8 China in World History
written Chinese, rooted in the Shang dynasty, has been a powerful uni-
fying force throughout the long political history of China, helping to
unite north and south, east and west, in one political system. Eventu-
ally, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all adopted Chinese characters into
their written language, even though their spoken languages were com-
pletely unrelated to spoken Chinese.
Shang rulers were deeply concerned with ancestor worship, another
custom with a very long history in China. The kings and their divina-
tion specialists or advisors conceived the afterlife as a mirror image
of the hierarchical society they had organized in this life, and they
saw their own dead ancestors as ranked in a hierarchy of power after
death, with more distant ancestors being more powerful. Shang kings
and diviners appealed to a “Lord on High” (Shangdi) whom they saw
as the most powerful spirit of all, able to control rain, thunder, wind,
and to harm or protect the Shang state and society. They addressed
oracle bone inquiries and made frequent sacrifi ces to deceased ancestral
spirits, the only intermediaries who could communicate directly with
the Lord on High. The deceased ancestors depended on the living for
respect, wealth, food, and drink, and in return for these the deceased
conferred blessings on their living descendants. These rituals sometimes
took dramatic form, as a young person would channel the spirit of an
ancestor, drink much sacrifi cial wine (millet ale), eat lavish food, and
thus inspired, report directly to the living from the world of the dead.
The Shang ruling house controlled several walled city-states with its
own troops and ruled a much larger area indirectly through its allied
vassals and soldiers. These allies recognized Shang power as supreme
and were allowed to administer their own territory while supplying the
Shang center with annual tribute payments in goods, crops, or mili-
tary aid. The extent of Shang political power is not entirely clear, but
archaeological fi nds have demonstrated that sophisticated bronze tech-
nology was spread far and wide across much of what we know as China
today. An elegant six-foot high bronze statue of a man contemporane-
ous with the Shang was discovered in 1986 in Sichuan (near Chengdu),
far beyond any direct Shang infl uence. This site in Sichuan contains
jades, extraordinary bronze masks, and axes of many kinds, all just as
sophisticated as anything found at Anyang, but without any evidence
of writing.
Shang contacts with other cultures ranged far beyond the Yellow
River valley. Hundreds of preserved corpses or mummies of an identifi -
ably Caucasian people were recently discovered in the Takla Makan
Desert of Xinjiang Province in China’s far west. These tall people (men