An Outline History of China (Bai Shouyi, Fang Linggui, Gong Shuduo, Yang Zhao, Zhu Zhongyu)

An Outline History of China
Author	Bai Shouyi, Fang Linggui, Gong Shuduo, Yang Zhao, Zhu Zhongyu
First published	1982 Beijing
Type	Book
PDF	First Edition Second Edition

Introduction

A Land of 9,600,000 Square Kilometers

The People’s Republic of China is situated in East Asia, on the western shores of the Pacific Ocean. Its borders reach from the central line of the main navigation channel of the Heilongjiang (Heilungkiang) River near Mohe in the north to the Zengmu Reef in the Nansha Archipelago in the south, and from the Pamirs in the west to the confluence of the Heilong¬ jiang and the Wusuli (Ussuri) River in the east. The total area is about 9.6 million square kilometres, making China one of the largest countries in land size in the world. With a con¬ tinental land boundary of more than 20,000 kilometres, China adjoins Korea in the east, the People’s Republic of Mongolia in the north, the U.S.S.R. in the northeast and the northwest, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan in the west and southwest, and Burma, Laos and Viet Nam in the south. The continental coastline is more than 18,000 kilo¬ metres long, and looks across the seas towards Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. The primary administrative divisions in China today are the three municipalities directly under the central govern¬ ment, the twenty-two provinces and the five autonomous re¬ gions (Table I). The capital of China is Beijing.

The Three Municipalities Directly Under the Central Government:

• Beijing
• Shanghai
• Tianjin

The Twenty-two Provinces:

• North: Hebei Shanxi
• Northeast: Liaoning Jilin Heilongjiang
• Northwest: Shaanxi Gansu Qinghai
• East Shandong: Jiangsu Zhejiang Anhui
• Southeast: Fujian Taiwan
• Southwest: Sichuan Guizhou
• Central South: Henan Hubei
• South: Jiangxi Yunnan Hunan Guangdong

The Five Autonomous Regions

• Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (north)
• Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (north)
• Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (northwest)
• Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (south)
• Tibet Autonomous Region (southwest)

Underneath the provinces and autonomous regions are cities, autonomous prefectures, counties, autonomous counties and other divisions. The municipalities directly under the central government are subdivided into urban districts and suburban counties. China has many mountain ranges, most of the major ones being located in the western regions. Running west-east are the Altay, Tianshan, Kunlun, Qilian, Karakdrum, Gangdise, Himalaya, Yinshan, Qinling and Nanling mountains. Running north-south is the Hengduan Range, which is formed from the Daxue, Nushan and Gaoligong mountains lying side by side from east to west. In the eastern part of the country are mountain ranges running from the northeast to the southwest: to the west are the Greater Hinggan Range, the Taihang Mountains, and the Wushan, Wuling, Dalou and Xuefeng ranges; to the east are the Changbai Mountains and the Liao¬ dong, Shandong and Minzhe highlands. These mountain ranges and highlands determine the basic features of China’s topography. The Chinese terrain varies conspicuously in elevation and consists of three tiers descending from west to east. The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the highest and largest plateau on earth, is commonly known as “the roof of the world”. To the north it is bounded by the northern branch of the Kunlun and Qilian mountain ranges and to the south and west by the Karakorum, Himalaya and Hengduan mountain ranges. Its average elevation is more than 4,000 metres above sea level. Mount Qomolangma in the Himalaya Mountains, located on the border between China and Nepal, is the world’s highest peak, with an elevation of 8,848.13 metres. The Qaidam (Tsaidam) Basin northeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is somewhat lower even though it has an elevation of almost 3,000 metres. This area forms the highest tier in China’s topography. The northern and eastern faces of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau descend to plateaus and basins mostly between 1,000 and 2,000 metres above sea level.

They include the Yunnan-Guizhou

Plateau; the loess plateau which takes in central and eastern Gansu, eastern and southern Ningxia, northern Shaanxi, the whole province of Shanxi and western Henan; the Inner Mongolia Plateau; the Sichuan Basin; the Tarim Basin and the Junggar Basin in Xinjiang. These plateaus and basins form the second tier. East of the Greater Hinggan Range and the Xuefeng Range are hilly country with an elevation of less than 1,000 metres and plains of less than 200 metres. The three main plains of China, the Northeast Plain, the North China Plain and the Lower and Middle Changjiang (Yangtze River) Plain are all in this area. The coastal plains have an elevation of less than 50 metres above sea level. These hills and plains form the third tier in the Chinese terrain.

�4

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

Most Chinese rivers flow from west to east and empty into the Pacific Ocean. The major rivers all flow east along most of their courses, such as the Changjiang (Yangtze River), Huanghe (Yellow River), Heilongjiang, Zhujiang (Pearl River), Songhuajiang (Sungari River), Liaohe, Haihe and Huaihe. (Jiang and he are both Chinese words for medium-sized and large rivers.) Some of the south-flowing rivers, such as the Yarlung Zangbu Jiang (the Yalutsangpo or Brahmaputra) River and Nujiang (the Salween River), pass through India, Bangladesh and Burma to empty into the Indian Ocean; others, such as the Lancangjiang, the Mekong River and Yuanjiang, flow through Burma, Laos, Thailand, Kampuchea and Viet Nam into the Pacific Ocean. The Ertixhe (the Kara-Irtysh River) flows north from Xinjiang into the U.S.S.R.

There

are also inland rivers with no ocean outlet, such as the Tarimhe, Qaidamhe and Shulehe; these are mostly confined to Northwest and West China. The longest river in China is the Changjiang at 6,300 kilometres, which passes through Qinghai,

Sichuan,

Tibet,

Yunnan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shang¬ hai, with tributaries flowing through several other provinces including Guizhou, Shaanxi, Gansu and Henan. Huanghe, which passes through Qinghai,

Next is the

Sichuan,

Gansu,

Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan and Shan¬ dong. The part of the Heilongjiang which lies within Chinese territory and forms the border between China and the U.S.S.R. has a drainage basin which covers the greater part of the northeastern provinces.

The Tarim which has few tributaries

has a relatively small drainage basin.

The Zhujiang, originat¬

ing in the Nanpanjiang in the upper reaches', of the Xijiang (Sikiang or West River), passes through Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Guangdong.

The Songhuajiang in the northeast

has a relatively large drainage basin, and the drainage basins of the Yarlung Zangbu Jiang (within China) and the Haihe are both more than 200,000 square kilometres.

�CHAPTER I

TABLE

5

II

The Longest Rivers in China Name

Length

Drainage basin

Changjiang (Yangtze River)

6,300 km

1,800,000 km2

5,464 km

750,000 km2

Huanghe (Yellow River) Heilongjiang (Heilungkiang or Amur River)

2,965 km*

Tarimhe (Tarim River)

2,179 km

198,000 km2

2,129 km

425,700 km2

1,840 km

545,600 km2

Zhujiang (Pearl River) Songhuajiang (Sungari River)

Lakes of all sizes are scattered throughout China but are more concentrated on the Lower and Middle Changjiang Plain and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The largest fresh water lakes are the Poyang in Jiangxi, the Dongting in Hunan, the Hongze in western Jiangsu and Taihu in southern Jiangsu. The most important of the salt lakes are the Qinghai Lake (Koko Nor) in Qinghai and the Lop Nur (Lob Nor) in Xinjiang; the latter covers an area of more than 2,500 square kilometres but is not fixed either in area or shape. Lake Xingkai (Hsingkai) is a fresh water lake which straddles the Sino-Soviet border.

• Length within China and along the Sino-Soviet border.

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

TABLE

III

The Largest Lakes in China Name

Qinghai Lake (Koko Nor) Poyang Lake Dongting Lake (Tungting Lake) Hongze Lake (Hungtse Lake) Taihu Lop Nur (Lob Nor or Lop Nor) Lake Xingkai* (Lake Hsingkai or Hanka) 1

Area

Type

salt fresh

more than 4,400 km2 3,976 km2

fresh

3,915 km2

fresh fresh

3,780 km2 more than 2,200 km2

salt

more than 2,500 km2

fresh

4,380 km2

In addition to the natural rivers and lakes, there are also many canals in China. The most famous is the Grand Canal between Beijing and Hangzhou (Hangchou), 1,782 kilometres in length, which passes through the city of Tianjin and four provinces (Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang) and links up with five major rivers: the Haihe, Huanghe, Huaihe, Changjiang and Qiantangjiang (Chientang River). The continent of China faces east and south towards the seas. In the east, the most northerly sea is known as Bohai (Po Hai): the Liaodong peninsula and the Shandong peninsula confront each other forming a natural gateway known as the Bohai straits. Southeast of Bohai is the Huanghai (Yellow Sea), south of the mouth of the Changjiang is Donghai (East China Sea), and south of the Taiwan Straits is Nanhai (South China Sea). Bohai is an inland sea of China while the other three are all marginal seas of the Pacific. Morg. than 5,000 islands are scattered across the seas, with half of them located in Donghai, forming a total area of about 80,000 square kilo* Belongs in part to China, in part to the U.S.S.R.

�CHAPTER I

7

metres. The largest island is Taiwan (35,700 square km), followed by Hainan Island (over 34,000 square km) and Chongming Island (1,083 square km). Also well known are the Miaodao Archipelago at the entrance to the Bohai, the Zhoushan (Choushan or Chusan) Archipelago beyond the mouth of the Qiantangjiang, and the Penghu Islands (Pescadores) in the Taiwan Straits. The most southerly islands are the coral reefs or atolls known as the Dongsha (Tungsha), Xisha (Sisha), Zhongsha (Chungsha) and Nansha archipelagos. These Nanhai archipelagos are composed of varying numbers of islets, sandbars and reefs totalling more than 170; the Nansha Archipelago consists of close to a hundred of them, and the Xisha comes next with about thirty. Many seaports are strung out along China’s lengthy and winding coastline. The river estuary ports of Tianjin, Shang¬ hai and Guangzhou-Huangpu (Canton-Whampoa) are im¬ portant centres for foreign trade and economic exchange within China. The port of Tianjin stands on the western shores of Bohai Bay at the lower reaches of the Haihe; the port of Shanghai stands at the confluence of the Changjiang, Huangpujiang (Whangpoo River) and Wusongjiang (Woosung River); the ports of Guangzhou-Huangpu stand at the Zhujiang delta which is the confluence of the lower reaches of the Dong jiang, Beijiang and Xijiang (the East, North and West rivers). The bay ports of Dalian (Dairen) on the Liaodong peninsula, Qing¬ dao (Tsingtao) on the Shandong peninsula, Jilong (Keelung) in Taiwan and Zhanjiang (Chankiang) on the Leizhou (Leichow) peninsula all have good natural harbours and are key to sea and land communications. Due to the monsoon climate created by the difference in temperature between continent and ocean, plus the vastness of the land and the complexity of the terrain, there are con¬ siderable variations in air temperature and rainfall in different parts of China, and a wide variety of climates. In summer, the temperature throughout China is generally rather high. The average temperature in July is above 20°C in Heilongjiang,

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

8

15°C in Lhasa and 28°C in Hangzhou. The average tempera¬ ture in winter is about minus 30°C in the most northerly part of Heilongjiang but above 10°C in places like Guangdong, Guangxi and Fujian, while in Hainan it can go as high as 15°C or more. When the north is a frozen land, coconut groves flourish in the south. The vastness of the land, the complexity of the terrain and the variation in climate, together with the related regional differences in natural characteristics, combine to make China’s natural

resources

extremely

rich

and

multifarious.

The

fertile plains produce cereal crops such as wheat, rice, maize, millet, sorghum (gaoliang) and soybean, and cash crops such as cotton, hemp, sugar and oil-bearing plants. The vast mountain areas produce, in addition to foodstuffs, tea, tea oil, tung oil, silk, wax and medicinal materials.

Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang,

Qinghai and Tibet have large areas of prairie land providing rich pastures for raising cattle, sheep, horses and camels, in¬ cluding many excellent breeds.

The forests are mostly con¬

centrated in the northeast and southwest, and are also to be found in Fujian and the eastern part of Taiwan.

The forests

are complex with many different types of plants:

there are

more than 2,800 species of trees alone, of which almost 1,000 provide timber of considerable economic value.

The fauna

that live wild in every region throughout China include about 1,150 bird species, more than 400 species of mammals, and over 420 species of reptiles and amphibians, many of them rare.

China is very rich in water resources.

According to

preliminary estimates, the total volume of flow of Chinese rivers is 2,700,000 million cubic metres, with reserves of 580 million kilowatts of hydro-electric power. All the major rivers are open to navigation, with a total of about 160,0.00 kilome¬ tres of navigable waters. Rich reserves of oil, coal and iron are found in various regions of the country. Non-ferrous minerals such as copper, aluminium, tungsten, antimony, molybdenum, tin, manganese, lead, zinc and mercury, along

�m

« as

t*

mm

■?

The Lake of Stars, the source of the Huanghe River, as seen from a distance.

�Mount Tomur of the Tianshan Mountains.

The Huanghe River skirts the southern frihge of the Tengger Desert as it flojys to Zhongwei County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. In the middle of the river is a newly built bifurcation dam across the Meili Canal dug in the Han Dynasty.

�Grazing sheep in the foothills of the Yinshan Mountains, Inner Mongolia.

�A country scene in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefec¬ ture, Yunnan Province.

�The Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region.

�A landscape in the Miaoling Moun¬ tains, southern Guizhou Province.

�Riyuetan Lake on a branch stream of the Zhuoshuixi River in the central part of Taiwan Island.

Chengyang Bridge in the Sanjiang Dong Autono¬ mous County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

�Upper: An itinerant song and dance troupe in Inner Mongolia on one of its rounds. Lower right: Song of the Fisher¬ men in the Liangshan Mountains, a dance of the Yi people. Lower left: Drum dance of the Korean nationality.

�CHAPTER I

9

with oil shale, phosphorus, sulphur, magnesite, salt, gypsum and so on are also widely distributed.

Fifty-five Nationalities and a Population of Nearly 1,000,000,000

The People’s Republic of China is a unitary multi-ethnic state, comprising the Han people and over fifty ethnic minori¬ ties. The Han people are the most numerous and live all over the country; their highest concentrations are in the Huanghe, Changjiang and Zhujiang river basins and on the Songhuajiang-Liaohe Plain in the north-east, occupying forty to fifty per cent of the total area of China. According to 1978 statistics, the ethnic minorities have a total population of 55.8 million, which is believed to have increased by now. They inhabit fifty to sixty per cent of the country’s total area. TABLE

IV

China’s Ethnic Minorities (Based on 1978 Statistics) Region

Name

Northeast Manchu

Widely distributed, con¬ centrated in Liaoning Mainly in Jilin, Heilong¬ jiang, Liaoning

Korean Daur Ewenki Oroqen Hezhen North Mongolian

/

)

Mainly in Heilongjiang

Mainly in Inner Mongolia, also in Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Qinghai, Gansu and Xinjiang

Population

2,650,000 1,680,000 78,000 13,000 3,200 800

2,660,000

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

TABLE

Region

Name

Northwest Uygur Kazak Kirgiz Xibe Tajik Ozbek Tartar Russian Hui

Dongxiang Yugur Bonan Tu Salar Southwest Tibetan Lhoba Moinba Yi

Miao

Bouyei

IV (cont.) Population

/

5,480,000 800,000 97,000 44,000 22,000 7,500 2,900 600

Widely distributed, but mostly in Ningxia and Gansu; also in Shandong, Yunnan, Qinghai, Hebei, Henan, etc. | Mainly in Gansu r ' Mainly in Qinghai | J

6,490,000 190,000 8,800 6,800 120,000 56,000

\

) In or mainly in Xinjiang

Tibet, Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, etc. \ In Tibet, but mostly in Moinyii and Lhoyu regions ) now occupied by India Over one million in Sichuan and over two million in Yunnan More than half in Guizhou, the rest in Hunan, Yunnan, etc. Guizhou

3,450,000 Estimated at 200,000 Estimated at 40,000

^ 4,850,000

3,920,000 1,720,000

�CHAPTER I

11

Table IV (cont.) Name

Dong Bai

Region

Population

Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi Mostly in Yunnan; small

1,110,000

numbers in Sichuan and Guizhou Hani Dai Lisu Lahu Va Jingpo Blang Achang Pumi Nu Jino Benglong Drung Naxi Shui Gelo Qiang

/

1,050,000 960,000 760,000 470,000 270,000 260,000 83,000 52,000 18,000 22,000 19,000 10,000 10,000 4,100

Mostly in Yunnan, also in Sichuan and Tibet ) Mostly in Guizhou, a small number in Guangxi J Sichuan

230,000 230,000 . 73,000 85,000

/

\

)

In or mainly in Yunnan

South and Central-south Mostly in Guangxi, small Zhuang numbers in Yunnan, Hunan, Guangdong, etc. In Guangxi and also in Hunan, Yao Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou, Jiangxi, etc. Hunan and Hubei Tujia Guangdong Li Taiwan Gaoshan

12,090,000

1,240,000 770,000 680,000 Estimated at 300,000

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

12 Name

Region

She

In Fujian and Zhejiang, also in Guangdong, Anhui, etc.

