? 118

Focus: Zhou “feudalism”? 119

Focus: A Zhou ancestral hymn from the Book of Odes 120 Focus: The Duke of Zhou lectures the nobles of Shang 121 Focus: A Zhou bronze inscription 122

The Spring and Autumn Period 125 Introduction 125

Regional cultures and the rise of the peripheral states 126

The ba “hegemons” 134

Agriculture, technology, and commerce 135

Literature, music, and intellectual life 137

Focus: A year in the Springs and Autumns 138

Focus: The Book of Changes 140

Focus: Chong’er 143

Focus: Confucius and the Analects 144

The Warring States Period 146 Introduction 146

The states at war 147

Warfare 150

Administrative reform 152

Law 153

The expansion of literacy 153

Intellectual life 154

Texts and trends 156

Literature 160

Texts from tombs 162

The arts 164

Burials and funerary practices 169

Focus: The Jixia Academy 172

Focus: Who is a Ru? 173

Focus: Mozi and Mohism 174

Focus: Zhuangzi on death and transformation 175 Focus: Lord Yi of Zeng’s tomb 175

Focus: The death of Shao Tuo 177

The rise and fall of the Qin dynasty 179 Introduction 179

The campaigns of conquest 180 Administering the empire 183

Public works 184

Standardization 186

Monopolizing knowledge 187

Intellectual and religious currents 188 Imperial progresses 189

Ershihuangdi and the collapse of the state 190 Qin Shihuangdi in retrospect 191

Focus: The terra-cotta warriors 192 vill Contents

Focus: Weights and measures 194 Focus: A protest song from the Book of Odes 195

10 The Western Han dynasty through the reign of Emperor Wu 197 Introduction 197 The struggle to succeed Qin 198 Challenges to imperial authority 199 Governing the empire 205 Imperial rites and religion 207 Imperial and elite tombs 209 Art and literature 214 Intellectual life 216 Cosmology 219 Emperor Wu's waning years 224 Focus: The travels of Zhang Qian 225 Focus: The Mawangdui funerary banner 226 Focus: The Great Learning 229 Focus: The Shiji 230

11 The Later Western Han and the Wang Mang Interregnum 232 Introduction 232 Chaos under Emperor Zhao 232 The fate of the Huo Clan 233 A look back: Modernists versus Reformers 236 Religious and government reform 238 Han popular religion 240 Disruption and usurpation: The Xin dynasty 242 The restoration of the Han dynasty 243 Focus: Debates on Salt and Iron 244 Focus: Liu Xiang and Liu Xin 246 Focus: A TLV mirror 247

12 The Han restoration, the Eastern Han dynasty, and the Three Kingdoms Period 249 Introduction 249 Emperor Guangwu 249 Emperor Guangwu 8 successors 252 The rise of the eunuchs 255 The fall of the Eastern Han 256 The Three Kingdoms 257 Intellectual life and the arts 259 Buddhism and Daoism 264 The legacy of the Three Kingdoms 267 Focus: The Ban family 268 Focus: Zhang Heng 269

Suggestions for further reading 271 Index 277

Figures

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The landscape of the Loess Highlands in the northwestern Heartland Region is characterized by windblown soil that is fertile but easily eroded

Much of the terrain of the southern Heartland Region is mountainous, with steep valleys and abundant water. Over a period of many centuries, hillsides have been terraced to create paddy fields

A woman threshing millet, using technology nearly unchanged from

the Neolithic era

Farmers weeding a recently planted rice field. Rice produces a high yield of calories per area of land, but is very labor-intensive

Burnished red-pottery bowl with fish motif, from Banpo Neolithic village, Shaanxi, c. 5000 BCE

Two jade “pig-dragons,” apparently worn as pendants, from the Hongshan Culture in the Near Northeast sector of the Heartland Region, c. 3500 BCE Jade cong (prismatic tube) from the Liangzhu Culture of the Lower Yangzi Valley, c. 3000 BCE. The corners of the cong are carved with a repeating pattern of a simplified and stylized version of the Liangzhu metamorphic deity figure (compare Figure 3.5)

Jade bi (pierced disk) from the Liangzhu Culture of the Lower Yangzi Valley, c. 3000 BCE

Metamorphic figure, presumed to be a deity of some kind, on a jade cong from the Liangzhu Culture of the Lower Yangzi Valley, c. 3000 BCE

