Back in lesson #3 we left off with the passing of power from
Emperor Yu the Great to his son. This act signaled the formation of the first
dynasty known to the Chinese, although I'm not sure it can really properly
be called that. There are some archaeologists and historians who believe that
the earliest dynasties might actually have been separate cultures in the Yellow
River valley region, and that their various descendants wound up essentially
retconning their history into forms that synched up with later concepts of
government and kingship. It's something like the Biblical stories of Saul,
David, and Solomon. All of them got called kings, but only Solomon managed
to sufficiently concentrate power under the central leadership of a single
ruler to truly fit the term. The two before him, while powerful rulers, were
more in the nature of high chieftains rather than royal overlords. A lot of
the early Chinese rulers seem to have been very much along these same lines.
The fact that up until 1959 there was no archaeological evidence whatsoever
of the Xia Dynasty existing didn't exactly help, either. They'd been treated
as a myth told as part of Chinese history - not unlike the way Arthur was
to the English - and sort of left at that. Then came the archaeologists, who
were apparently interested in researching an ancient people called the Longshan
or Lungshan.
They started serious diggings at a city called Yanshi, and found themselves
what looked awfully like a capital city dating to the time of the Xia - 2100
to 1800 BCE. That would've been just about the time China was emerging from
the Neolithic period and moving into the Bronze Age. The climate back then
was much wetter, warmer, and overall damper than it is today. Apparently big
chunks of the country were covered with lakes, marshes, and swamps. The area
was really relatively decent to live in at the time... and I have to say at
this point that I find myself looking at this and thinking about Yu's role
in legend vis-a-vis the GREAT WHACKING FLOODS that supposedly drowned the
region year after year after year. Tamer of floods, controller of lakes, drainer
of big whacking pools of unwelcome water, and look, isn't this the capital
city of his supposed descendants?
Ahem. Anyway.
The other notable thing about this region is the pottery. The Lungshan people
were incredibly good at pottery by ancient standards, creating a type
of black pottery without painting or decoration, but with a lovely polished
texture. Their neighbours, the mountain-living Yangshao people, were also
big on pottery - to a degree that makes me choke. I'm really sorry, but every
Yangshao pot I've ever seen has looked like something stolen from the southwestern
United States. I mean, here! Look at these,
or stuff like this
or this.
I've seen some pictures in other sources, too; the similarities get a little
unnerving sometimes. Bloody weird if you ask me, but we're getting off the
track again.
Xia kings held power for quite a long time, long enough to begin developing
bronze technology (impressive) and getting seriously decadent (not impressive).
If ever there was a pre-Romanov example of why dynastic succession is not
a good way to pass power from one ruler to the next, these guys were it. Rome
had its supposed seven Etruscan kings culminating in Tarquin the Right Ba-
I'm sorry, Tarquin the Proud - but Tarquin was nothing compared to
the tail end of the Xia Dynasty. The last ruler thereof was a fellow by the
name of Jie,
who was big on entertaining himself and not a whole lot else. Part of the
problem may have been that, according to the old stories, the king's advisors
were responsible for most of the business of running the country. You tell
a man Heaven wants him to rule, then take away all responsibility that might
keep him busy and in touch with the people in his care, and what do you expect?
You get an idiot with a warped sense of priorities.
Jie went to war against several neighbouring states in order to get himself
women that he wanted, or to enslave entire populations. This was necessary
because the SOB was the kind of guy who would dig a rowboat pond, then fill
it with wine, or build a palace big enough to hold all 3,000 of his favourite
dancing girls. Granted, these claims are probably embellished after the fact,
but the basic idea remains: they had a king who had no concept whatsoever
of his long-ago forebears' responsibilities towards their people. Long before
there was ever a King Louis in France, Jie was declaring himself the Sun King
- the story is that when his advisors told him his extravagance would ruin
the country, he said 'everything under heaven belongs to me, and I am like
the sun in the sky. Will the sun ever be extinguished?'
Okay, maybe it's me, but this man was ASKING for trouble with a line like
that.