Mulam Maonan Jing

i l j

Guangxi

Population

330,000 73,000 31,000 5,400

Apart from the fifty-five ethnic minorities listed in the above table, there are still some groups whose ethnic status remains unclear. The language and script of the Han nationality are the most widely used in China, and are commonly known as the Chinese language and script. Each of the other nationalities, with the exception of the Hui which uses Chinese, has its own language. The language of the She is very close to Chinese. Increasing numbers of people among the ethnic minorities are using Chinese in addition to their own languages. Many of them have no script of their own and use either the Chinese script or the script of a related nationality. The Chinese (Han) language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family. It is often said to be monosyllabic because the smallest meaningful units of speech generally consist of one syllable each. However, very many words of the modern language are polysyllabic compounds of two or more of the one-syllable basic units. Chinese is also described as a tonal language, which means that a syllable generally is pronounced with a characteristic tone (even, rising, falling-rising or falling). On the whole, Chinese lacks the inflections (suffixes, prefixes etc.) that are characteristic of many other languages. These are partly replaced by grammatical “particles”, and the parts of speech in a sentence are chiefly determined by the word order. Over the vast area throughout which the Chinese language is spoken, there are many different dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. In the last few decades a standard language has gradually been formed, based on the language of the north, with the Beijing pronunciation as the norm and

�CHAPTER 1

13

a grammar modelled on modern vernacular writing. This language is called putonghua and is gradually being populariz¬ ed. It will eventually become the form of spoken and written Chinese in universal use. The Han script consists of pictographs and ideographs com¬ monly known as Chinese characters, some of which go back more than three thousand years. The earliest characters con¬ sisted of a single pictographic or ideographic element: the characters 0 and M were, as they still are, pictographs for the sun and the moon, while JL(_h ) and T* (T) conveyed the meaning of “upper” and “lower” in terms of the relative posi¬ tion of the vertical stroke to the horizontal. The structure of such characters was relatively primitive and simple. A second step was taken when two or more simple characters were com¬ bined to form a more complex character to express a new meaning. For example, the characters 0 and A were com¬ bined to form meaning “bright”, and the character A (man) with the character A (spear) forms the character meaning “defend”. Still later a third type of character was developed, consisting of one element which stood for the mean¬ ing and another for the pronunciation, e.g.: 7j fang:

fragrance

fang: ■pfj fang:

house visit

fang:

fang: fang: U fang:

francium hinder pleasure boat

set down

The character A fang, which means direction, only indicates the pronunciation and does not contribute anything to the meaning; the other element indicates the meaning. Over a long period of time, Chinese characters have undergone very great changes in appearance, and many new characters have been invented, but the principles for the formation of new characters have persisted. In the development of Chinese culture, the Chinese or Han script has played a very great role in facilitating communication between different regions in China and strengthening the unity of the country. But because

�14

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

each character has its own separate form, the Chinese script is much more difficult to learn, write and print than an alpha¬ betic script. For this reason, the Chinese government has set up a committee for the reform of the Chinese script to study and carry out gradual reforms. Twenty-eight of the languages of China’s ethnic minorities belong to the Sino-Tibetan family, including Tibetan, Yi, Zhuang, Bouyei, Dai, Miao and Yao. Another eighteen belong to the Altaic family, including Uygur, Kazak, Mongolian, Manchu and Korean. Va, Blang and Benglong belong to the Austroasiatic family, Gaoshan to the Austronesian family, and Tajik and Russian to the Indo-European family. Some people claim that the Jing language belongs to the Austroasiatic family, but this has not been fully established. Some national minorities, such as the Mongolians, Tibetans, Uygurs, Kazaks, Koreans, Xibes and Dais, have their own alphabetic scripts. The Tibetan script has a history of more than 1,300 years. The Uygurs and Mongolians have used dif¬ ferent alphabetic scripts over periods of more than a thousand years and seven or eight hundred years respectively. The Yi language has a syllabic script which also has a history of over a thousand years.

The Naxi script consists of two elements,

ideographs and a syllabary, and the ideographs go back more than a thousand years. Ethnic minorities which had no script or incomplete scripts have created or improved their scripts in recent years. Ten of them have devised their phonetic alphabets, and nine of these are being tried out. Both in economic and cultural life many of the nationali¬ ties have much in common with each other, yet each has its distinctive characteristics. Han people have had a very long history of agricultural production, and their handicrafts also reached a tairly high level at an early stage. Their inventions, such as printing, the compass, gunpowder and the manufacture of porcelain, tea, silk and paper, have long been famous throughout the world. Han culture is extremely rich in ancient books and records,

�CHAPTER I

15

literature and history. Many great thinkers, scientists, in¬ ventors, statesmen, military strategists, writers and artists have appeared in the course of Chinese history, and great rev¬ olutionary movements have taken place. The Han people have made a very great contribution to the development of Chinese society. Of the twenty-one ethnic minorities that live in North Chi¬ na, twelve are mainly engaged in agriculture, including the Manchus, Koreans, Huis and Uygurs. Among them the Tus, Xibes and Yugurs turned from stock-breeding or fishing and hunting to agriculture only during the last few centuries. The achievements of the Koreans in rice paddy cultivation and im¬ provement are well known. The Uygurs are skilled in estab¬ lishing green oases on basin peripheries and at constructing karez (an irrigation system of wells connected by underground channels), demonstrating their mastery of agricultural pro¬ duction. The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was one of the first area in China where cotton was planted. The Kazak, Kirgiz and Tajik minorities are mainly engaged in stockbreeding. The Kazak regions are famous for their livestock. Agricultural crops flourish in the Ili Basin, which is known as “the granary of northern Xinjiang”. The Mongolians on the northern plateau are mainly engaged in stock-breeding, while those on the Hetao Plain at the Yellow River Bend are mainly engaged in agriculture. The Mongolians raise famous breeds of horses, oxen, cows, sheep and camels.

The Hezhens

are mainly hunters and fishers, and the Oroqens are mainly hunters, but both also practise some agriculture. The Ozbeks and Tartars are for the most part engaged in commerce, but a few also practise agriculture. Of the thirty-four ethnic minorities in the south, the majority are chiefly engaged in agriculture, some in combina¬ tion with stock-breeding, hunting and fishing, or forestry. The Tibetans practise both stock-breeding and agriculture, the former on the extensive, high grasslands and the latter in the river valleys. The large and long-haired yak is unique to the

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

16

Tibetan highlands. The Jings are the only minority which chiefly subsists on fishing, with some agriculture as well. Most of the ethnic minorities have a rich cultural tradition embracing song, dance, oral literature and art. The colourful dances of the Uygurs, Kazaks, Mongolians and Koreans are particularly well known. The Uygurs, Mongolians, Huis, Manchus, Tibetans, Bais and Dais all possess substantial bodies of literature and art as well as historical and technological works and religious classics. Modern industry began in China around the middle of the nineteenth century. After the founding of the People’s Repub¬ lic in 1D49, an all-round development of the national economy got underway, and all kinds of industries were established. At the same time education and cultural activities were im¬ proved and popularized.

The economic and cultural life of

each ethnic group took on a new look. Ethnic minorities which had lingered in a backward condition for a long period achieved a rapid development both economically and culturally, and ex¬ hibited striking changes. In Chinese history no one ethnic group has developed in isolation from the others. Each has contributed to the creation of Chinese history and each shares the destiny of the nation as a whole.

In the protracted struggle against feudalism, colo¬

nialism and imperialism, each group has battled side by side with the others.

In every aspect, economic, political and cul¬

tural, each group absorbs nourishment from its fraternal groups for its own enrichment, and each language is under the con¬ stant influence of the fraternal tongues.

Even the formation

and development of each ethnic group is a constant process of association, separation and fusion, a constant process of emigra¬ tion and immigration between different groups. j\fter the founding of the People’s Republic, a policy of equality and unity between its ethnic groups was put into effect, autono¬ mous areas for minorities living in compact communities were established, the languages and customs of the minorities were

�CHAPTER I

17

respected, and the state helped each of them to develop its economy and culture. Unprecedented unity has been achieved.

1,700,000 Years and 3,600 Years

Human life existed in many parts of China in remote antiq¬ uity, leaving behind traces of primitive society. The earliest man discovered in China is Yuanmou Man, who lived roughly 1,700,000 years ago. The famous Peking Man lived approxi¬ mately 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. The gradual formation of a matriarchal commune took place approximately 40,000 or 50,000 years ago, and the patriarchal commune appeared more than 5,000 years ago. Because of low productivity, exploitation did not appear in primitive society; it was a society of communal production and consumption, and the productive relations were based on the public ownership of the means of production. Primitive socie¬ ty was followed by slave society, in which the relations of pro¬ duction were based on the slave-owners possessing both the means of production and the productive workers, the slaves. It was in slave society that exploitation, classes and the state ap¬ peared for the first time. We still lack concrete evidence to determine when slave society came into being in China. According to traditional ideas, the first dynasty in Chinese his¬ tory was the Xia, which ruled for more than four hundred years. Its activities were centred around the juncture of mod¬ ern Shanxi, Shaanxi and Henan. It is generally thought that this dynasty lasted roughly from the 21st century to the 16th century B.C. and saw the beginning of slave society in China. Archaeologists are still trying to find out the truth about the Xia, which is now known to exist only in traditional legend. The first dynasty which can be traced from archaeological discoveries and from records corroborated by these discoveries was the Shang, having begun some 3,600 years ago when, ac¬ cording to our present knowledge, recorded history started in

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

18

China. By the Shang, which lasted roughly from the 16th cen¬ tury to the 11th century B.C., China had entered the stage of slave society. The Western Zhou Dynasty, which succeeded the Shang in the 11th century B.C., was also based on the slave system. The centre of Shang activity was initially around Shangqiu in the southeast of modern Henan, but after repeat¬ ed moves the rulers finally settled around Anyang in modern Henan.

The Zhou capital, Hao, was on the western outskirts

of modern Xi’an in Shaanxi.

The centre of Zhou activity was

the region around the lower reaches of two rivers, the Jinghe and Weihe.

In addition, the Zhou had an eastern capital at

Luoyi, on the west bank of the Luoshui (present-day Luohe) near modern Luoyang in Henan, which formed another centre of activity around the lower reaches of the Yihe and Luoshui. The Jing-Wei plain and the Yi-Luo plain were both well suit¬ ed for agriculture, with fertile soil, a mild climate and relative¬ ly adequate rainfall. abundant there.

Other natural resources were also fairly

These two regions subsequently experienced

several periods of prosperity and decline, but they enjoyed an important political position up until the end of the 9th cen¬ tury.

Considerable bodies of cultural relics, legends and rec¬

ords have also been preserved in other regions within China. The period from 770 to 221 B.C. is known in traditional history as the early Eastern Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring States periods. It was a time when slave society was gradually disintegrating and feudal society taking shape, a period of transition from slave to feudal society. The relations of production in feudal society were the landlords’ ownership of the means of production and their partial ownership of the productive workers. In addition, there was an individual econ¬ omy where peasants and artisans owned tools and other means of production on the basis of their own labour. But' these in¬ dividual labourers were the objects of landlord control and exploitation. The landlords and peasants were the two antag¬ onistic classes in feudal society, although the different ranks

�CHAPTER I

19

into which the society was divided generally obscured the class division. . In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the feudal hierarchy of land ownership gradually replaced the land ownership by the slave-owning aristocracy; the labour of individual peasants replaced collective slave labour in agriculture, the dependence of the labour force on the land replaced an unstable relationship between the labour force and the land, and the individual peasant family combining plough¬ ing and weaving gradually became the dominant form of labour organization. As for the political system, the system of enfeoffment initiated in the early years of Western Zhou underwent changes, giving rise to a prefectural system of local administration: local government officials were appointed by the court to serve limited terms in a succession of different places, as opposed to the system of hereditary posts. With the appearance and development of the prefectural system, con¬ tacts between the various regions increased, the political or¬ ganization of each locality was strengthened and history pro¬ gressed further along the path to unification of the country. In 221 B.C., Qin Shi Huang (First Emperor of the Qin) estab¬ lished the first imperial dynasty, marking the beginning of feudal predominance throughout the country. The period from 221 B.C. to A.D. 196 was a time when feudalism reached maturity under the three imperial dynasties of Qin, Western Han and Eastern Han. The hierarchical feudal order matured both economically and politically. The emperor possessed supreme political power, and at the same time was the supreme landowner. Under the emperor were landowners with different kinds of hereditary status and privileges, in¬ cluding the imperial relatives on the male and female lines and persons who had rendered meritorious services to the throne. These landed aristocrats with hereditary titles oc¬ cupied the dominant position in the landlord class. In addi¬ tion there were the landowners from powerful families and the mercantile landowners thriving on usury. Both possessed

�20

considerable they did not some even subjected to

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

strength in property and social influence, but belong to the higher ranks in social status, and ranked very low. The hereditary aristocrats exploitation peasants who were registered by

household and bestowed to them by the feudal state. This was the main type of peasant at the time. The registered peasants had a private economic sphere and a certain degree of personal freedom. Although they were exploited, they were better off than the slaves. But they too varied in socio¬ economic status. Their household registration status could not be altered after they were attached to hereditary aristo¬ crats by state decision. The land rent they paid to the landed aristocracy also served as their state tax, the two being com¬ bined in one. The relations of production stated above were established in the period of unity under the Qin and grew continuously under the Western and Eastern Han. Slavery did not vanish in the Qin and Han period but persisted in government and private handicraft industries, and existed in households throughout the feudal era. However, these rem¬ nants of the slave system were insignificant in social pro¬ duction. As for the political system, Qin Shi Huang started a unitary prefectural system of administration, but no historical records survive which describe how it was carried out. Under the Western and Eastern Han the system coexisted with the fiefs. Underneath the prefectures and fiefs were counties and un¬ derneath the counties were administrative organizations at the grassroots. These were the different levels in the political structure, each with some relative independence. Beginning in the 3rd century, the prefectural system gradually supersed¬ ed the fiefs and changed continually. But generally speaking, power became more and more concentrated in tl^e hands of the court and restricted at the local levels. The capital of the Qin Dynasty was Xianyang, and the capital of Western Han was Chang’an; the Eastern Han moved its capital east to Luoyang after Chang’an had been devastat-

�CHAPTER I

21

ed by war. The Jing-Wei plain, the Yi-Luo plain and the lower reaches of the Huanghe were the most fertile regions in these periods. The sphere of activity of the Qin and Han was much wider than those of previous dynasties and included the Huanghe, Changjiang and Zhujiang river basins. There were more extensive records of the history of the ethnic minorities than before. The Han people, the major ethnic group in China, was formed in the Qin and Han periods through the fusion of related tribes and ethnic groups. The name of the Han people is identical with that of a great dynasty. Chinese feudalism experienced its earlier period of ascend¬ ancy from 196 to 907, which covered a period of disunity — the Three Kingdoms, the Western and Eastern Jin, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties — as well as the dynasties of Sui and Tang. The period witnessed protracted struggles as well as large-scale displacement and migration among the nationalities. As a result the territory shared by various groups expanded both northward and southward. The Han group replenished itself, and the ethnic minorities raised their production level and standard of living. A new phase in national fusion appeared, and feudalism developed among groups sharing the same territory. This is an important, feature of the earlier period of ascendancy of Chinese feudalism. The hereditary landed aristocracy of the previous era crumbled under the onslaught of peasant uprisings, and was replaced with the newly arisen landlords of privileged fami¬ lies. Like the landed aristocracy, the privileged families en¬ joyed political status and hereditary rights. But they built themselves up by relying on their traditional position in the feudal officialdom and not as a result of imperial fiat. Their land ownership had a more private character than had been the case with the landed aristocrats. The privileged landowners mainly controlled peasants who had attached them¬ selves to these manorial lords for protection against exorbitant taxes and levies.