The so-called Lingjiatan Jade Plaque from the Liangzhu Culture, evidence of the importance of directional orientation in Liangzhu cultural and intellectual life

Black-ware goblet from the Longshan Culture, Shandong, c. 2500 BCE. Goblets of this kind are often found in Longshan Culture graves, sometimes on top of the corpse, perhaps giving evidence of some sort of graveside ceremony

Pitcher for warming and serving millet ale, from a late Longshan Culture site in Shandong contemporary with the Early Bronze Age Erlitou Culture, c. 2000 BCE. The clay vessel seems to imitate a metal one, held together with rivets

A bronze jue vessel for warming and serving millet ale, Erlitou Culture,

c. 2000 BCE. This is one of the earliest extant bronze ritual vessels in the Heartland Region x Figures

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Ornament representing a dragon, made of turquoise inlay. Erlitou Culture,

c. 1800 BCE. Several examples of this kind of plaque are known from Erlitou tombs, where they were placed on the chest of the deceased

Bronze blade for a ge dagger-axe, Shang dynasty, c. 1200-1100 BCE.

The dagger-axe was the standard infantry weapon in the Heartland Region from the Neolithic era to the Warring States Period

Bovine scapula used as an oracle bone, Shang dynasty, Anyang period, reign of King Wu Ding (twelfth century BCE)

Rubbing of a turtle plastron used as an oracle bone, Shang dynasty, Anyang period, reign of King Wu Ding (twelfth century BCE)

Small jade sculpture of a woman with a fish-like or reptilian tail, possibly representing the soul of the deceased person; tomb of Lady Fu Hao, Shang dynasty, Anyang period (twelfth century BCE)

Bronze axe of the type used to behead human sacrificial victims; tomb

of Lady Fu Hao, Shang dynasty, Anyang period (twelfth century BCE) Sacrificial burial of a chariot with its team of horses; tomb of Lady Fu Hao, Shang dynasty, Anyang period (twelfth century BCE)

Bronze fang zun vessel with decoration of four rams, from a Shang-era tomb near Changsha, Hunan Province, a good example of Shang bronze-working technology used to produce a vessel in a distinctive provincial style

Gilt bronze head from Sanxingdui, near Chengdu, Sichuan province, the work of a culture contemporary with the late Shang dynasty (eleventh century BCE) but culturally quite unlike the Shang

Pit with human sacrificial victims, Shang dynasty, Anyang period

Bronze covered container for sacrificial food. Bronzes of the early Western Zhou Period retain, in shape and decoration, many features of late Shang bronzes

Inscription on the interior of the Duoyou ding, a bronze vessel discovered

in 1980 in Chang’an County, Shaanxi Province. The inscription, of 288 characters arranged in twenty-two lines, commemorates the defeat of a people called the Yan Yun by the Western Zhou general Duoyou, in a series of battles in which the Zhou forces killed 350 enemy troops and captured 127 chariots. The vessel was awarded to General Duoyou by Zhou King Li (r. 877-841 BCE) Drawing of a square ding vessel from a tomb at Baoji. Early Western Zhou vessels such as this one diverge in shape and decoration from their Shang antecedents Diagram of Baoji Tomb 13

Bronze sword which, according to its inscription, was made for the personal use of King Goujian of Yue, ca. 510 BCE. Careful control of different alloys accounts for the beautiful patterning on the surface of the blade, and its extreme sharpness

A set of twenty-six tuned bronze bells from Tomb 2, Xiasi, Xichuan, Henan Section 24 of a fourth-century BCE trigram divination manual, written on bamboo strips. Originally from Chu, the text has been given the title Shifa (“Stalk Divination”) by the team of researchers at Tsinghua University, where it is preserved. The manual rolls out like a map and has thirty sections with different charts and divination subject sample types that a diviner could consult at one time. In Section 24 the Eight Trigrams are arrayed according to the directions and provided with yin yang/Five Phase correlates

