The EconomistAugust 1st 2020 China 35I
n the tight-knitworld of Chinese archaeology, a sign of a dig’s
importance is the sight of Zhou Mingsheng at work. A sun-bat-
tered, tousle-haired field technician who has worked at excava-
tions all around China, “Master Zhou” is credited with the gentlest
touch in his profession. Born into a farming family, he is a “nation-
al-level craftsman” with a talent for using simple tools—a trowel
and soft brush—to extract relics that would crumble in other
hands, says his current boss, Wang Xu, director of an archaeolog-
ical site at Shuanghuaishu, a Neolithic settlement near the Yellow
River in the central province of Henan.
Master Zhou’s presence, quietly supervising local villagers as
they scrape at the hard-packed soil, is not the only proof that this
hilltop site has the attention of high-ranking officials. Since dig-
ging began in 2013, funding has increased greatly. Sturdy roofs cov-
er much of the site. Vaulted living quarters have been built into a
hillside, keeping them cool in summer heat and cosy in winter
frosts. A spell at Shuanghuaishu is a prize for top students at Pe-
king University, the country’s most prestigious college. Visits by
Chinese dignitaries are a weekly routine.
It is not beauty that lures visitors to Shuanghuaishu. At 5,300
years old, the settlement is the work of a culture too simple to have
left behind exquisite bronzes or written inscriptions. The single
most precious find, to date, is a finger-length sculpture of a silk-
worm, carved out of the tusk of a boar. Nor is the setting lovely: a
scrubby plateau patrolled by dragonflies and deafening crickets,
between a highway and two power stations. Rather, the site’s im-
portance is historical, and thus political. For since the birth of Chi-
nese archaeology in the 1920s, it has been inseparable from claims
that China boasts the oldest unbroken civilisation on Earth.
That question caused a genteel tussle between President Don-
ald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, during a state
visit in 2017. As the pair explored the Forbidden City in Beijing, Mr
Trump ventured that he had heard that China has 5,000 years of
history, but that Egypt has 8,000. “Egypt is a bit more ancient,” Mr
Xi replied. “But the only continuous civilisation to carry onwards
is China.” Shuanghuaishu is now part of that debate. Leading ar-
chaeologists say that the site boasts the right combination of loca-
tion, age, grandeur and distinctive cultural elements to be the cap-italofanearlyChinesekingdom. That would make it a bridge
between China’s written history, which stretches back 3,000 years,
and the era of the Yellow Emperor, who by tradition ruled over
these fertile central plains almost five millennia ago, though many
foreign scholars have the impudence to dismiss him as a myth.
State media call the site proof of China’s 5,000 years of history.
Master Zhou began his career in 1979. He is too diplomatic to
say so, but that was a period of cautious rebuilding for Chinese ar-
chaeology, after the relic-smashing frenzies of the Maoist era. Back
then ancient treasures, if displayed at all, were labelled as evi-
dence of feudal oppression. By the late 1990s patriotic education
had replaced class warfare as a favoured tool for mobilising the
masses. In 1995 a deputy prime minister, Song Jian, was mortified
during a visit to Egypt, where officials showed him a detailed time-
line of the pharaohs extending back 4,700 years. He returned argu-
ing that China needed similarly precise dates for its dynasties,
writing that history without chronology “can only be called ru-
mour or myth”. The central government tasked a team of 200 ar-
chaeologists, historians and other scholars with assigning firm
dates to the earliest dynasties listed in classical histories, the Xia,
Shang and Zhou. That multi-year project ended with official Chi-
nese declarations of success, and a start date for the Xia dynasty
four millennia ago. In contrast, many foreign scholars question to
this day whether proof of the Xia has been found.
A second national project to research the origins of Chinese civ-
ilisation followed from 2002 to 2015. It was given a further boost by
President Xi’s launch in 2013 of a globe-spanning infrastructure
scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative, with its talk of reviving an-
cient trade routes along the Silk Road. Mr Wang recalls how those
twin quests to find silk-producing kingdoms led archaeologists to
Shuanghuaishu, and then in 2016, to two nearby sites where small
urns turned out to hold children buried in silken funeral wrap-
pings. He lists signs of Shuanghuaishu’s sophistication, from its
large houses to neatly dug tombs, some containing residents who
lived to the then-astonishing age of 40 and have the slender torsos
of those spared hard labour. A series of pots was found buried in
the precise shape of the plough, a constellation. Foreigners carp
about a lack of written records, Mr Wang notes. Perhaps they are
missing symbols that will one day be deciphered, for instance in
patterned pottery. Maybe the Yellow Emperor was not a literal per-
son, but a tribe. Outsiders “can’t keep using Western standards to
apply to Chinese ruins,” he argues.Whose emperor are you calling mythical?
To foreigners, a final puzzle remains. Shuanghuaishu is an inter-
esting place. But so are lots of other Chinese sites of the same per-
iod. Wang Wei, director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Chi-
nese Academy of Social Sciences (cass), agrees that similar
artefacts—from jade carvings to images of dragons—have been
found in several sites dating back five or six millennia. That would
seem to bolster those scholars who compare early China to a “star-
ry sky” filled with competing cultures. But unity is what interests
Mr Wang. In time, he says: “the stars gathered in central China, and
a nation was built on top.” Shuanghuaishu matters because it lies
in that central cradle of national greatness. Chinese archaeology
has three main missions, says the cassarchaeology boss. The first
two are studying human development and agriculture. But the
most important is studying the origins of Chinese civilisation. If
that sounds like a political answer, in China history and politics
are inseparable. And that has been true for thousands of years. 7Chaguan China digs its past
Officials claim an archaeological site proves that China has 5,000 years of continuous history