These manorial peasants were omitted from

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

22

the household registers of the state and the land rent they paid was no longer part of the state tax. Their position in society was lower than the state-registered peasants, but they were relieved of state taxes which included a heavy burden of labour service. This change in the relations of production was favourable to the growth of the productive forces of society. It was another sign of the ascendancy of Chinese feudalism. The Wei (one of the Three Kingdoms), the Western Jin, and the Later Wei (one of the Northern Dynasties) all set up their capitals at Luoyang. The Sui and Tang had their capitals at Chang’an and maintained an eastern capital at Luoyang. The Wu (another of the Three Kindoms), Eastern Jin and the four Southern Dynasties of Song, Qi, Liang and Chen all had their capitals at Nanjing (Nanking).

The northerners who be¬

gan to move south in the Wei and Jin dynasties lent fresh im¬ petus to agricultural production in the southeast by increasing the labour force and spreading productive skills.

The lasting

prominence of Nanjing as a political centre was inseparable from the prosperity of the southeast.

The economic growth

in the middle and lower reaches of the Changjiang, emulating that in the fertile areas of the Huanghe river basin, was an¬ other feature of the ascendancy of Chinese feudalism. The years from 907 to 1368 were the later period of ascend¬ ancy of Chinese feudalism.

It began with the Five Dynasties

and Ten Kingdoms, followed by the Liao, Western Xia and Jin dynasties on one side and the Northern and Southern Song dynasties on another, and finally reunification under the Yuan Dynasty.

Extensive border regions from the north¬

east to the northwest and again in the southwest entered the stage of feudal society in most important Respects at this time.

This was a significant feature of Chinese feudalism in

the later period of its ascendancy. The economic growth in the southeast surpassed that in the north, and the middle and lower reaches of the Changjiang became the most prosperous parts of the country.

�CHAPTER I

23

The privileged stratum of landowners of the previous historical period crumbled under the onslaught of peasant uprisings. It was replaced, under the Northern and Southern Song, by bureaucrat landlords who enjoyed certain political status and privileges. With few hereditary privileges, these bureaucrat landlords obtained most of their land through purchase or seizure. The law put no limit on the amount of land they might hold. They were obliged by regulations to pay taxes to the state, and in their turn collected rent from the peasants. The distinction between taxes and rent became clearer. Apart from the bureaucrat landlords there were also the plutocrat landlords and mercantile landlords. Some of the peasants owned small amounts of land, but the majority were tenant-farmers who worked on the lands of the various kinds of landlords. They had a better social position in society and more personal freedom than the manorial peasants in the previous period. Listed in the state household registers, they had to contribute a poll tax and some labour services to the feudal state in addition to payment of rent to the landlords. But generally they were not registered with a certain landlord on the order of the feudal state. This was a major difference between them and the state-registered peasants of the Western and Eastern Han. The imprint of feudal bondage on both landlords and peasants tended to fade away, and the agrarian relations of exploitation in terms of property rights became more distinct. This marked the feudal relations of production in the Northern and Southern Song dynasties. The strength of the Southern Song landlord class was largely preserved after national unification under the Yuan Dynasty, and a most typical feudal economic order prevailed in the regions under its domination. The Yuan Dynasty saw the emergence of a huge stratum of Mongolian aristocratic landowners, many commoner households bearing feudal duties, and a greater number of slaves. This kind of relations of production was, however, confined to the north and was merely a partial phenomenon of retrogression. The feudaliza-

�24

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

tion of extensive border regions was a new phenomenon in the development of production in Yuan society. The states of Liang, Jin (936-946), Han and Zhou in the period of the Five Dynasties established their capitals at Kaifeng, which also served as the capital for the Northern Song and as a secondary capital for Jin (1115-1234). Modern Bei¬ jing was the capital for three dynasties: Liao, which called it Nanjing; Jin (1115-1234), which called it Zhongdu; and Yuan, which called it Dadu. Since ancient times this site has been of strategic, political and economic importance. After the Yuan, the Ming and Qing dynasties retained it as their capitals and today it is the capital of the People’s Republic. The de¬ velopment of Beijing is a joint creation of the Han, Qidan, Niizhen, Mongolian and other ethnic groups. Although the Song capital of Kaifeng and the Yuan capital of Beijing were father distant from the fertile regions of the Southeast, they both used the Grand Canal linking north and south to facilitate the transport of foodstuffs from the south to the north and to bring in the wealth of the southeast. The period from 1368 to 1840, which takes in the Ming Dynasty and a large part of the Qing, saw the decline of Chi¬ nese feudalism. The majority of peasants under the Ming were still tenant-farmers. From the legal point of view, the feudal dependence of the tenant-farmer on the landlord was somewhat weakened. Peasants could choose their own land¬ lords and could reject the landlords’ excessive demands for labour service. Hired labourers selling their labour power for material recompense also made their appearance. The tax law of the Qing converted the poll tax and the land tax into a single tax, so that those with land were taxed and those without were not, giving the tax the character, of a pure prop¬ erty tax. These conditions showed that feudgl bonds had eased considerably. But this did not arise from the kindness of the rulers, but from the necessities of socio-economic de¬ velopment and the fierce struggles of the labouring people. Nevertheless, this was only one aspect of the social phenomena

�CHAPTER I

25

of that time. The other aspect was the rapacious plunder and oppression carried out by the landlord class, especially its ruling group, by using the power in their hands. The unscru¬ pulous use of eunuchs at the Ming court and the strength¬ ening of military rule during the Qing period were attempts to preserve a highly feudalized government. These two as¬ pects may appear to be in disagreement with each other, but they are simply different manifestations of the moribund condition of feudal society. The second manifestation by no means showed the vitality of the feudal landlord class, but revealed its weakness. The two apparently contradictory phenomena were precisely signs of decline. The bureaucrat landlords of the previous historical period and their successors, together with the Mongolian aristocratic landlords, crumbled as before under heavy attacks from peasant uprisings. Taking their position were the newly arisen scholar-official landlords. Apart from officials it included fairly large numbers of intellectuals who had passed the Ming and Qing civil service examinations. The wealthier members of this class not only owned much land but also took up trade, operated pawnshops and issued high-interest loans. This was a reflection of the development of commodity production and a money economy, which nevertheless could not be developed normally because those people were dependent on feudal power. The Ming court directly occupied large areas of land in the form of imperial estates. This, like its appointment of palace eunuchs to collect taxes on commerce and mining and to look for and store up tremendous amounts of gold and silver, re¬ vealed the greed of the rulers of a falling dynasty. The estates of the imperial clan and the nobles and bureaucrats, along with the grain allowance of the imperial clan, amounted to fantastic sums, growing into a malignant tumour on the social economy and national finance. Although the Qing court also had imperial estates, they were aware of the possible harmful effects and kept the area much smaller than under the Ming.

�26

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

However, for a fairly long period, the Manchu homeland of the Qing court in the northeast was a forbidden area, which largely hindered local economic development. “Sprouts of capitalism” could be found as early as the be¬ ginning of the Ming Dynasty. They appeared in greater quantity after mid-Ming and showed a further development in early Qing. But these “sprouts” could never grow to full maturity or break through the declining feudal system because of their insufficient strength. In external relations, the Sui, Tang, Song and Yuan were all in a position to take the initiative, but under the Ming and Qing external relations took a distinct turn for the worse. In early Ming there were landings by “Japanese invaders” (wokou), pirates operating off the Chinese and Korean coasts from the 14th to the 16th century, but the Ming court did lit¬ tle against them. From mid-Ming on, coastal harassment by the “Japanese invaders” brought great destruction to the south. During the Ming and Qing period, capitalism had already arisen in the West, but Chinese feudalism hobbled along its own course, and the autocratic rulers knew nothing of world developments. By the beginning of the 16th century, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and others had come east to carry out colonial activities and had invaded Chinese territory. They were subsequently followed by Tsarist Russia, England and the United States, whose ambitions in regard to China grew constantly.

The eunuch admiral Zheng He’s voyages to

Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in early Ming and Chi¬ na’s resistance to Tsarist Russian invasion in early Qing were major events in external affairs, but the overall situation worsened continually, and it was not by chance that the Opium War was followed by a series of national disasters. The history of semi-feudal and semi-colonihl China lasted from 1840 to 1949. At the same time, this was aJi era of re¬ sistance to imperialism and feudalism by all of China’s ethnic groups. The first stage, up to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, was the period of the old democratic revolution. The

�CHAPTER I

27

second stage, from 1919 on, was the period of the new-dem¬ ocratic revolution. The period of the old democratic revolution lasted almost eighty years, taking in the final years of the Qing Dynasty and the first years of the Republic. In this period, due to the invasion of foreign imperialism and its brutal rule over China, China’s social economy underwent major changes, becoming more complex than that in feudal society. In addition to the feudal landlord economy and the individual economy of the peasants and handicraftsmen, which continued to exist, the newly arisen capitalist economy became a major sector in the social economy. The capitalist economy comprised three parts: imperialist capital, bureaucrat-comprador capital and national capital. While imperialism gained control over China’s econom¬ ic lifelines, the feudal landlord class occupied a dominant position in the economy, and the two were in mutual collabora¬ tion. Bureaucrat-comprador capital was an appendage to the imperialist economy and was also closely connected with feudal exploitation. The national capitalist economy was ex¬ tremely weak. It did not form an independent economic system or occupy an important position in socio-economic life, and it also had ties with imperialism and feudalism. Foreign imperialist aggression brought ruin to the self-suf¬ ficient natural economy in the countryside; commodity pro¬ duction developed, but agricultural production and the peas¬ ants’ economic life was drawn deeper and deeper into the vortex of the world capitalist market. These were the main features of China’s semi-colonial, semi-feudal social economy. Along with the violent changes in the social economy, changes also developed in class relations. Following its penetration into China, the foreign bourgeoisie became a dom¬ inant power in Chinese social life, controlling the country’s economy, politics, military affairs and culture. It not only propped up the feudal landlord class as the mainstay of their rule over China, but also created a comprador class to serve the needs of their aggression. Within the feudal landlord class,

�28

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

the newly arisen warlord-bureaucrat landlords, with the sup¬ port of the international bourgeoisie, replaced the scholarofficial landowners as the dominant force. The warlordbureaucrat landlords were an appendage to the international bourgeoisie and were generally the earliest bureaucratcapitalists of a strong comprador character. They held the real power in the regime of the landlord class and became the de¬ cisive force. This was an important manifestation of the compradorization of the landlord regime. The peasant class mostly comprised owner-peasants, tenant-peasants and farm labourers, and accounted for about 70 or 80 per cent of the national population. Under the oppression and exploitation of feudalism and imperialism, the peasants became increasing¬ ly impoverished and bankrupt, so that the owner-peasants became ever fewer and the tenant-peasants ever more numerous. The national bourgeoisie and the proletariat were the two new classes arising in this period. The national bourgeoisie, as determined by their economic position, was a class with a dual character:

on the one hand it exhibited an

anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolutionary character in certain periods and to a certain extent, but on the other hand it tend¬ ed towards a compromise with the enemies of revolution.

The

proletariat was the greatest, most progressive and most rev¬ olutionary class. In the period of the old democratic revolu¬ tion, however, it did not constitute an independent political force, but took part in revolution as a follower of the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie. The socio-economic conditions and class relations in semi¬ colonial, semi-feudal China determined that the basic task of the Chinese revolution was to overthrow the rule of imperial¬ ism and feudalism. In the period of the old democratic rev¬ olution, the people of all ethnic groups in Chftna carried out a bitter, unremitting struggle against the internal hnd external enemies and for the winning of national independence and freedom and happiness for the people. However, they did not find the road to liberation and did not gain the final victory.

�CHAPTER I

29

After the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the proletariat grew in strength, Marxism-Leninism spread to China, the Chinese Communist Party was established and the Chinese revolution took on an entirely new appearance. Under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the people of each ethnic group in China gained the final victory in China’s democratic rev¬ olution. In 1949, the People’s Republic of China was establish¬ ed and China entered a new age of socialism.

Traces of Remote Antiquity

From Yuanmou Man to Peking Man; the Making of Tools and the Use of Fire

The first primitive man so far known to have existed in China is Yuanmou Man, who lived about 1.70 million years ago. In 1965, two fossil front teeth of primitive ape men were discovered in Yuanmou County, Yunnan Province. Later, stone artifacts, pieces of animal bone showing signs of human work and ash from campfires were also dug up. The primi¬ tive ape man who had inhabited the site came to be known as Yuanmou Man. In 1963 and 1964, a fossil skullcap, the upper and lower jawbones, and three teeth of the ape man were discovered together with stone artifacts and animal fossils in Lantian County, Shaanxi Province. The “Lantian Man” inhabited this site 500,000 to 600,000 years ago.1 Other traces of the ape man have also been found in Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, Hubei, and Guizhou. But the best-known of all is “Peking Man”. Peking Man, whose remains were discovered at Zhoukoudian to the southwest of Beijing (Peking), lived some 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. In excavations before and since libera¬ tion, a wealth of fossils and other evidence of this culture have been uncovered. In 1966, a relatively complete fossil skullcap was discovered at the site. To date, fossil bon^s deriving from more than forty individuals of both sexes and various ages, 1 Paleogeomagnetic examination reveals that the skullcap and the lower jawbone date from different periods. The former is a million years old, while the latter dates back 500,000 years.