89 96

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Figures xi

8.1 Schematic drawing of a crossbow trigger and a crossbow, one of the key weapons in Chinese warfare in the Warring States Period. Triggers were mass-produced with standardized, interchangeable parts 151 8.2 A Zun (jar) and pan (basin) bronze drinking set from tomb of Lord Yi of Zeng, 433 BCE. The intricate surface decoration of these vessels testifies to the technical skill in bronze-casting in the Chu cultural region 165 8.3a A Huai-style bronze hu covered vessel with narrative decoration, from the

late Spring and Autumn Period 166 8.3b Rubbing of décor from the vessel in Figure 8.3a. The activities portrayed

include hunting, fighting, and feasting 166 8.4 A bronze mirror with décor of four characters for “mountain” (shan 111)

that delineate a “square earth” within the “round Heaven” of the mirror itself 167 8.5 Panel from the side of a lacquer-painted box from a Chu tomb at Baoshan,

Hubei Province, c. 300 BCE, depicting elite figures traveling in chariots 168

8.6 Local residents looking at the excavation of a tomb at Baoshan, Hubei Province, c. 300 BCE. The figures standing around the edge of the excavation give an idea of its scale 170 8.7 Aside chamber of the underground wooden structure of a tomb at Baoshan, showing some of the offerings interred with the deceased 171

8.8 A zhenmushou tomb guardian figure. Tombs in the Chu cultural area often include such figures, apparently intended to deter malign spirits from entering the tomb 171 8.9 Design of long-necked birds and humanoid figures armed with ge dagger-

axes from the lacquer coffin of Lord Yi of Zeng, 433 BCE 176 9.1 Qin-era beacon tower, Shanxi Province. Several states during the Warring

States Period built extensive walls and beacon towers 185 9.2 Terra-cotta warrior, representing a kneeling crossbowman, from the tomb

of Qin Shihuangdi, near Xi’an, Shaanxi Province 193

10.1 Wooden tomb figure with silk clothing from a Western Han tomb at Mashan, Jiangling, Hubei Province. Western Han tombs often contain extensive retinues of clay or wooden figures representing officials, soldiers, and servants 210 10.2 A set of five wooden musicians from Mawangdui Tomb 1, some of the many wooden attendants found in the tomb of the Lady of Dai 211

10.3 Detail of an omen text depicting comets of various kinds and describing how to interpret them, a silk text from Mawangdui Tomb 3, Changsha,

Hunan Province, c. 168 BCE 212 10.4 Incense burner of bronze inlaid with gold in the form of a mountain, representing the abode of immortals 213

10.5 Jade burial suit of Dou Wan, Mancheng, Hebei Province, c. 112 BCE. The bodies of Dou Wan and her husband Liu Sheng were completely encased in jade, evidently in an attempt to keep them from decaying 213 10.6 The funerary banner from the tomb of the Lady of Dai, Mawangdui

Tomb 1, Changsha, Hunan Province, c. 168 BCE 227 11.1 Mold for casting bronze wushu coins, Han dynasty 237 11.2 Late Western Han lamp in the shape of a bird holding in its beak a circular

reservoir for the lamp’s oil 239 11.3 A Xin dynasty TLV mirror, early first century CE 247

12.1 Eastern Han clay model of a multi-story watchtower 254 xii

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Figures

Plowing with oxen. Stone relief from an Eastern Han tomb in Shaanxi Province

Rubbing of a scene of a musician playing tuned bells, from a carved stone tomb at Yinan, Shandong Province

Banquet scene on a pictorial tomb brick from Sichuan Province. Note

the absence of chairs

The oldest dated Buddha image in China (420 CE), from the Bingling Temple, Gansu Province

Maps

1.1 Relief map of East Asia, with the present borders of China. Political boundaries change drastically over time; physical features are relatively much more stable 2 2.1 The East Asian Heartland Region and the Extended East Asian Heartland

Region. Many different cultures flourished here before China became China 11 2.2 Important features of the East Asian Heartland Region: North 12 2.3 Important features of the East Asian Heartland Region: South 14 3.1 Important Early Neolithic sites in the Heartland Region 35 3.2 Important Late Neolithic sites in the Heartland Region 40 3.3 Jade Age cultures in the Heartland Region 47

4.1 Early Bronze Age sites in the Heartland Region. The geographical reach of the Erlitou and Erligang Cultures is still undetermined and the areas shown here are approximate. The Sanxingdui Culture was contemporary with the Shang dynasty; its origins and geographical scope remain unknown 62 5.1 Territory under the direct or indirect control of the Shang kings during the late (Anyang) phase of the Shang dynasty 77