Jie's preference for entertaining himself at the expense of the welfare of
his kingdom bit him in the ass one day. A state not all that far away, called
Shang, had come about as the result of a man named Tang uniting several tribes
and looking around for something else to do. Given that the king of the Xia
region was such a sot, he looked like an easy target. And he was. Word of
advice to those of you planning on becoming an Evil
Overlord or Overlady: don't take your concubines or concubators to the
front for the big battle, okay? Jie did. It wasn't the only reason he lost,
but it's just so not the wise thing to do. The man was a moron. He
deserved to lose. So he did, and the Shang, who were really good with
bronze, assimilated his kingdom and got themselves a nice big chunk of China
to rule.
In The Story of the Stone, by Barry
Hughart (ha! Thought I wouldn't mention him this time, eh?), Number Ten
Ox speaks of how the oracle bones of the city of An-yang were said by Master
Li to be the only evidence the semilegendary Shang dynasty ever existed. There's
a good deal more evidence than that, enough to show that the empire had several
capitals - enough, in fact, to make it very clear to archaeologists galore
that the Shang rulers constituted the first real, solid dynasty in China.
They centralized power in the city of the ruler to a degree never before seen
in the Middle Kingdom-
Quick note here. I should've done this ages ago when I started using the term.
China is a name that didn't get applied to the country until well after the
first true Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, aka the Duke of Ch'in to readers of Barry
Hughart. The local name for the place has generally been rendered as Chung
Kuo or Zhong Guo - the Middle Kingdom. The belief was that the country lay
directly under Heaven and was at the center of the entire world. Before you
say anything about geography, have a look at the medieval Europeans' maps
that featured Jerusalem as the center of the world. People like to place what's
dear to them as close to the eye of their gods as possible, I think.
All right, back to the history. The Shang rulers consolidated their power
to a frightening degree. Anyang was only one of the capitals they established
over the years; there was another one at a city called Zhengzhou.
THAT capital had a wall around it. A big wall, made of earth, stamped
down hard enough to become as tough as cement. The wall was four miles long
and in some places reached as high as 27 feet. Think about how many people
that must've required in ancient China - we're talking sometime between, oh,
about 1750 and 1040 BCE. That's a LOT of work. King Solomon couldn't
get that kind of work done without going off to look for foreign assistance
in the form of alliances, supplies, and wives. Then again, Solomon wasn't
a ruler of the most
advanced bronze-working civilization in the ancient world. Neither was
he into the kind of enthusiastic religion the Shang rulers were. We're talking
Aztec enthusiasm here - large-scale human sacrifices. King died? Round
up a hundred or so slaves and prisoners, whack off their heads, and set them
in the tomb with him to serve him in the afterlife. Putting up a temple? Go
find fifty or so slaves and sacrifice them to the gods and various
deities. Building a new palace? Hope you've got a bunch of prisoners on hand,
'cos there's gonna be a big need for blood shortly...
You get the idea. You just can't get that kind of bloodshed without
having a serious organization in place, the people start causing problems.
For what it's worth, the Shang people were fairly prosperous, being agriculturalists
and developers of near-porcelain-quality pottery. They had their writing system
- found on oracle bones, and then on turtle shells, and then on bronze and
stone. All Chinese writing to this day descends from this, although it's been
reformed and refined more times than I know how to count. (You can pop on
back to lesson #2 and look up the information there, if you like.) They had
a fairly unique system of inheritance, too - the king's son was not his heir,
but his next eldest brother was. When the brothers ran out, the throne went
to the oldest surviving son of the king's sister. Relatively unique system,
as far as I know.
Eventually, around 1040 BCE, the Shang dynasty got smacked in the face by
their neighbours to the west. These neighbours were of a semi-nomadic tribe
called the Zhou, who would form the next dynasty to rule over China, and some
of the critical ideas that shaped much of the rest of Chinese history would
come from them - but that's a story for the next lesson, and I hope you'll
forgive me for putting it off until then.