30

�CHAPTER II

31

and more than 100,000 pieces of stone worked by man, fossils of more than a hundred kinds of animals, and traces of campfires have been discovered there. Though still retaining some of the features of the ape, Peking Man’s physical structure already possessed the basic characteristics of man. He was relatively short, the male averaging 1.558 metres, the female 1.435. His face was shorter than that of modern man, his mouth protruded, and he had no chin, while his forehead was low, flat, and receding. His skull was about twice as thick as modern man’s, with the cap small¬ er at the top and widening towards the base. Cranial capacity averaged 1,075 cc., approximately 80 per cent of contemporary man’s, more than twice that of the modern anthropoid ape (415 cc.), and much greater than Lantian Man’s 780 cc. The brain structure was incomparably more advanced than that of present-day anthropoid apes. Peking Man had two inter¬ locking heavy brow bones above the eye sockets which screen¬ ed his eyes, his nose was flat, his cheekbones were prominent, his teeth strong and their grinding surfaces relatively complex. Peking Man’s lower limbs already had the basic form of those of modern man. In size, shape, proportion, and muscular attachment, his thighbones were similar to those of presentday man, though they still possessed some primitive features. The bone walls were thicker and the medullary cavities inside the bones smaller, while the transverse diameter of the middle section of the femur was slightly greater than the diameter measured front to back — more like that of the ape than of contemporary man, whose femoral cross-section is the reverse. But Peking Man could already walk and even run erect, though he was somewhat stooped. Through labour over long periods, Peking Man’s hands had become dexterous, as they had had to adapt to complex move¬ ments. The humerus and collar bone of the upper arm re¬ sembled those of modern man, though the humerus was still a bit primitive, with a relatively small medullary cavity and a thicker wall. Research on the inner surface of the cranium

�32

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

shows that the left cerebral hemisphere was bigger than the right, testifying to the fact that Peking Man normally used the right hand in labour. This point is verified by reference to the stone tools he used. It is clear that the uneven development of the various parts of Peking Man’s physique was due to the nature of the labour in which he was engaged. Hand labour led to the functional differentiation between the upper and lower limbs, with the upper limbs developing faster than the lower. The develop¬ ment of the brain occurred gradually as a result of hand labour and differentiation of the limbs, and thus the primitive character of Peking Man’s head is rather more pronounced. The role of labour in the physical development process proves the truth enunciated by Engels: “Labour created man.”1 Peking Man was already able to make and use tools: tools of wood and bone, but especially of stone. He already had several ways of making stone tools. He used one piece of stone to strike or hammer another stone to pieces, or broke a stone held in his hand by pounding it against a bigger stone, thus knocking off large numbers of usable sharp flakes which could be fashioned into various kinds of tools.

Most of the

tools were made of stone flakes worked on one edge. a few were made of unworked stone flakes.

Only

The stone tools

can be roughly classified as choppers, scrapers, or knife-shap¬ ed tools, according to their different forms and uses. Some were suitable for cutting and fashioning wooden hunting clubs, others for cutting animal skins or meat. The tools made and used by Peking Man prove that he was essentially different from the animals and had already come a long way on the road of human development. A great deal of ash, some of it in piles and some in layers, has been discovered in the caves once inhabited by Peking Man. The ash contains pieces of burnt animal bones and stones 1 Dialectics of Nature, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Mos¬ cow, 1966, p. 170.

�CHAPTER XX

33

of various colours, hackberry seeds, and charred Chinese red¬ bud wood, showing that animal meat was often roasted, and that Peking Man was already able to preserve, use, and con¬ trol fire. The use of fire allowed Peking Man to cook his food, and thus shorten the digestive process and promote the absorption of more nutrients, thereby spurring physical evolution and enhancing health. At the same time, fire could be used to ward off cold and defend against attacks by fierce animals. It could serve as an effective aid in hunting as well. In his mutual relations, Peking Man had already formed links which do not and cannot exist in the animal realm, namely, the links involved in the cooperative creation and use of tools, and the creation of speech through the common labour process. The size of the part of the brain where the speech centre is located shows that he could already speak. Speech originated in joint labour, and in turn promoted the evolution of man’s body; it had an especially great influence on the development of man’s brain. Peking Man’s main productive activities were hunting and gathering. The great quantities of smashed and burnt deer bones discovered in the caves where he lived indicate that deer were his principal game.

Probably his most effective

hunting weapons were the firebrand and the wooden club. Although no clubs have been preserved, the discovery of many choppers and big convex tools suitable for scraping wood, pro¬ vides indirect evidence of their existence. Peking Man led an extremely difficult life in primitive collectives.

He used his crude tools, his limited labour ex¬

perience, and his simple cooperative labour to confront every kind of natural hazard, to stave off repeated attacks by wild beasts, and to procure his essential food. His lifespan was generally not long; of the more than forty individuals whose remains have been discovered, approximately one-third died before the age of fourteen years.

Dingcun (Tingtsun) Man and Upper Cave Man; the Improvement of Tools and the Emergence of Ornaments

About 100,000 years ago, China’s ancient culture entered the “Neanderthaloid” stage.1 Human fossils from this period are relatively widely distributed in China, but the most significant among them are those of “Maba Man”, discovered in Qujiang County in South China’s Guangdong Province; “Changyang Man”, found in Changyang County in Central China’s Hubei Province; and “Dingcun Man”, uncovered in Xiangfen County in North China’s Shanxi Province. Their physical appearance was already different from that of Pe¬ king Man. Maba Man’s skull bones were thinner than those of Peking Man, and his forehead was higher. Changyang Man’s upper jawbone did not protrude so much as Peking Man’s. And both the roots and the crowns of Dingcun Man’s teeth were more advanced than those of Peking Man, closer to those of modern man. Dingcun Man lived in the Fenhe River basin to the west of the Taihang Mountains. His chief tools were still stone implements, but they were more advanced than those of Pe¬ king Man, both in terms of flaking and fashioning technique. In making the flakes, Dingcun Man commonly used a flinging technique, forcefully hurling a large piece of stone against another stone. Dingcun Man’s stone implements were also more clearly differentiated as to type than were those of Pe¬ king Man, with tools like the prismatic knife-edge and stone balls appearing for the first time. About 40,000 years ago, China’s ancient culture entered the stage of “modern man”. Starting then, the hunting and fish_

"H

1 The evolution of man may be roughly divided intO'-the Pithecanthropine (“Apeman”), Neanderthaloid, and “Modern” stages. Some scholars hold that beginning with the time man began to create tools, his morphological development may be divided into three stages, name¬ ly, the “Australopithecus” stage, a Homo erectus stage, and the Homo sapiens stage which includes contemporary man.

�CHAPTER II

35

mg economy underwent a remarkable advance and the matriarchal commune gradually took shape. Traces of the peoples of that period have been found at many places across China’s wide territory. Typical examples are Liujiang Man and Qilinshan Man found in Liujiang and Laibin counties respectively in Guangxi, South China; Hetao Man found along . both banks of the Sjara-osso-gol River in Uxin Banner, Inner Mongolia and in Lingwu County in Ningxia; the Shiyu Culture which existed 28,000 years ago in what is now Shuoxian in North China’s Shanxi Province; and the Upper Cave Man who lived about 18,000 years ago in caves near the top of Dragon Bone Hill at Zhoukoudian, where Peking Man was discovered. Upper Cave Man’s physical make-up and outward ap¬ pearance were hardly different from those of present-day man. As a result of working with, the hands and walking erect, the load on the skeletal muscles had been diminishing. Thus the walls of the bones of the limbs had become thinner, and the medullary cavity larger. As for the head, the cranial capacity had expanded and the structure of the brain was reaching a higher level of complexity and perfection.

Peking

Man’s cranial capacity had averaged 1,075 cc., but Liujiang Man’s and Upper Cave Man’s was between 1,300 and 1,500 cc., similar to that of present man.

As the brain gradually grew,

the forehead became progressively higher, the cranium pro¬ gressively thinner, and the point of maximum breadth of the skull shifted from above the ears to the region where the parietal bones link up. The brow-ridges had become thinner and flatter, and the teeth smaller and less complex. The mouth had receded so that the lower jaw and nasal bridge were more prominent as in modern man. The cranium of Liu¬ jiang Man and Upper Cave Man possessed the basic character¬ istics of that of modern man. From the point of view of race, their heads bore the primeval features of the Mongoloid peo¬ ples, and they represent an important stage in the formation of Mongoloid physical characteristics.

�36

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

Upper Cave Man’s labour experience and skill surpassed that of his predecessors. Though his stone implements were still basically made by striking stones against each other and by rough fashioning, he had already acquired the new skills of polishing, scraping, drilling, carving and colouring. Among the tools he left behind were two bone implements, a polished dear antler and a lower jawbone. The polished antler bears carved designs consisting of both straight and curved lines. The best reflection of Upper Cave Man’s improved tool-mak¬ ing techniques is a bone needle. With a length of 82 mm and a diameter varying from 3.1 to 3.3 mm, the needle is round and sharp, and the eye small. To fashion such a needle, an animal bone had to be cut and scraped, the eye had to be goug¬ ed out, and then the whole thing had to be polished. By these complex techniques Upper Cave Man created a needle which could be used to sew animal skins into clothing. Among the ornaments belonging to Upper Cave Man that have been discovered are drilled stone beads, pebbles, the eyesocket bones of black carp, perforated animal teeth and clam shells, and carved tubes made of bird bones.

The making of

these ornaments involved selection of materials,

chipping,

drilling, abrading and colouring. Some of the ornaments were dyed red with.hematite. Upper Cave Man’s main economic activities were hunting and fishing. Hare, red deer, sika, wild boar, antelope, badger and fox were his chief game. He also caught ostrich and other birds. He caught various fish, including black carp a metre in length, and he collected fresh-water clams. He gathered fruit and roots as supplementary food. Upper Cave Man, or even his predecessors, probably already knew how to make fire. Making fireninstead of just preserving it marked another big step forward in man’s effort to control nature. Engels considered the discovery of the fire¬ making technique to be even more important than the dis¬ covery of the steam engine. He pointed out that “the genera¬ tion of fire by friction for the first time gave man command

�CHAPTER II

37

over one of the forces of nature, and thus separated him for ever from the animal kingdom.”1 The invention of the fire¬ making technique paved the way for many subsequent inven¬ tions, such as the making of pottery and metal tools. The shells of salt-water clams found in the upper cave were not local, but could only be obtained at the seaside quite a dis¬ tance away. Whether obtained by exchange or collected directly, they show that man had expanded the scope of his activities and contacts, and was in a better position to do bat¬ tle with nature. The upper cave is approximately 12 metres long and about 8 metres wide, with an area of more than 90 square metres, and could accommodate a dozen or so inhabitants. The cave was divided naturally into “upper” and “lower” chambers. The upper chamber, near the cave mouth, was the common liv¬ ing quarters, while the lower, located deep inside, served as a burial ground.

A vast region around the cave served as the

base for hunting, fishing, and gathering activities. A young female, another of middle age, and an elderly male were interred in the lower chamber of the cave. Hematite powder was scattered around the dead, and stone implements and ornaments were interred with them. The arrangements for the dead give an idea of the activities of the living in the upper chamber. The burial of men and women, old and young together, with production tools and ornaments around them, reflects the closeness of a blood relationship and the produc¬ tion relations of communal labour and consumption. The fact that there is no great differentiation in burial objects suggests equality of the clan members. The hematite powder and ac¬ companying burial objects show that Upper Cave Man adhered to certain burial customs and that his thinking had developed to a new level at which he had begun to formulate primitive re¬ ligious beliefs with a superstitious tinge and ideas that went beyond actual existence.

The Yangshao Culture and Its Matriarchal Communes

Some 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, clans and tribes, big and small, were scattered across China, leaving behind rich cul¬ tural remains. A microlithic culture extended from the North¬ east through Inner Mongolia and Ningxia to Xinjiang and Tibet.1 There was the Yangshao culture2 on the middle reaches of the Huanghe (Yellow River), and the Majiayao culture3 on its upper reaches. Other primitive cultures were distributed elsewhere. The features of the matriarchal commune are displayed relatively distinctly by the Yangshao culture. Mainly dis¬ covered in central Shaanxi, western Henan and southern Shanxi, it stretched as far as the upper and middle reaches of the Hanshui River in the south and the Hetao (Yellow River Bend) region in the north, the upper reaches of the Weihe Riv¬ er in Gansu in the west, and Shandong in the east. The re¬ mains of many settlements have been found in these places, and in some cases they were clustered relatively close together. The inhabitants of the Huanghe River region were engaged mainly in a primitive agriculture, supplemented by animal husbandry. They used pointed wooden sticks for digging the earth, and their stone implements were no longer the roughly fashioned ones made by striking stones, but comparatively re¬ fined ones made primarily by abrading techniques. They had stone axes for cutting away the ground cover, stone and bone spades for loosening and levelling the soil, and various kinds of stone knives for harvesting grain. The main agricultural crop 1 The name “microlith” derives from the small size of the stone implements. The term “culture” is used here in Its archaeological sense, referring to an entire body of archaeological remains with common characteristics from a single period and a single region. Such a culture is commonly identified by the name of the spot of the first discovery or the name of a characteristic site or relic. 2 The name comes from Yangshao Village, Mianchi County, Henan Province, where the culture was first discovered. 3 First discovered in Majiayao, Lintao County, Gansu Province.

�CHAPTER IX

39

was grain,1 but they also planted vegetables. Some simple tools for processing crops had already been invented. Grain was placed on a millstone and ground with a hand-held stone pin or disc until it was husked or powdered. Once man took up agriculture, he was able to produce the food he needed, and thus could settle down. Of course, the methods of cultivation used in primitive agriculture were still in an early stage, and production was always subject to the whims of nature. The yields were low or even came to nothing. In such circumstances a part of or even an entire clan settle¬ ment had to move. Hunting and fishing was second only to agriculture in man’s productive activities, occupying a relatively important position in the economic life of the time. The principal weapons in¬ cluded bows and arrows, stone-tipped spears, fishing lances, fish-hooks, and nets with stone weights attached. Household animal husbandry developed as another sideline. From the pens and animal skeletons found at the Banpo site at Xi’an, we can see that the main livestock were pigs and dogs. Cattle, sheep, horses and chickens may also have been domesticated. But gathering was still an indispensable part of production. Many hazelnuts, pinenuts, chestnuts, hackberry seeds, snail and clam shells were discovered in the homes and cellars at the Banpo site. The rise in the quantity and quality of production and household implements is an indication of the advance of hand¬ icraft industry. The creation of large numbers of ground and polished tools provided man with new tools and spurred the overall development of social production. That cutting, par¬ ing, grinding and drilling techniques were being used can be seen from the axes, adzes, spades, chisels, knives, needles and 1 Between 1973 and 1978, archaeologists unearthed large quantities of carbonated rice remains and bone and wood spade-shaped imple¬ ments used in rice planting at the site of Hemudu Village in Yuyao County, Zhejiang Province. These remains go back approximately 7,000 years. To date, they are the first signs of the domestic cultiva¬ tion of rice in China.

�40

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

hairpins. The reflex-barbed fishing spear, the fish-hook and the perforated bone needle had already appeared, indicating the relatively high level of the bone-working techniques of primitive handicraft industry. Weaving and sewing had also made relatively rapid prog¬ ress. Fibre could be stripped from wild hemp and twisted into thread with the use of pottery or stone spinning wheels, and then be woven into cloth. Animal skins were also used to make clothing. The ingenious bone needles or bone and antler awls could be used to sew cloth and leather into various kinds of clothing. Pottery manufacture was a new, distinctive handicraft at the time. One of the characteristics of the Yangshao and Majiayao cultures was that they had various kinds of painted pottery. Remains of pottery kilns have been found at the sites of numerous clan settlements. The pottery paste was prepared from relatively fine loess soil to the proper degree of viscosity. After mixing, it was rolled into cords and then either folded to make a rough blank or coiled into an embryonic shape. Small pieces were molded directly into finished form. The next step was decoration of the blank and the addition of handles, ears, noses, etc. by adhesion or inlay. After the blanks were half dry, the inner and outer walls were again scraped and polished. Hematite and manganese oxide were applied with brush-like tools to paint pictures on finer household utensils. Sometimes, before applying the paint, a white or light red ground was ap¬ plied to make the whole image more colourful. As the kilns were not completely sealed, the iron oxides in the clay would oxidize fully, hence the bulk of the pottery is red or brown. Part of the pottery articles were production tools while most were household utensils: basic cooking utensils ssuch as stoves, steamers, footed vessels and cauldrons for steaming or boiling various kinds of foods; drinking and eating vessels like cups, basins, plates, bowls and tumblers; and jars and pots for stor¬ ing things in. There was an amphora-shaped bottle for drawing water which utilized the principle of equilibrium: placed on

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Upper: Yuanmou Man site, Yuanmou County, Yunnan. Lower right: Yuanmou Man’s teeth, found in Yuan¬ mou County, Yunnan. Low¬ er: The reconstructed cra¬ nium of Lantian Man.