6.1 Territory under the direct or indirect control of the Western Zhou dynasty.

The Zhou greatly increased its territorial reach by governing indirectly

through as many as 100 dependent polities. The Zhou royal domain

embraced territory in both the Yellow River Plain and the Wei River Valley 103 7.1 During the Spring and Autumn Period the consolidation of Zhou dependent

polities was well under way. Ba hegemons attempted to maintain order on

behalf of the Zhou kings 127 8.1 The early Warring States Period was dominated politically and militarily

by the large peripheral states. In the late fifth century BCE the powerful

state of Jin broke apart into three states, Hann, Wei, and Zhao, further complicating the political turmoil of the time 147 9.1 In 221 BCE the state of Qin succeeded in defeating the last of its rivals, uniting China under one central administration for the first time 180

10.1 At the beginning of the Han dynasty Emperor Gao rewarded his military supporters and imperial clansmen with semi-autonomous kingdoms in the eastern part of China. His successors gradually eliminated the kingdoms and annexed their territory to the imperial domain. The kingdom of Huainan, for example, was established in 203 BCE, transferred to one of Emperor Gao’s sons in 196, abolished in 174, re-established (with much less territory) in 164, and permanently abolished in 122 202

12.1 The territories of Shu Han, Wei, and Wu during the Three Kingdoms Period 258

Tables

Neolithic and Jade Age cultures

Bronze Age polities

The ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches The Sexagenary Cycle for days and years

Yin-Yang correlates

Five Phase correlates

34 60 73 74 220 220

Illustration credits

2.1 Corbis 2.2 Corbis 2.3 Corbis

2.4 JSM photo

3.1 Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973)

3.2 Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York

3.3 Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York

3.4 Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York

3.7 Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973)

3.8 Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973)

4.1 Drawing by Rodica Prato; copyright © CAC

4.2 Henan sheng bowuguan (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1983)

4.3 Private collection; JSM photo

5.1 Guo Moruo and Hu Houxuan, eds, Jiaguwen heji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1978-82), no. 6057

5.2 Guo Moruo and Hu Houxuan, eds, Jiaguwen heji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1978-82), no. 9950b

5.3 Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973)

5.4 Yinxu Fu Hao mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1984)

5.5 CAC photo

5.7 Drawing by Rodica Prato; copyright © CAC

5.8 CAC photo

6.1 Shaanxi sheng bowuguan (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1983)

6.2 CAC photo

6.3 Baoji Yuguo mudi (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1988)

6.4 Baoji Yuguo mudi (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1988)

7.1 Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973)

7.2 “Henan sheng Xichuang xian Xiasi chunqiu Chu mu,” Wenwu 1980.10

8.1 Drawing by Sandra Smith-Garcés © JSM

8.2 Suixian Zeng Hou Yi mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1980)

8.3a Zhongguo gu qingtongqi xuan (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1976)

8.3b Zhongguo gu qingtongqi xuan (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1976)

8.4 Courtesy of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm

8.5 Baoshan Chu mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1991)

8.6 Baoshan Chu mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1991)

8.7 Baoshan Chu mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1991)

xvi Illustration credits

8.8 Chu wenwu zhanlan tulu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1954) 8.9 Suixian Zeng Hou Yi mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1980) 9.1 JSM photo 9.2 CAC photo 10.1 Jiangling Mashan yihao Chu mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1985) 10.2 Changsha Mawangdui yihao Han mu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1973) 10.3 Zhongguo gudai tianwen wenwu tuji (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1980) 10.4 Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973 10.5 Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973) 10.6 Drawing by Sandra Smith-Garcés © JSM 11.1 Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society 11.2 Wenhua da geming qijian chutu wenwu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1972) 11.3 Courtesy of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm 12.1 Hebei bowuguan (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1983) 12.2 Wenhua da geming qijian chutu wenwu (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1972) 12.3 Yinan gu huaxiang shimu fajue baogao (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1956) 12.4 JSM photo of original rubbing in private collection 12.5. Zhongguo shiku: Yongjing Binglingsi (Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1989)

All maps by Ji’en Zhang, with data from China Historical Geographic Information Service (CHGIS), Center for Geographic Analysis, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

The quotation in Chapter 6 from Bernard Karlgren, The Book of Documents (Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 22; Stockholm, 1950), pp. 55—6 (modified JSM), is used courtesy of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm.

