2 China in World History
northeast down the coast all the way to today’s Vietnam. The Longshan
people made beautiful tools and ceremonial objects of jade, a very hard
mineral that can only be shaped with abrasive use of sand and metal
drills requiring a great deal of time and energy. Because of its hardness
and its lustrous green beauty, jade has been seen as a precious stone in
China from the late Neolithic up to the present day.
Out of these Neolithic cultures organized in villages there eventually
arose, between 2000 and 1500 bce, more highly developed societies in
which people specialized in different kinds of productive occupations.
Farmers produced enough food to support a non-agricultural popu-
lation that included artisans who produced non-agricultural goods,
administrators who collected taxes and set rules and regulations for
society, and soldiers who defended or expanded the territory under the
government’s control.
In contrast to many other societies, the early Chinese accepted the
world and human existence as facts of life that needed no supernatural
explanation or divine creator. They assumed the world was a friendly
place, and they credited advancements in civilization to human beings,
not to gods or divinities. This optimistic humanism became one of the
distinctive aspects of Chinese thought and culture up to modern times.
It stands in sharp contrast to the ancient Greek fascination with trag-
edies, to the jealous tribal God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and
to the elaborate metaphysical speculations of Indian mystics.
Among the most important cultural heroes in China’s earliest his-
torical records were three “sage-kings,” Yao, Shun, and Yu, who were
known particularly for their virtue and their loving concern for the wel-
fare of their subjects. Yao passed his throne on to Shun rather than his
own son because Shun was clearly superior to all others in his devotion
to the public welfare. Shun, in turn, chose as his successor an engineer,
Yu, who tamed the fl oods of China’s major rivers. In this early con-
ception of the state, rulers were seen as analogous to parents, and the
state was seen as the family writ large. Having established prosperity by
taming China’s rivers, Yu passed on his political authority to his own
son, thus beginning what came to be known in the historical record as
the Xia dynasty, traditionally dated 2200–1750 bce. Around 1750, the
Xia was overtaken by rulers of the Shang, which remained in power for
about seven hundred years.
There probably was some regional power around 2000 bce known
as the Xia, but it has not yet been verifi ed by the archeological record.
In the 1930s, archeologists proved the historicity of the Shang dynasty
by discovering its capital through an unlikely coincidence. During