�The bust of a reconstruction of Peking Man.

�Stone tools used by Peking Man, unearthed at Zhoukoudian, Beijing.

Lower animal jawbone, stone and earth burnt by Peking Man, found at Zhoukoudian.

�Stone tools used by Dingcun Man, unearthed at Dingcun Village, Xiangfen County, Shanxi Province.

Bone needle and ornaments used by Upper Cave Man, found at Zhoukoudian.

�A neolithic village site with remnants of Yangshao Culture, discovered at Banpo Village, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province.

A reconstructed round house at the Banpo site,

�Upper: A stone pickaxe (restored) found at the Banpo site. Middle upper: Mill and pestle, unearthed in Xinzheng County, He¬ nan Province. Mid¬ dle lower: Painted spinning wheels, un¬ earthed in Jingshan County, Hubei Province, and Xichuan County, He¬ nan Province. Low¬ er: Pottery basin with human-mask and net-like de¬ signs, unearthed at the Banpo site.

1

�Black pottery stem¬ med cup with thin body, of Longshan Culture, unearthed in Weifang, Shan¬ dong Province.

A pottery wine con¬ tainer of Longshan Culture, unearthed in Linyi County, Shandong. It is of white clay mixed with fine sand.

�Bronzes of Qijia Culture, unearthed at Huangniangniangtai, Wuwei County, Gansu Province.

Oracle bones of Longshan Culture, kept in the Museum of Chinese History, Beijing.

�CHAPTER II

41

the surface of the water, it would automatically tilt, allowing the water to flow in. Pottery was one of the most important inventions of the matriarchal commune period. It indicates that man’s wisdom was not limited to the working of natural objects, but could create entirely new things. Pottery could be used to cook food, thereby allowing the human body to absorb more fully the nutritious substances of foodstuffs, and it could be used to store liquids, which was beneficial to agricultural irrigation. This contributed to making the sedentary life style more stable. And the principles of pottery-making could also be applied in making ceramic spinning wheels, pellets for hunting, and sink¬ ers for fishing nets. Fire could also be used to bake the earth walls and foundations of primitive buildings.

All of this

had very great significance for the advance of human produc¬ tion and livelihood. Painted pottery was not only practical, but was also a fine handicraft art. The painted designs, patterns, birds and ani¬ mals on the pottery reflect the agricultural labour and hunting and fishing activities of the time with much liveliness and imagination. There are also many marks carved into the sur¬ faces of the pottery which may have been used as symbols for the utensils themselves. a kind of primitive script.

Some scholars believe that they are The birds, fish, deer and frogs de¬

picted on the pottery may have been the clan totems.1 The settlements of that era had a fixed layout in keeping with clan structure.

The Banpo site is a typical clan settle¬

ment. It covers an area of about 50,000 square metres and in¬ cludes three components: a residential section, a pottery-kiln quarter, and a common burial ground.

Cellars of various

1 Totems served as both the names and emblems of the clans. In general, names of animals, plants or inanimate objects were adopted. The function of the totem was to preserve the common pedigree of all clan members bearing its name, thereby serving to distinguish be¬ tween clans.

�42

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

shapes within the village were the clan’s common storehouses. The homes in the residential section are themselves arranged according to a pattern. There was one very large square build¬ ing, a place for public activities, while other medium- and small-sized buildings served as the clan members’ dwellings. A ditch, approximately five or six metres deep and wide, was dug around the residential section, and the clan’s common burial ground was to the north of the ditch, the kiln quarter to the east. This layout demonstrates that the clan members lived in equality, labouring and consuming in common, and the fact that they were buried together when they died shows that they all belonged to a single clan. Women enjoyed a high status in the clan. They played an important role in production and other activities. The custom of burying the females in the centre prevailed in some places: dozens of joint matriarchal clan graves have been discovered at Yuanjunmiao, Huaxian County, and Hengzhen Village, Huayin County, in Shaanxi Province. The bodies of the deceased, found in common pits, were all moved there to be buried to¬ gether; the number of bodies in each pit was uneven, and there were men and women, old and young. The removal and joint burial process was quite complex. When a person died, the corpse was probably first dealt with in an interim fashion, but when a woman of fairly high status in the matriarchal clan died, her body was immediately placed in one of these grave pits in a supine position. Then the remains of the predeceased of the same clan were brought, laid out together, and buried in the same grave. This burial custom, with the women at the centre, is one reflection of the important position women oc¬ cupied in the clans. But what is more, at the Banpo site and at the Jiangzhai site in Lintong County in Shaarixi, the buried objects accompanying the females generally outnumbered those of the males. This is further demonstration that the women’s social status was high. Collective labour and the public character of ownership of the means of production determined that the distribution of

�CHAPTER II

43

goods within the matriarchal commune was perforce one of common consumption by all members. The cellars for storing things at the Banpo and Jiangzhai sites are distributed closely together around the dwellings. In some spots there are more than ten clustered together in one place, forming a cellar com¬ plex. This may have been a form of collective storage. From the graves we can see that after death the majority of clan members were buried in a common burial ground according to a basically similar burial style, and that the great majority of burial objects were ornaments and pottery used in daily life. The maximum number of burial objects in any one of the sev¬ enty-one graves containing such objects at Banpo was ten, the minimum one, and the average 4.3. Although by that time, people’s livelihood had improved somewhat, it was still very difficult. According to the result of a survey of human bones at the Yuanjunmiao site, the peo¬ ple of the time were afflicted with bone-compression spurs be¬ cause of the excessively heavy burdens they had to bear. And because their food was coarse and they had to expend a lot of energy in chewing, their lower jaws were still more sturdy than those of modern man and their teeth show serious wear and tear. The remains in the various grave groups reveal that the life expectancy of the majority was only around thirty or forty years, and that there was a high rate of infant mortality. Precisely because the level of the productive forces was still very low, and the means of livelihood very limited, it was only possible for them to maintain such an arduous, poor life for members of the clan by living, producing and consuming in common.

The Patriarchal Clan Society of the Longshan Culture

Approximately 5,000 years ago, the tribes of the Huanghe River and Changjiang (Yangtze River) valleys gradually en¬ tered the era of the patriarchal clan commune. In general, the

�44

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

Longshan, Qijia, Qujialing, Qingliangang, Liangzhu and Dawenkou tribal cultural remains belong to this period.1 The Longshanoid tribes were widely distributed, from the seacoast in the east to the middle reaches of the Weishui River in the west, from the Bohai Gulf coastline of the Liaodong Peninsula in the north to the northern parts of Hubei, Anhui and Jiangsu in the south. The principal area was Henan, Shan¬ dong and Hebei, the southern part of Shanxi, and the Weishui River basin in Shaanxi. Taken as a whole, it was greater in extent than the Yangshao culture, and the regional differences were more pronounced. Tribes belonging to the Qijia culture lived on the upper reaches of the Huanghe River in the east¬ ern part of Gansu and the northeastern part of Qinghai. The stone implements and pottery from the late New Stone Age sites found in Tibet have an affinity to those of Qijia; the jade

bi (a piece of jade for ceremonial purposes) and jade beads of the New Stone Age cultural remains of the Wusuli River ba¬ sin in the Northeast are also similar to those of the Huanghe River basin. The Qujialing culture was distributed mainly in the Hanshui River basin in Hubei, while the Qingliangang cul¬ ture was scattered along the lower reaches of the Changjiang River, principally within what is now Jiangsu Province.

The

Liangzhu culture extended along the lower reaches of the Qiantang River and the area around Lake Taihu. The Dawenkou culture was scattered mainly throughout Shandong and the northern parts of Jiangsu and Anhui. Production reached new levels of development, especially in agriculture and animal husbandry, during the Longshanoid period. The rise in handicraft levels was marked by the intro¬ duction of the potter’s wheel and by the beginning of the metal¬ lurgical manufacture of copper. Two new agricultural tools 1 These cultures take their names from their places of first dis¬ covery: Longshan Township, Zhangqiu County, Shandong; Qijia Green, Guanghe County, Gansu; Qujialing, Jingshan County, Hubei; Qing¬ liangang, Huaian County, Jiangsu; Liangzhu, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang; and Dawenkou, Taian County, Shandong.

�CHAPTER II

45

appeared at this time: the wooden fork and the stone or clam¬ shell sickle. It was discovered that by using a stone or clam¬ shell sickle with handle attached, a change could be made from picking the ears of grain to harvesting it with the stems con¬ nected. This raised labour efficiency and made it possible to bring in fodder for the livestock. The development of Longshanoid agriculture is also reflected in the increase in the num¬ bers of reaping tools. At some sites in Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi, reaping tools in the form of stone knives have been found in numbers roughly equal to those of tools for clearing and planting, as represented by the stone axe and stone spade. In some places the reaping tools even outnumber the clearing and planting tools by two to four times. There was also an improvement in the stone knives, which became broader, long¬ er and sharper. By way of contrast, among the argicultural implements of the Yangshao culture, clearing and planting tools normally outnumbered reaping tools by a couple of times. The increase and improvement in the Longshanoid culture’s reaping tools indicate the better harvests in that period. The tribes of the Qujialing, Qingliangang and Liangzhu cultures living on the middle and lower reaches of the Changjiang opened up the grass-covered marshy regions, turned them into paddy fields, and planted rice. The numbers and variety of domesticated animals also in¬ creased in this period. Herds of pigs and dogs were raised everywhere, and there were cattle and goats as well as horses and chickens. The bones of livestock excavated from twentysix firepits of the Longshanoid culture at Miaodigou, Shanxian County, Henan, are more plentiful than those from 168 Yang¬ shao firepits; among them, pig bones are especially numerous. Bones from twenty-one pigs were excavated from a single firepit in Jiangou, Handan County, Hebei. More than one-third of a total of 133 graves excavated at Dawenkou yielded pig bones which had been interred with the corpses, the richest tomb in this respect yielding fourteen pig skulls. Of the domesticated animals, pigs have the advantage of reproducing quickly and

�46

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

of tolerating coarse food. The growth of pig raising provided a source of meat for man and made him less reliant on hunting. Livestock raising had already become a new means of liveli¬ hood and it gradually took on increasing importance in eco¬ nomic life. While participating in agricultural labour, the males also devoted themselves to animal husbandry and thus the acquisition of means of livelihood became a primarily male affair. The products from such pursuits accrued more to the males, while the women were confined to labouring chiefly within the household. It was precisely these herds that be¬ came the major private property of the patriarchal family. The hunting-fishing-gathering economy served as a supple¬ mentary means of livelihood and underwent development to varying degrees. Of the hunting implements discovered, the stone, bone and shell arrowheads are highly polished, but in specific areas we still find a few struck flint ones. People of the Liangzhu culture of Shuitianfan at Hangzhou and Qianshanyang in Wuxing, Zhejiang, were already using fishing boats to go out into open waters to fish on a relatively large scale. At the time under discussion, the potter’s wheel had al¬ ready been created. The clay was fashioned into containers by using the force of the rapidly spinning wheel. Pottery made this way was regular in shape and of even thickness, but a more important result was the sharp rise in productivity. The structure of the pottery kilns had also been perfected and peo¬ ple had mastered the technique of sealing them. High temper¬ atures and sealing caused the reduction of the ferrites in the fired blanks, giving rise to a grey-coloured pottery. The wheel-thrown pottery of the Shandong Longshanoid clans was particularly well-developed. Because the blanks were pol¬ ished, the kilns were tightly sealed, and the smoke^was inten¬ tionally allowed to colour it, the fired pottery was pitch-black, with a glossy surface. Black pottery could even be made which was thin as eggshell. And kaolin clay was used to fire a small number of tripod pitchers with a very white surface.

�CHAPTER II

47

The metallurgical industry was one of the outstanding pro¬ duction accomplishments of the patriarchal clan period. Copper tablets have been discovered at the Dacheng Mountain site near Tangshan in Hebei and such things have also been dis¬ covered in some quantity in several dwelling sites and grave of the Qijia culture which came a bit later than that of Longshan. Copper products — knives, awls, chisels and rings — and frag¬ ments of copper utensils have been found at Huangniangniangtai in Wuwei County in Gansu. Copper daggers, awls and rings have also been found at Qinweijia and Dahezhuang in Linxia County, Gansu. All these items were made of very pure cop¬ per; there were small amounts of impurities, but no tin or lead was added in the working process. Such copper was relatively soft and could be directly hammered into various kinds of tools and ornaments. Copper is malleable and can be shaped at will and even recast, and is thus much superior to stone. The dis¬ covery of copper marks a break with the several tens of thou¬ sands of years of stone tool technology of primitive Chinese society; it was a creative new technology which brought about a fresh rise in the productive forces. Making copper imple¬ ments involved a series of steps — mining, smelting, hammer¬ ing, pattern making and casting — which required much more complex production techniques than did the making of either stone implements or pottery. People came to specialize in this profession, furthering the division of handicraft labour. As those who turned out the copper utensils came to know the properties of metals, they also opened the road for subsequent metal manufacture. At the time of the patriarchal clan communes, people still lived under a primitive communal system with collective ownership and sharing, and the clans were still held together by blood ties. In the layout of the clan settlements, the dwell¬ ings and the cellars are still tightly interknit and there are com¬ mon graveyards close to the dwelling areas. The common bur¬ ial grounds of the clans are especially ordered and best reflect the characteristics of the clan system. The clan grave-

�48

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

site of the Longshanoid culture at Miaodigou is situated on the western edge of the site. Within an area of something over 1,100 square metres, 145 graves are laid out, aligned northsouth, the heads of the dead pointing invariably to the south. The public burial ground of the Qijia culture at Qinweijia has more than a hundred graves in six north-south rows and the heads of the dead all face northwest. Somewhat over twenty metres to the east is a smaller burial area with three east-west rows and twenty-nine graves, the heads of the deceased all facing west. These arrangements suggest that the different clans adhered strictly to their own traditional customs for bury¬ ing the dead and that .the members of the clans did not easily leave their own clans under normal circumstances. An important symbol of the patriarchal clan commune was the appearance in marriage relations of a more firm and en¬ during system of monogamy, with succession fixed through the male line. By that time they had adopted the formula of joint burial after death. There are quite a few joint graves of adult men and women at the Dawenkou cultural site and they are also found at the Longshanoid Hengzhencun site in Huayin County, Shaanxi.