About the authors

John S. Major taught East Asian history at Dartmouth College from 1971 to 1984. Thereafter he has been an independent scholar based in New York City. An authority on the intellectual history of the Han dynasty, he is the co-translator (with Sarah A. Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold D. Roth) of The Huainanzi (2010), co-translator (with Sarah A. Queen) of the Chunqiu fanlu (Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn), and co-author and co-editor, with Constance A. Cook, of Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China (1999). In addition to his scholarly works on early China, he has published widely in other fields, including books for young readers, local and family history, and the pleasures of reading.

Constance A. Cook is Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Lehigh University. She specializes in the study of excavated texts from ancient China. She is co-author and co-editor, with John S. Major, of Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China (1999), author of Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man’s Journey (2006), and author of Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao (2017). In these and other publications she focuses on the examination of excavated texts in the context of material culture and what they can tell us about belief systems and local social practices.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315715322-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

There was no such place as China for most of the time period covered by this book. Long before China arose as a concept, a place-name, and a political reality, a variety of cultures, polities, and states occupied parts of the physical landscape that we now know as China (Map 1.1). Some of the first manifestations of such cultures could be called “proto-Chinese” or “Sinitic’”—that is, showing characteristics that would later be identified with China— while others clearly stood apart from the Chinese ethno-cultural world. The name China itself apparently comes from the state of Qin (pronounced “chin”), which in 221 BCE completed the forcible unification of the various states that occupied the Yellow River Plain and the Yangzi River Valley, imposed central rule upon them, and created the first authentic imperial Chinese state. But a succession of proto-states and kingdoms had existed in parts of that territory for some 2,000 years before “Qin” gave rise to “China,” and Neolithic cultures had existed there for thousands of years earlier. Indeed, human existence in various places in East Asia can be documented back over 50,000 years. How, then, is one to refer to China before “China”? And why does it matter?

It matters because the use of such terms as “North China” for the territory of the Shang kingdom (c. 1555—1046 BCE), or “Far Western China” for the Tarim Basin (the home of what seems to have been the easternmost outpost of the ancient people who would later be known as the Celts), tends to homogenize ancient history and obscure the diversity of the ancient East Asian world. It falsely suggests the existence of “China” as a political entity in very ancient times. And it obscures the reality that what is known as Chinese culture today has diverse regional and cultural roots.

Ancient China, as historians commonly use that term, refers to the period from the beginning of the Neolithic era, about 10,000 years ago, to the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in 220 CE. “Early China,” in common usage, is a more restrictive term, used for the period from the Early Bronze Age to the end of the Eastern Han. The Three Kingdoms Period, 220-265 CE, marks the transition from Early China to Medieval China. In this book, we will generally avoid using the word China to refer to the period before 221 BCE. Instead we will refer to sociopolitical entities as they existed at any given time (for example, “the Shang kingdom” or “the state of Lu”), and locate them by using terms that refer to specific geographical features (“the Yellow River Plain,” “the South-Central Coastal Region”) rather than by such terms as “east-central China” or “the North China Plain.” Fortunately many Chinese placenames are geographically specific (such as the province names Shandong, “east of the mountain,’ and Hunan, “south of the lake”), allowing us to use them freely within our frame of reference.

Relief - High g.

Low 4- À

Map 1.1 Relief map of East Asia, with the present borders of China. Political boundaries change drastically over time; physical features are relatively much more stable.

Our basic focal area will be the East Asian Heartland Region and, surrounding it, the Extended East Asian Heartland Region. The first refers to the grain-growing regions roughly comprising the basins of the eastward-flowing Yellow and Yangzi River Valleys and the Sichuan Basin. The second, the Extended Heartland, encompasses the forests, grasslands, arid lands, mountains, high plateaus, and subtropical jungles that surround the Heartland Region. We will define these terms more precisely in Chapter 2; here we simply posit them as the landscape within which, over a long period of time, Sinitic culture and the Chinese nation gradually came into being.

