The Formative Age 3
a malaria epidemic in 1899, drugstores in and around Beijing did a
lively business selling “dragon bones,” believed to cure the illness when
ground up and served in a soup. One day a scholar of ancient Chinese
culture was stunned to see on one of these dragon bones a very early
form of Chinese writing. His discovery eventually led archeologists to
begin excavations at Anyang, a source of these bones in the north cen-
tral province of Henan. There they uncovered the tombs of the last
thirteen kings of the Shang dynasty.
“Dragon bones” were in fact the fl at undersides of turtle shells and
the shoulder blades of cattle. The ancient writing on them came from
the practice of divination or the consultation of ancestral spirits by the
rulers of the Shang dynasty. Shang diviners fi rst drilled a hole into the
bone and posed a yes-or-no question to an ancestral spirit. When they
inserted a red-hot bronze rod into the drilled hole, the intense heat
made cracks in the bone. The diviners (Shang kings and their shaman-
like advisors) then interpreted the confi guration of the cracks to answer
the question. Artisans then carved on the cracked bone the date, the
name of the diviner, the spirit consulted, the question, and the answer
provided. In this curious way, “dragon bone soup,” whether it cured
malaria or not, led scholars to discover Shang oracle bones, providing a
unique window on early Bronze Age China.
Anyang, it turned out, was the Shang capital at the height of its
power (around 1300–1000 bce). In 1950, an earlier Shang capital, with
similar archaeological fi ndings, was discovered in Zhengzhou, directly
south of Anyang. Today we have more than 100,000 oracle bones from
Shang sites, and scholars have deciphered roughly 2,000 characters (also
called ideograms), or about half of the known total. These are the ear-
liest known examples of Chinese writing. In addition to oracle bones,
the Shang also produced large numbers of bronze vessels of remarkable
artistic quality that were used in sacrifi ces to the dead.
Bronze technology marks the birth of Chinese civilization. An alloy
of copper and tin with a small amount of lead, bronze requires fi rst
the location, mining, and refi ning of the appropriate metal ores, fol-
lowed by the smelting of the three metals in exact proportions at very
high temperatures (over 1,000 degrees Centigrade). In contrast to the
Mesopotamians, who produced small quantities of forged or hammered
bronze perhaps fi ve centuries before China, Shang bronze makers mined
abundant deposits of copper and tin ores to cast molten bronze in huge
quantities and in highly sophisticated designs.
Bronze technology was a hallmark of both the Shang and (its
successor) the Zhou societies, and some vessels were inscribed with