In the joint graves of the Qijia culture at

Qinweijia, the males are invariably on the right-hand side, stretched out, their faces upward, while the females are always on the left, reclining on their sides facing the males, legs flexed. This burial style seems to show that the males were in the dominant position and the females in a position of submission and dependence. In the separate conjugal families, the diverse household chores had been transformed from the previous service to the commune to a kind of service to the individual — this marks them off completely from the matriarchal households. It has been discovered that in the graves of the Dawenkoq, culture at Dawenkou, Liulin and Dadunzi of Pixian in Jiangsu, all those whose heads are ornamented have spinning wheels, while those without ornaments have more production tools. In the graves of Majiayao culture discovered at Liuwan in Ledu County in

�CHAPTER II

49

Qinghai, the majority of the burial objects with the males are ground stone axes, adzes, knives and chisels, while the majority of those with the females are pottery or stone spinning wheels, and bone awls and needles. These things all give expression to the division of labour between males and females, the women being excluded from social production and hence losing their previous social status. What is more, pottery and stone sculp¬ tures symbolizing male ancestor worship have been found at the Longshanoid sites at Keshengzhuang in Xi’an and Quanhucun, Huaxian County in Shaanxi, and the Qijia culture site at Zhangjiazui, Linxia County in Gansu. This too is an important sign of the formation of the patriarchal clan. The patriarchal clan commune represented a transitional social stage between primitive communal and slave society. Private ownership, polarization between rich and poor, class division, and the possession of slaves all made their appear¬ ance in the patriarchal clan commune period. As we have not¬ ed, the most important item of private property at the time was the livestock herd. It was the fashion for tribes in various places to use pig palate bones as a yardstick for measuring wealth. The private wealth which people accumulated while alive went into their graves as burial objects after their death. About one-third of 133 Dawenkou culture graves have pig skulls in them, the maximum number being fourteen. In a few graves belonging to the Dawenkou culture at Gangshangcun, Tengxian County, and Yaoguanzhuang, Weifang City in Shan¬ dong, there were also unequal numbers of pig palate bones. Fourteen such bones were found in a grave belonging to the Longshanoid culture at Qinglongquan, Yuanxian County in Hubei, thirty-six pieces were placed in a grave belonging to the Qijia culture at Dahezhuang and sixty-eight pieces were discovered in a grave at Qinweijia. Pig bones in varying num¬ bers have also been found in graves in other places. This shows both that the pigs were owned personally by the grave occupant while alive and that the accumulation of personal property had already reached substantial proportions.

�50

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

The beginning of private ownership was accompanied by polarization between rich and poor. Some wealthy people used grain to brew alcohol. A set of wine containers such as tripod pitchers, kettles and long-stemmed cups discovered in a Dawenkou grave testifies to this situation. There is a clearer re¬ flection of this division between rich and poor and of the in¬ equality in property in the Dawenkou burial grounds. The burials of the wealthy were very extravagant and the pits very big — more than four metres long and three metres wide. The pits were lined with wood, wooden floors were laid to form outer coffins, and some of the coffin bases were daubed with red pigment. The wealthy had fifty or sixty burial objects — the richest more than 160 — including elegant painted, jetblack and pure white pottery, delicate production tools, and various kinds of ornaments made of polished stone and bone. Some graves also had ivory combs and containers with per¬ forated patterns carved in them. In contrast to the lavish burials of the wealthy, of the 133 graves already excavated at Dawenkou, eighty employ only common production tools and household utensils as burial objects, and eight have no burial objects at all. In graves of the same age and style ex¬ cavated at Liuwan, differences in size and great disparities in number of grave objects also appear. The differences in num¬ ber of grave objects, their presence or absence, are a record of the wealth possessed by the grave occupants during their life¬ times, a reflection of the division into poor and wealthy, and evidence that some people expropriated the fruits of others’ labour and made them their own. In the patriarchal clans, relations of bondage were taking root. At the Huangniangniangtai site, one joint adult grave was discovered, containing one male and two females. The male lay face upward in the middle with a female^pn either side; both females lay on their sides facing the male with limbs bent, the lower limbs behind them and their two hands in front of their faces. In graves belonging to the Qijia culture at Liuwan, some males lay in coffins, face upwards with their

�CHAPTER II

51

limbs straight, while young females lay on their sides outside the coffins, their limbs bent and facing towards the males. The women in these graves, whether their relations with the males were conjugal or not, were obviously in a subordinate position and seem to have been in the status of slaves. Oracle bones have been discovered in many of the Longshan and Qijia culture sites. They are the result of a method of divination which used fire to scorch the upper surface of pig, oxen or sheep scapulae to produce cracking patterns which were then used to determine good or bad fortune. The develop¬ ment of this kind of activity later led to the emergence of sorcerers who specialized in divination, becoming daily more divorced from physical labour. Their activities probably were not limited to making entreaties to nature, but may also gradu¬ ally have assumed the character of class oppression.

Myth and Legend

The Legends of Ancient Tribes

Tradition has it that in remote antiquity there were two famous tribes in the Huanghe River valley. One was Ji and had Huang Di (the Yellow Emperor) as its chief. The other, Jiang, was headed by Yan Di. Being closely related, they formed a tribal alliance. They lived at first in the Weihe (Wei River) area and later moved eastwards along the Huanghe Riv¬ er to areas belonging to today’s Shanxi, Henan and Hebei provinces. In old Chinese books there are many legends and stories about Huang Di. He is described as a god resourceful in inventions as well as war, and is credited with the invention of many things, such as carts and boats, clothes, houses, writ¬ ing, and silkworm breeding and silk weaving. Yao and Shun are two leaders who have been much praised in historical tradition and are supposed to be descendants of Huang Di. In Yao’s time disastrous floods occurred and he called together some tribal chiefs to discuss what should be done. Some suggested that a man called Gun be sent to deal with the flooding and Yao followed their advice. Later Shun succeeded to Yao’s position and also summoned some of the tribal chiefs to discuss how their tasks should be assigned to different people. Shun agreed with the recommendation and only functioned as the chairman of the meetin'g. Stories like this give us an idea of the primitive democracy at meetings of tribal alliances. Tribes originally occupying East China were called Yi. They were first active in southern Shandong and later expanded 52

�CHAPTER

III

53

north to northern Shandong and southern Hebei, west to east¬ ern Henan, south to central Anhui, and east to the sea coast. They were famous for their workmanship in bows and arrows and the written character Yi (3ft) was originally a picture of a man (A) carrying a bow ). Taihao, Shaohao and Chiyou were renowned leaders among the Yi people. Chiyou once en¬ gaged in a long and fierce battle against Huang Di on the out¬ skirts of Zhuolu, which according to tradition was in present Hebei. Chiyou was very resourceful and could summon wind and rain. But Huang Di outdid him by sending goddesses to disperse the wind and rain and finally Chiyou was defeated. After he died, Chiyou ascended to Heaven, and became a con¬ stellation known as “the Banner of Chiyou”. Both Huang Di and Chiyou were worshipped later as gods of war. Another chief of the Yi people, according to legend, was the celebrated archer Yi. In his days, there were ten suns in the sky, which burned all the crops, so that the people had nothing to eat. There were also many evil demons harming mankind. The archer Yi shot down nine suns, leaving only one in the sky, and killed all the demons. Because of his great ex¬ ploits he became revered as a god. Along the Changjiang River valley down south, in modern Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces the Miao and other tribes once lived. Among the leaders of these tribes, Fuxi and Niiwa were the best known.

Fuxi was said to be the first man who

used ropes to make nets for hunting and fishing. In the days of Niiwa, the four pillars supporting heaven collapsed and the earth cracked. So flames spread wildly, torrential waters flood¬ ed all the land, while fierce birds and beasts preyed on men. Niiwa smelted rocks to make five-coloured stones with which she patched up heaven. To replace the broken pillars she cut off the four legs of a huge turtle and used them to prop up the fallen sky. With water and land restored to order and the fierce animals killed, the people could once again live in peace and happiness. Niiwa in return was regarded as a goddess for her great achievements.

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

54

The tribes mentioned earlier, namely, the Huang Di, Yan Di and Yi tribes, can be regarded as three tribal groups. Though it is difficult to separate legend and reality, we know for certain that they once did exist and had an influence on later historical development.

Tribal Chiefs, Gods and Their Sons

According to myth and tradition, chiefs made important contributions to their tribes, especially in flood control, farm¬ ing and animal husbandry. They were regarded as gods, the sons of gods or both. There was once a tribe called Jintian living in areas belong¬ ing to modern Shanxi. Both its chief, Mei, and his son Taitai, were skilful in water control work. Taitai dredged the Fenshui (Fen River) and constructed the storage lake of Daze so the people in the Taiyuan area could live a stable life. And Taitai became the god of Fenshui, enjoying sacrifices offered by the four states established by his descendants. Xiu and Xi, chiefs of the Shaohao tribe in Shandong, were likewise known for being good at flood control. Their work was carried on by their sons and grandsons while they themselves became water gods.

Gonggong in northern Henan was another tribe known

for its success in water control work.

The people of the tribe

invented the method of building dikes to prevent floods.

Due

to overdependence on the dikes, however, they suffered severe losses when their dikes eventually failed them. Nevertheless their chief, Houtu, was respected as a god of the soil. Later, when helping Yu the Great with water control work, the Gong¬ gong tribe adopted his method too with very good results. The above stories illustrate the fact that water conservation was of great importance in the lives of people in primitive- societies. When the chiefs brought relief to the sufferings of the people, they were deified. However, their achievements were limited by a tribal nature, and it was only Yao’s and Shun’s contem-

�CHAPTER

III

55

porary, Yu the Great, who made contributions in water works construction that affected a larger number of tribal groups. Yu was conceived by some mysterious force. According to one legend, Yu’s mother was called Xiuji, and bore her son after swallowing the Yiyi plant (Job’s-tears). According to an¬ other legend, Yu emerged into the world from the body of the above-mentioned Gun, who had been dead for three years, when his body, which had not decayed, was cut open. Both accounts agree in making the birth of Yu the Great a miracle. Yu was entrusted by Shun with the task of conquering floods in cooperation with fraternal tribes. Having learned from previous failures, Yu studied the characteristics of flow¬ ing water, the direction of its flow and the topography, and adopted the method of dredging the waterways.

Canals were

dug to direct flood water into proper water courses.

Further¬

more, he led people in digging irrigation canals which were beneficial to farm production. Thanks to all these efforts, peo¬ ple could settle down peacefully on the plains without the con¬ stant threat of floods. Yu was so devoted to his work that he did not visit his home for thirteen years, although he travelled nearby three times. He worked tirelessly, regardless of wind and rain, until his hands and feet were severely calloused. In order to open some water courses, he summoned a divine winged dragon.

Once,

while cutting through a mountain, he even turned himself into a bear so as to complete a task beyond man’s ability.

His

celebrated contributions won him the respect of the people who honoured him as “Yu the Great” and god of the soil. Stories about Yu’s exploits in water conservation spread far and wide beyond the boundaries of individual tribes. Shennong was one of those tribes that were good at farm¬ ing and it had a gifted man as its chief. Not only did he invent tools for turning over the soil and teach his men how to farm, but he also discovered many medicinal herbs by personal ex¬ perimentation. Zhu, chief of the Lieshan tribe, became god of

�56

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

agriculture because of his miraculous talent in growing grain crops and vegetables. Above all, Qi, chief of the Zhou tribe, was famous for his achievements in farming and was often compared to Yu the Great in fame. Qi was a son of god and a god himself. Once when walking in the wilderness, his mother, Jiang Yuan, step¬ ped onto a huge footprint of a giant and her body was jolted. She had become pregnant and later bore a son. At first she dared not keep the child so she abandoned him in small lanes, in the woods, and on frozen waterways. But to her great surprise, the child always remained protected and did not die. So she took it back and named it “Qi”, meaning “abandoned”. The child proved to be very handy in farm work when he was still very small. The beans, millet, hemp, wheat, melons and fruit he cultivated all grew well, and the crops he helped others grow were so heavy they bent. He was also good at discover¬ ing better varieties of plants and ways of processing grain. The food he made was so good it even pleased the Lord on High. Later he became god of agriculture under the name of Houji, Lord of Agriculture. Houji lived at the same time as Yu the Great and helped in the water control work together with Xie, Gaoyao, Boyi and Dafei. Gaoyao and Boyi were both from the Yi people in the east. Boyi invented the sinking of wells. Xie’s mother, Jiandi, was once standing on a high platform when she saw a swallow fly by. She swallowed an egg it had laid and later gave birth to Xie. Dafei, about whose birth a similar story is told, was an expert in animal husbandry and the animals under his care were very obedient. Shun married a woman from his clan to Dafei and said to him that his descendants would surely be promising. As it happened, descendants of Yu, Xie and Houji founded the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties respectively, while Dafei became the ancestor of the foundef'-mf the Qin Dynasty. That the tribal chiefs were said to be sons of gods actually reflects the fact that in a society of matriarchal clans people

�CHAPTER

III

57

knew only who their mothers were but not their fathers. An¬ other reason for men becoming gods was that they had dis¬ tinguished themselves by performing the most important social function in a primitive society with a low productivity, namely, the organization of work in water conservation, farm¬ ing and animal husbandry. Despite repeated changes made according to each story-teller’s imagination, these myths to some extent reflect the historical reality of primitive society. As historical conditions changed, so did the role played by the tribal chief.

He became less a public servant than a kind

of power above society. History entered a new stage as class¬ less primitive society changed into civilized society with its class distinctions.

The Hereditary Monarchy of the Xia Dynasty

The Xia Dynasty is traditionally supposed to have begun with the reign of Yu the Great and ended with the fall of Jie, lasting for more than 400 years, from approximately the 21st century B.C. or a little earlier to the 16th century B.C. There were altogether seventeen kings in fourteen generations. Ac¬ cording to an ancient version of history, however, it was not Yu, but his son Qi, who founded the dynasty. The Xia people lived on loess plains formed by alluvial deposits suitable for primitive farming. Their territory extend¬ ed from western Henan and southern Shanxi eastwards along the Yellow River to the point where the borders of modern Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces meet and extended south to Hunan and north to Hebei next to the territory of other tribes living there. Since flooding had already been brought under control and people could settle down, we may suppose that animal husbandry and agriculture underwent further de¬ velopment. Development of animal husbandry and agriculture required more knowledge of astronomy and a better calendar to mark

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

58

seasonal changes. After carefully observing the movements of the sun, the moon and the stars, Yao is said to have worked out a calendar dividing a year into spring, summer, autumn and winter to coincide with the seasons of stockbreeding and farming. What was used in Yao’s time was a lunar calendar with the months determined by the phases of the moon.

Since

a year of twelve lunar months is shorter than the solar year, an intercalary month was inserted in certain years.

At the

time of Yao and Shun the solar year was thought to have 366 days which, of course, was not quite correct. It is not known whether the calendar of the Xia Dynasty represented an im¬ provement upon that of Yao but the so-called Xia calendar was much praised by people of later generations. Bronze vessels came into use at the time of the Xia. There was little opportunity to use bronze directly in farming but it could have been useful in the making of farm tools.

Some

tribes are said to have presented bronze to the Xia as tribute, Yu is supposed to have cast bronze tripods, and the Xia used bronze to make weapons. The Xia was an alliance formed by over a dozen closely related tribes of'which the Xiahou tribe was the leading one. Included in the alliance were also some more distantly related tribes and some of the Yi tribes in the east.

According to his¬

torical tradition, the leadership of the alliance originally alter¬ nated between the Yi and the Xia. Due to Yu’s great achieve¬ ments in water control and his victories over the Sanmiao tribes, his personal prestige increased so much that the chief of the clan wielded ever greater authority over the other clan members.

As Yu was getting old, the renowned chief Gaoyao

of the Eastern Yi was elected to succeed him. But Gaoyao un¬ expectedly died before Yu, so Boyi of the Eastern yi tribes was chosen to replace him. After Yu’s death, the Xia tribes, rely¬ ing on their great strength and Yu’s prestige, promoted Yu’s son Qi to the position of king. They asked Qi to grant them audiences and mediate in disputes, and praised him to the sky.