Diversity and continuity in ancient China

To study the history of early China requires constantly navigating a course between two poles: change within continuity and continuity within change. In the long history of human societies in the East Asian Heartland we find both important structural commonalities and a wide range of cultural responses to widely differing environmental circumstances. Neolithic cultures worldwide are in some senses similar in their general characteristics (agriculture, villages, ceramics, stone tools), but highly diverse in the specific manifestations of those characteristics. The cultures of the Yellow River Plain, the Yangzi River Valley, and the southeastern coast, to name just three key regions, exhibit differences even today; the roots of those differences are unmistakably visible in the archaeological record over a period of 8,000 years or more and clearly reflect different ecologies and agricultural economies. For example, the people in the Yangzi River Valley mainly grew rice, while those in the Wei River Valley and the Yellow River Plain, to the north, grew several varieties of millet as well as barley and wheat. Coastal peoples in the south consumed large amounts of seafood and had access to abundant fruits and vegetables, both cultivated and gathered in the wild. Within some

Introduction to Ancient China 3 cultures hunting evolved from a daily pursuit to an elaborate and ceremonial elite activity, while elsewhere small populations of hunting and gathering tribal peoples continued to exist well into the era of dynastic states and great cities. Even when, over a period of many centuries, some northern and southern cultures in the two great river valleys began to amalgamate and coalesce into the root culture we call Chinese, many areas, large and small, remained unassimilated. During China’s first imperial period, the Qin—Han era lasting from 221 BCE to 220 CE, the empire struggled to define its relationship with the many non-Sinitic peoples within and along its borders. Substantial populations of ethnically non-Chinese people remain in the southern, western, and northern highlands to this day. In the early twenty-first century at least fifty-five languages are still spoken within the borders of the People’s Republic of China. It is reasonable to assume that in ancient times there was far greater ethno-linguistic diversity within the Heartland Region.

On the other hand it is equally true that a strong thread of cultural continuity runs though the Heartland Region’s tangle of cultural diversity. To that extent the oft-repeated claim that China has “the world’s oldest continuous civilization” can be taken as valid. The mask-like décor found on jade ritual objects of the Liangzhu Culture that flourished in the Yangzi River delta in the late fourth and early- to mid-third millennia BCE are clearly ancestral (with several intermediate steps) to the mask-like décor of bronze ritual objects of the Shang dynasty, 2,000 years later. Many shapes of ceramic vessels of the late Longshan Culture (c. 2600-2000 BCE) were directly copied in bronze during the Early Bronze Age Erlitou Culture and the subsequent Shang dynasty. Neolithic cultures in many parts of the Heartland, and their Jade Age and Bronze Age successors, exhibit a shared enthusiasm for the building of pounded-earth walls (village walls, city walls, eventually state-boundary walls), as well as a post-and-beam architectural style for large buildings, usually sited on pounded-earth platforms. The earliest known written language in the East Asian Heartland, found on animal bones and turtle shells used for divination during the late Shang Period, is unmistakably an early form of Chinese, and the subsequent written record shows the inexorable spread of Chinese as the region’s common language, leaving other languages to survive only in scattered pockets. Many other examples of long-term continuity will be adduced in this book’s pages, and because of that continuity we will often write in terms of “proto-Sinitic,’ “Sinitic,’ and (from the Qin—Han period onwards), “Chinese” culture.

Nevertheless, to say that there were fundamental continuities in the ancient East Asian Heartland is not to say that the region’s societies, whether in the emerging mainstream of Sinitic culture or on its fringes, remained static throughout time. Societies may change in response to internal evolutionary developments or external pressures, or both. They might even be swept away and replaced. For example, the Liangzhu Culture (c. 3200-2300 BCE) seems to have simply disappeared (possibly as result of a period of persistent flooding in the Liangzhu homeland in the Yangzi delta). Some attributes of Liangzhu Culture reappear in the Longshan Culture, which arose in western Shandong c. 2600 BCE and gradually spread widely across the Yellow River Plain; were those cultural attributes introduced by Liangzhu refugees who moved northward into Longshan territory? Or were they simply the result of long-term cultural contact? Did Longshan overlords conquer what remained of Liangzhu near the end of its cultural existence? And, in turn, did the final stage of the Longshan Culture lead directly into the beginning of the East Asian Bronze Age? Clear answers await further archaeological work.

New archaeological discoveries and new studies continue to redefine drastically our understanding of the cultural diversity of the ancient Heartland Region, and of the evolution there of political powers and of competing civilizations. It has revealed many early complex societies that were not recorded in the traditional histories but which must be taken into account to achieve a full and reliable picture of how China became China.