246 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
The Grand Historian wrote of the three earliest Chinese dynasties: Xia,
Shang, and Zhou. His accounts of the Xia and Shang were so filled with fabu-
lous stories that modern historians tended to discount them and begin their own
historical accounts with the Zhou, the dynasty during which Confucius lived.
After all, what can you make of the founder of the Shang dynasty, born from a
mother who became pregnant after swallowing the egg of a black bird? Sima
Qian seems to have told the stories as they came to him without passing judg-
ment on their credibility. He had quite a lot of more concrete things to report
about specific kings, their characters and actions, and their capital cities. While
some records from the Shang exist (see below), the earlier Xia is recorded only
through myths, and here the figure of Yu the Great (ca. 2200 B.C.E.) emerges
most prominently. This legendary founder of the Xia is significantly remembered
for his ability to “tame” the changeable Yellow River through dredging and dike
construction. This mighty task has forever been essential to the good governance
of northern China, and it became a crucial test of any ruler’s legitimacy.“The Ruins of Yin”
Three and a half centuries after Sima Qian died, grave robbers plundered a
royal tomb in an area long known as the “Ruins of Yin” in the lower Yellow
River valley. They found strips of bamboo with writing on them, which made a
handy torch while the robbers carted off treasures. Some bamboo strips, how-
ever, were rescued; these turned out to be a chronology of Shang kings and
became known as the “Bamboo Annals.” Sima Qian’s Shiji and the Bamboo
Annals have long been the best sources on the Shang dynasty. But for 3,000
years, fear of ghosts and respect for the graves of the ancestors prevented any
serious efforts at investigating the “Ruins of Yin,” leaving to twentieth-century
archaeologists the discovery of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 B.C.E.). The
scholar Wang Yirong (Yi-jung) tracked “dragon bones” to the town of Anyang
in the first years of the twentieth century and discovered what proved to be the
royal archives of the Shang dynasty. This touched off a frenzy of treasure hunt-
ing as well as some of the best archaeological research done anywhere in the
world by Western and Chinese scholars.
First excavated in 1928, the Shang capital of Anyang is now one of the most
important archaeological sites in the world. It is actually 17 different sites near
the modern town of Anyang. One of these sites was the major palace complex;
another was the royal cemetery. Several sites are bronze foundries where mag-
nificently ornamented bronze vessels were manufactured. Nestled everywhere
are humble workshops and residences of artisans and commoners. The old
annals identified 12 kings of the Shang, one of whom was burned to death when
Zhou invaders conquered Anyang. Imagine the delight of archaeologists to find,
along with a thousand humbler graves, the remaining 11 royal tombs at Anyang.
These tombs are not monumental in the Egyptian sense, or even structures
at all, but huge burial pits about 10 meters deep with long ramps leading down
into the grave. The ramps on the north and south were longer, giving the burial