�CHAPTER

III

59

As a result the principle of electing leaders was violated and a new hereditary system came into being. In ancient times this was considered to be the beginning of a system whereby the ruler “takes all under Heaven as his family possession”. The founding of the Xia Dynasty is regarded as a major turning point in history. One tribe named Youhu criticized Qi for having violated the old system. But Youhu was defeated by Xia in a battle at Gan in modern Huxian in Shaanxi.

The defeated survivors

were made into “mushu”, which may be a term for prisoners of war who became slaves collectively owned by the victorious tribe. After attaining kingship, Qi turned out to be fond of drink¬ ing, hunting, singing and dancing.

Qi’s successor, Taikang,

cared nothing for state affairs but rather spent months on end hunting on the northern bank of the Luo River.

This be¬

haviour aroused strong resentment among the people. Houyi, known as a good archer from the Youqiong clan of the Eastern Yi, took the opportunity to attack Xia and made himself king. But the throne was again seized by Houyi’s trusted follower Hanzhuo who bribed Houyi’s family servants to kill him. Taikang, the overthrown ruler, had fled and died in exile, leaving as his heir his younger brother Zhongkang.

-Zhong-

kang’s son Xiang was attacked and killed by Hanzhuo while taking refuge with the Zhenguan and Zhenxun clans.

But

Xiang’s wife, already pregnant, climbed through a hole in the wall and escaped to her mother’s family of the Youreng tribe where she later bore her son Shaokang.

When the son grew

up, he was put in charge of stockbreeding in the clan, but being pursued again by Hanzhuo, he escaped to the Youyu clan which was descended from Shun. There he was made respon¬ sible for food preparation and the tribal chief Yusi married two daughters to him. Shaokang gathered together some other closely related tribes, defeated Hanzhou, and restored the Xia Dynasty.

�60

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

In order to counter the good marksmanship of the Yi peo¬ ple, Shaokang’s son Shu invented coats of mail which played an important role in the defeat of Hanzhuo. After he came to the throne, Shu went on a punitive expedition against the Eastern Yi and drove them back to the sea coast. Because of his great exploits, Shu was regarded by the Xia people as the only worthy heir of Yu, and they made magnificent sacrifices to him after his death. The Yi tribes were one by one brought under Xia’s control, and Yi chiefs even accepted noble titles and became officials of the Xia court offering tribute. After many long years of struggle, Xia’s ruling position was eventu¬ ally recognized by the other tribes, and the new hereditary monarchy had in effect replaced the traditional system of elec¬ tion. The establishment of hereditary monarchy eliminated the function of the tribe as an organization representing the will of its members and taking care of its own affairs. What was emerging instead was a state apparatus in which one class ruled over another. The Xia Dynasty by then had not only erected city walls with moats, but also established its own army, penal code and prisons.

The tribes conquered by Xia or forced to

recognize its position were made to pay tribute which usually consisted of local products. But some defeated tribes were forced to offer their sons and daughters as tribute. Towards the end of the Xia Dynasty, social conflict grew sharper. Tradition has it that in the 16th century B.C., the last ruler of Xia, Jie, abused his power.and increased oppression. He exhausted the resources of the people to build palaces and pavilions for himself. The people were also forced to go to war frequently to exact children, as well as jade and silk, from neighbouring tribes. Filled with hatred for J^ie, the people could no longer put up with his despotic rule and fled in large numbers. Even his court officials cursed him and wished his death, although that might mean that they themselves would perish. Jie, however, still thinking of restoring and strength¬ ening his control over other tribes, gathered all the tribal

�CHAPTER

III

61

chiefs together for a punitive expedition against the Youmin clan. But this made the existing conflicts more acute and alienated the tribes further. Shang Tang took this opportunity to revolt and overthrew the Xia Dynasty.

The Slave State of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties

The Earliest Written History

The Shang and Zhou dynasties were the earliest to have a written history. The Shang (c. 16th-llth century B.C.) lasted over 600 years, with 31 kings belonging to 17 generations. The early Zhou Dynasty is known as Western Zhou because the capital was located in the west. This period (c. mid-llth cen¬ tury to 771 B.C.) lasted more than 290 years, with 12 kings belonging to 11 generations. It was during these 900 years that historical records became consciously and systematically written instead of being spon¬ taneous and fragmentary. This was made possible by the emer¬ gence of two essential conditions, a written script and a cal¬ endar, during the Shang Dynasty. The Shang nobles were superstitious and believed that everything in the world was controlled by gods. They often sought the divine will through oracles and used a method of divination by which a spot on a tortoise shell or an animal bone was heated until it cracked and the oracle was then inter¬ preted on the basis of the pattern of the cracks. This method has been called scapulimancy, since the scapulae or shoulder blades of cattle were often used. In many cases the question and the answer and sometimes the subsequent events were written on the bone or shell and these records ar^'known as oracle-bone inscriptions. Oracle-bone inscriptions were first discovered in Xiaotun Village, in the northwest of Anyang County in Henan. People 62

�CHAPTER

IV

63

began to collect and identify them in 1899, and there have since been more discoveries. According to preliminary research, these inscriptions contain about 4,500 characters, of which some 1,700 have been deciphered. The written characters were already formed in four different ways; there were pictographs, ideographs, associative compounds and phonetic compounds. A method of “borrowing” was used, that is, a synonym or homonym was adopted to express a different thing. For exam¬ ple, the character lai which gave the image of wheat, was borrowed for a homophonous word meaning “to come”; feng M, meaning phoenix, was borrowed to write the word feng meaning wind (now written Jxl). Compared with later Han characters, the oracle-bone script was more detailed in making distinctions between animals of different species and sexes. For instance, the character yu meaning “to drive a chariot”, would take the radical ma 3r (horse) or xiang (elephant), depending on which animal was used. Again, the character mu ft (herding) would take the radical ft tizu (cat¬ tle) or ft yang (sheep), depending on whether the herd was cattle or sheep. The characters 3; ma (horse), ft yang (sheep), ^ shi (pig), quan (dog) and jfg lu (deer) might have addi¬ tional marks to indicate whether the animal was male or female. The characters ft pin and fi mu, which at first meant male and female cattle, were later applied to the males and females of all animals. Some of the oracle-bone characters did not have a fixed form, such as that for the character fi, gui (tortoise). The character sometimes depicted the figure of a turtle from the front and sometimes from the side, with or without a tail. In general, however, the oracle-bone script is the foundation of later Han characters. Judging from the forms of the oracle-bone characters and the grammar of the inscriptions, they must have gone through a rather long period of development, but the origin of this script remains to be ascertained. The number of characters on any given piece of oracle bone could range from a handful to over a hundred. The actual con-

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

64

tent of the oracles was related to various activities of the ruling house, indicating the circumstances at the time. As divinations of good or evil, the oracle-bone inscriptions are the earliest historical records known to us and are invaluable in a study of the Shang Dynasty. From these inscriptions we know that the Shang used a lunar calendar which was combined with the

solar

year

through the addition of an intercalary month, once in a few years, to make up the difference between a year of twelve lunar months and a solar year. The number of days in a month was fixed at 30 for a long month and 29 for a short one.

The

intercalary month was at first added at the end of the year as a 13th month, but later inserted in the middle of the year. Years and months were recorded by numerals in oracle-bone inscriptions.

Ten characters known as “heavenly stems” and

twelve others known as “earthly branches” were used to name the days in a cycle of sixty days. The stems are jia Ep, yi Z3, bing H, ding T> wu jj£, ji £, geng J^, xin 5^, and the branches are zi

ren {£, gui

chou 31, yin If, mao tip, chen

jg, si E, wu wei shen Ep, you Hf> xu jg,, hai -%■ Calendar-making has since gone through many changes and the calculations have become increasingly exact, but the lunar calendar bound to the solar year, and the 60-day cycles con¬ tinued in use for over 3,000 years. The use of a calendar was of great significance to the de¬ velopment of historical records.

Most of the oracle-bone in¬

scriptions only recorded the day and not the year or month. Some recorded all three, but with the day preceding the recorded event, followed by the month and then the year. A record of the year alone, however, did not indicate which king’s reign it referred to. Such information has to besought by other means. In other words, while records of some form did exist, they were incomplete. Only through a study of both written sources and archaeological finds are we able to obtain more comprehensive information on the Shang Dynasty.

�CHAPTER

IV

65

The engravings on Shang bronzes are an important form of documentation. A vessel may have one or a few characters, while some late Shang bronzes are inscribed with as many as 45 characters. These inscriptions are generally called jin wen (writings on bronzes) or zhong ding wen (writings on bells and tripods). Up till now, not very many of such inscriptions have been found, but they are a primary source of historical ma¬ terial for the Shang period. Oracle-bone inscriptions of the Zhou Dynasty have been discovered in recent years. The characters are so small that they can only be read with a magnifier. The content of these inscriptions are still under study, but there is a clear increase in writing on bronze vessels from the Zhou period, not only in the number of pieces but in the length of the inscriptions. For example, ling yi, an inscription dating from the early Zhou, has 187 characters; Mao gong ding of the late Zhou has 499 characters. A large number of the bronze inscriptions from the Zhou Dynasty had 100-300 characters each, and show a wider vocabulary than the oracle-bone inscriptions. Most of the Zhou Dynasty bronze inscriptions are written in praise of great achievements or to celebrate grants and re¬ wards. Detailed descriptions are often given on military ex¬ peditions, the capture of war prisoners, and grants of servants and slaves, land, chariots, horses, banners, dresses, ceremonial vessels, and gold and shell articles. Some famous inscriptions contain data about the scale of warfare and number of ser¬ vants bestowed; others record the circumstances concerning grants of land and enfeoffment. The Zhou inscriptions frequently end with the words: “For eternal preservation by our descendants.” This is clearly an expression of hope for the handing down of the inscribed bronzes from generation to generation, and of the fact that the inscriptions were written in a way to suit such a purpose. In other words, they were deliberately written as historical rec¬ ords and, in this sense, represent an advance over the oraclebone texts. Some of the bronzes do not record the time, but

�66

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

there are more bronzes than oracle bones which give years and dates. Unlike the oracle bones, the bronzes indicate the time by using the month-day-year or year-month-day sequence, the latter subsequently becoming the common practice in Chinese historical records. There were also some Shang and Zhou historical records written on bamboo slips or silk. The main part of what has been preserved is contained in the Book of History (Shang Shu) and the Book of Odes (Shijing). The Book of History is a col¬ lection of political documents from the Shang, the Western Zhou and the Spring and Autumn periods. The Book of Odes dates from the Western Zhou and the Spring and Autumn periods. These two works had a far-reaching influence on the philosophy, political ideas and literature of later times. From the point of view of historical value, the Book of History has about twenty papers on Shang and Zhou history that are com¬ paratively reliable and more or less contemporaneous with the historical events they covered. These include accounts of his¬ torical figures, speeches and events. The way in which the material is presented shows a further step forward in making conscious historical records as compared to the bronze inscrip¬ tions. The Book of Odes contains 74 “Lesser Odes”, 31 “Great¬ er Odes” and 31 “Sacrificial Odes of Zhou”. Most of these odes deal with events, and some with offerings to gods, and they were written mainly during the Zhou Dynasty. The book also includes 160 “Lessons from the States”, 4 “Praise-odes of Lu” and 5 “Sacrificial Odes of Shang”, most of which were works of later times. The odes throw light on the historical conditions and are highly valuable for an understanding of history. It can be seen that the various sources for Sfyang and early Zhou history, whether the oracle-bone inscriptions^bronze in¬ scriptions or the Book of History and Book of Odes, all devel¬ oped independently of each other and do not give a complete year by year record of these periods. The situation started to change towards the end of the Western Zhou.

From 841 B.C.,

�CHAPTER

IV

67

the Zhou royal house began to keep annals, and some vassal states did the same about this time. Henceforth China had his¬ torical records for each year. Thus the year 841 B.C. marked the beginning of conscious, systematic records. Although historical records of the Shang and Western Zhou are still rather inadequate to help us understand the history of this period, they nevertheless free us from dependence on legends.

The Slave-Owning Shang Dynasty

According to legend the Shang Dynasty traced its origin to an ancient tribe on the lower reaches of the Huanghe River. As stated in the previous chapter, the founder of the Shang Dynasty, Xie, had assisted Yu in harnessing rivers. The leg¬ endary accounts tell us that Xie was also an official in charge of education during the reign of Shun.

This may be attribu¬

table to the fact that the Shang tribe had a relatively high cultural level. The Shang moved its centre of activities five times under the three kings from Xie to Xiang Tu, and three times after Xiang Tu, during the eleven generations from Chang Ruo to Tang. These moves occurred mainly along the Huanghe River in present-day Shandong and Henan provinces. Shang rule became powerful under Xiang Tu, its influence extending eastward to Mount Tai and north to the coast of Bohai Sea. It grew still stronger under Tang, who was also called Tai Yi. State organization already existed under Tang. He had two men, Yi Yin and Zhong Hui, as his ministers, both known as capable officials. At that times Jie, the ruler of the Xia Dynasty, was opposed by the people. From Bo, a place south of present-day Caoxian in Shandong, Tang launched at¬ tacks against Xia rule. He first conquered a dozen nearby tribes and small states and then started an expedition against

�68

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

the Xia king, Jie. He issued a proclamation denouncing Jie for his misrule and the harm he had done to the people’s pro¬ ductive pursuits. He said that the house of Xia had committed such crimes that the Lord on High had commanded him to destroy it, and since he feared the Lord on High, he dared not disobey. Tang also told people that they would be richly rewarded if they followed him and succeeded in their god-giv¬ en task. If they did not follow him, he would enslave them or kill them and they should not expect to be able to save them¬ selves. Tang’s words show that the soldiers were free men and not slaves but that Tang himself behaved in the manner of a slave-owner. Jie was defeated in a battle fought at Mingtiao (present-day Fengqiu in Henan) and fled to Nanchao (presentday Chaoxian in Anhui), where he died. The Xia Dynasty was overthrown, and the Shang Dynasty established, with presentday Shangqiu city in Henan Province as the centre of its activities. The state power of the Shang Dynasty was exercised by the king and the slave-owning nobility. The king was assisted by ministers and vice-ministers.

Other officials with religious

functions were the shamans, the recorders and the diviners. Actually the ministers were also religious officials.

Others

took charge of military affairs, production, etc. The numerous official posts were mostly hereditary for members of noble families. The dynasty had a large and powerful army. Oracle-bone inscriptions state that “the king has set up three army units, right, centre and left.” The core of the army consisted of members of the nobility, while the soldiers were mainly com¬ moners. A number of slaves were pressed into the service as foot-soldiers or for the performance of miscellaneous duties. Sometimes a clan constituted a unit of the army. The oracles record orders for “three clans”, “five clans” or “a clan with many sons” to go to battle. The army was armed with bronze weapons, the commonly used ones being axe, battle-axe, lance, spear, sword, javelin, helmet, bronze battle-axe with iron edge

�CHAPTER IV

69

and leather shield. Tn late Shang chariots became the principal combat force. Each chariot was drawn by two horses and carried three soldiers clad in armour — one driving, one holding a lance or spear, and the third carrying bow and ar¬ rows; alongside the chariots marched foot-soldiers. The number of soldiers in war usually varied from three to five thousand, and could reach thirty thousand. Prisons were set up and punishments were instituted for more than ten different crimes. The Shang kings claimed that their first ancestor was the son of the Lord on High on whose command the dynasty had been founded. Thus a central element in Shang religion was the identification of the earliest royal ancestor with the su¬ preme god. The Shang kings were bom to become masters of the people and became gods after death. While they lived they ruled over the living, and after they died they ruled over the dead. In remote antiquity, the tribal heads who had worked for the good of the people and made contributions to their common cause were venerated as gods. The Shang still regard¬ ed their chiefs as gods, but these were gods who stood above the people and ruled them as kings and so were no longer the servants of the people. The Shang possessed a complete set of instruments of violence and weapons of spiritual control as well as a welldeveloped written language. It was already a slave-owning state of considerable scale but retained a great many customs of primitive society. Special sacrifices were offered to a per¬ son’s deceased mother and the heavenly stems were used for the titles of deceased grandmothers. This shows the great respect the Shang people paid to matriarchal authority. After the death of Tang, as his eldest son Tai Ding had died young, he was succeeded by Tai Ding’s younger brother Wai Bing who was in turn succeeded by another brother, Zhong Ren. A few years later, Tai Ding’s son Tai Jia became the fourth king of Shang. He refused to take the advice of Yi Yin, the prime minister, who then dethroned him, but

�70

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

restored him when he changed for the better a few years later. Another story says that Tai Jia was at first put under house arrest by Yi Yin. He escaped, killed Yi Yin and seized the throne. This restoration marked the beginning of a period of stability under six kings from Tai Jia to Tai Wu. After Zhong Ding succeeded Tai Wu, struggles for the throne occurred many times, and the internal contradictions of the nobility intensified. Misery spread wide among the people, and the dynasty declined. Small states that had submitted to the Shang now renounced their allegiance. Con¬ ditions improved somewhat under the rule of King Zu Yi, the fourth successor of Zhong Ding. Oracle-bone inscriptions show that sacrifices were offered to three kings together — Tai Yi, Tai Jia and Zu Yi, the last posthumously given the title of Zhong Zong. To honour them, 300 heads of cattle and sheep were used in the sacrifices. However, struggles for the throne continued in the whole period from Zhong Ding to Yang Jia. During the reign of King Pan Geng, the Shang removed its capital to Yin (modern Anyang in Henan), laying a new foun¬ dation for Shang rule which from then on was also called the Yin Dynasty (or Yin-Shang). One of the next kings, Wu Ding, is supposed to have spent his early years among the common people and was therefore familiar with their difficulties in making a living. After becoming king he appointed Gan Pan and Fu Yue as ministers and made great efforts to consolidate his rule. Wu Ding also launched many military expeditions against the surroYmding tribes and states. These campaigns centred on present Shanxi, northern Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia. The Tu Fang tribe and another nomadic tribe north of the Hetao (the Yellow River Bend) had joined forces to attack the Shang. For each campaign Wu Ding conscripted three to fiye thousand men. The more powerful nomadic tribe Gui Fang, which lived in present Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia and further north, resisted the forces of Wu Ding for three years before they were con¬ quered. In the northwest there was also the Qiang Fang tribe

�CHAPTER

IV

71

against which Wu Ding once employed 13,000 men. In the south he also attacked the Jing Chu people and extended his influence to the Changjiang basin. His reign lasted 59 years and he received the posthumous title of Gao Zong. Wu Ding was succeeded by Zu Geng and then by Zu Jia. The rulers after Zu Jia were mostly pleasure-seeking and paid little attention to state affairs while social contradictions deepened. The last two kings were Di Yi and Di Xin. Di Yi launched many expeditions against the Yi (Eastern Yi) tribes between the Changjiang and Huai rivers and was victorious. He moved the capital to Zhaoge, present-day Qixian in Henan. Di Xin or Zhou is known in history as an infamous tyrant. He devised many cruel laws and means of torture, oppressing and exploiting the slaves and common people. Building luxurious palaces and gardens, he led a life of debauchery with com¬ panions from the nobility. By tradition, the old nobles held power in Shang. But by the end of the dynasty, particularly under King Zhou, the centralized autocracy had the effect of setting aside the “elders” and only favouring those congenial to the king. This aggravated the contradictions among the nobility and caused internal dissension. Zhou also spent nearly a year personally leading a war against the Yi. Although he won a victory after one year’s bitter fighting, he exhausted much of the resources of his realm and increased the burdens of the people. The intensification of class contradictions brought about great confusion. Taking advantage of the op¬ portunity, King Wu of the Zhou Dynasty launched an attack and overthrow the Shang Dynasty.

The Social Economy of the Shang Dynasty

Animal husbandry had a long history already in Shang times. In the late Shang period, the number of cattle and sheep used in a single sacrifice might be 300-400, sometimes up to a thousand. The oracle-bone inscriptions many times mention hunting, e.g., in one hunting trip 384 deer were

�72

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

captured, and hunting was common for quite a long period. The inscriptions also record the kind and sexes of the animals, showing the developed state of animal husbandry. Agriculture was the principal part of production with many kinds of crops. In the ruins of the Shang capital at Zhengzhou in Henan, remains of rice have been found. In the oracle-bone inscriptions we find the names of the main cereals and some other plants, e.g., he 7^, meaning growing grain; shu HI, sticky millet; su M, rice or millet in husk; mai wheat; ji W., millet; mi yft, rice; sang mulberry; and ma$$, hemp. In the ruins of Yin at Anyang have been discovered cellars for storing grain. Some of the walls and floors of these cellars had been plastered with a mixture of mud and straw. The character ling JJl in the oracle-bone inscriptions, which means granary, applied to such cellars. Different kinds of wine were brewed — sweet wine was made of rice and fragrant wine was made of black millet. The many wine vessels found in the Yin ruins show that drinking wine was common among the nobility. Wine making and drinking were a result of the advances in agriculture. Iron had been discovered and was already in use. Ironblade bronze battle-axes of the Shang have been unearthed recently but not yet iron farm implements. Tools were mainly made of wood or stone, such as wooden spades to dig earth, stone hoes for weeding grass and stone sickles for harvesting. Hundreds of sickles have been found near the royal palace among the Yin ruins, mostly showing signs of having been used. The handicraft tools included axe, adze, knife, saw, chisel, drill, awl, needle, shovel, etc. — all made of bronze. Bronze metallurgy was the most highly developed among the handicrafts. Remains of bronze foundries upder the direct control of the royal house have been discovered at Zhengzhou, Anyang and other places. The raw material consisted of mala¬ chite (copper oxide ore), tin and lead, and charcoal was used for fuel. Pottery moulds were first made, into which molten bronze was poured. The mould was removed after the liquid

�CHAPTER

IV

73

had cooled off and solidified. The bronze was then decorated by carving to make it more attractive. The famous large rec¬ tangular cauldron si mu wu ding can be taken as a representa¬ tive of the advanced bronze metallurgy of the late Shang. The height is 133 cm to the top of the handles, the opening 110 X 78 cm, and the weight 875 kgs. The furnace used for smelting bronze was made of red pottery with a thick inside wall and could stand high temperature without breaking. Usually it could only take 12.5 kgs of molten bronze. To make the above-mentioned, large cauldron, 70-80 furnaces were re¬ quired. A couple of hundred skilled craftsmen performing different tasks were needed, not including those making the mould and handling transport. Chemical analysis has shown the tripod to contain 84.77 per cent of copper, 11.64 per cent of tin and 2.79 per cent of lead. Separate moulds were made for the ears, the body and the legs, each requiring from two to eight pieces. Besides the common gray, black and red pottery, there were white and hard pottery and primitive porcelain made of por¬ celain clay fired in a kiln. These were highly heated, so that they became hard and did not easily absorb water.

The white

pottery has a clear pure colour with fine texture and beautiful decorations. The surface has a thin, blue or yellowish green glaze, the body is greyish white, the structure is solid, and the vessels emit a metallic sound when struck. Experimental analysis has shown that the temperature of firing was about 1,200 ± 30° C. The vessels were still quite rough, but may be said to be primitive porcelain. The Shang people already had linen and silk textiles. On the bronzes traces of silk fabrics have been found — rough silk with plain design and damask with lozenge design. Cowrie shells and a small number of copper shells have been unearthed from Shang ruins. The oracle-bone inscrip¬ tions record the acquisition and bestowal of shells. The shell was at first used as an ornament. It began to be used as money with the growth of exchange. Documents of the

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

74

early period of the Zhou Dynasty mention traders driving ox¬ carts carrying goods to distant places. At Zhengzhou and An¬ yang, hard pottery with impressed design, sea shells, clam shells, whale and tortoise scapulae (used for divination) have been found to have come from far away. The development of production was closely connected with the advance of scientific knowledge.

Astronomy was needed

to determine the seasons for farming and animal husbandry. And mathematics and mechanics helped water conservancy planning and design and construction in the cities. The oraclebone inscriptions have records of solar and lunar eclipses and of some constellations and newly discovered stars. The Shang calendar shows the important results of astronomy and mathe¬ matics of that time.

Numerals from one to ten thousand with

a decimal system were used. Tradition says that Xie, the founder of the Shang royal lineage, worked together with Yu in harnessing the rivers and that Ming,

Tang’s ancestor eight generations

drowned while doing the same work.

before,

was

In its early period the

Shang people had inhabited the lower reaches of the Huanghe River and had much to do with water control. There must have been many records concerning this, but now they are no longer available. The Shang capital cities were built according to a plan that determined the arrangement of palaces, temples and various workshops.

The characteristic of Chinese architecture based

on wooden structures had already taken shape.

The founda¬

tions of the palaces and temples of Yin ruins were generally of pounded earth, one of them as large as 46.7 by 10.7 metres. The remains of the stone or bronze bases of the rows of columns allow us to see the complicated structure of the palaces with heavy gates and compound rooms. These building foundations, with a north-south or east-west direction, formed groups of mutually compatible structures. Their style and technique exercised a far-reaching influence on the architecture of later ages, and the knowledge of applied mechanics was already fairly advanced. In the relations of production, the Shang Dynasty had entered slave society.

The slaves were engaged in farming,

domestication of animals and primitive handicrafts, or did household work for slave-owners. The oracle-bone inscriptions record using war prisoners for farming and animal husbandry. There is not much historical material on the actual conditions under the slave system. In the oracle-bone inscriptions the character ^ zhong, (meaning many people), resembles a picture of three men under the sun and has commonly been interpreted as slaves labouring in the fields.

In a large tomb

at Wuguan Village at Anyang, which had been twice plun¬ dered, 79 skeletons were found, buried with the man the tomb was made for.

The other tombs of the Yin ruins also contain

the remains of people buried alive with the dead or killed as sacrifices.

It is generally explained that these people were

slaves. That is more or less guesswork and does not clarify the position of slaves in social production. Not until the Zhou Dynasty did more factual data on the slave system appear.

The Rise of the Zhou and the Establishment of the Slave-Owning Zhou Dynasty

The people of Zhou were an ancient tribe on the loess plateau in the middle reaches of the Weishui (the Wei River). The ruling clan’s family name was Ji. Their earliest ancestor, Qi, was worshipped as the god of agriculture. Qi lived in Tai, which is said to be present Wugong County in Shaanxi.

His great-grandson Gongliu started a settlement

in Bin, the area around Binxian and Xunyi counties'in Shaan¬ xi. He studied the topography, found the water sources and organized production, developing agriculture and the domes¬ tication of animals.

Ten generations from Gongliu to Gugong

�CHAPTER IV

77

Tanfu lived in Bin. Threatened by the Rong and Di* tribes from the northwest, Gugong Tanfu led his people to Zhouyuan (the Zhou plain) at the foot of Mount Qi (now Qishan County in Shaanxi). People in his time gave up cave-dwelling and built houses and city walls and began to live in cities called yi, which were administered by officials. Making use of the rich soil of Zhouyuan, the people developed farm production and laid the foundation for the rise of the Zhou. About this time Zhou began to have contacts with the Shang. Gugong Tanfu was later honoured as Great King. He was succeeded by Ji Li, or King Ji, during whose reign the Zhou state grew strong. In the wars against the Rong Di tribes the captured prisoners were made slaves. The relations between the Zhou and the Shang became closer; Ji Li married the Shang woman Tai Ren and was received in court by the Shang king who granted him some land and gave him horses, jade and other valuables. He was also appointed an official in charge of livestock. However, later he was killed by King Wen Ding of the Shang. Ji Li was succeeded by his son Chang, who later became the celebrated King Wen of the Zhou.

Seeing that the Shang

king, Zhou, had earned the hatred of the nobility by his efforts to win over and recruit the slaves of certain tribes and states, Chang proposed an agreement among the slave-owners. It au¬ thorized searches for escaped slaves, who should be returned to their respective owners and must not be hidden by anyone. This agreement won the support of the nobility and raised King Wen’s prestige among the tribes and states. He carried out a series of campaigns against hostile tribes and states and subdued them. Then he attacked Chong (now Huxian in Shaanxi), a powerful state on the Zhou’s eastern

• “Rong” or “Xi Rong” was the ancient name applied to ethnic

groups in Northwest China, while “Di” or “Bei Di” was the name used for ethnic groups in North China. The groups in both Northwest and North China were also generally referred to under the name of “Rong Di”.

�78

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

border. Chong was friendly to the Shang and was treated as an enemy by the Zhou. With the help of his allies King Wen subdued Chong, capturing many of its people. He then moved his capital to Fengyi (on the west bank of the Feng River in Shaanxi), ready for eastward expansion. The many rivers and rich soil in this area favoured agriculture. In King Wen’s last years, his power extended to the southwestern part of present Shanxi and the western part of present Henan, posing a threat to Zhaoge, the Shang capital. Ji Fa, King Wen’s son, succeeded as King Wu. He moved the capital to Hao (southwest of present-day Xi’an in Shaanxi). In the ninth year of his reign when the contradictions in Shang society sharpened, he attacked Shang which had been ex¬ hausted in its wars against the Eastern Yi tribes. When his forces reached Mengjin (now Mengxian, Henan), 800 enfeoffed lords spontaneously joined him, but he did not continue his drive until two years later. Then he advanced eastward with 300 war chariots, a shock brigade of 3,000 men and 45,000 armoured soldiers.

The forces of the tribes of the southwest

also joined in when he started the campaign against King Zhou of the Shang.

At Muye to the southwest of the Shang capital

of Zhaoge, he and his men took an oath denouncing King Zhou for failing to offer sacrifices to ancestors and distrusting his kinsmen and for shielding people who had committed crimes and slaves who had escaped from their masters. The Zhou and Shang armies fought a battle at Muye. As the Shang soldiers turned against their ruler, King Wu quickly captured Zhaoge, where the Shang king burnt himself to death. Having vanquished the Shang, King Wu established the Zhou Dynasty. Among his chief ministers were Dan, the Duke of Zhou; Shi, the Duke of Zhao; and the Venerable Duke Jiang (Lti Shang, also known as Taigong Wang or Jian& Taigong). He enfeoffed Wu Geng, the son of King Zhou of the Shang, at Yin and appointed his own brothers Guan Shu, Cai Shu and Huo Shu to watch over Wu Geng. King Wu died two years later and was succeeded by his young son Song as King Cheng

�CHAPTER XV

79

with his uncle, the Duke of Zhou, as regent.

Guan Shu and

Cai Shu and other nobles were dissatisfied and Wu Geng took this opportunity to rebel against Zhou rule in collaboration with these nobles and some tribes and small states in the east. The Duke of Zhou led his forces in an eastern expedition, crushed the rebellion in three years, and extended the in.fluence of the Zhou Dynasty to the lower reaches of the Huanghe and Huaihe rivers. The Zhou capital city, Hao, was far removed from the east where the Duke of Zhou was carrying on his military cam¬ paign.

Luoyi, now Luoyang city in Henan, was then chosen

as the eastern capital and as a strategic centre from which the east could be controlled politically and militarily.

Here many

people who remained loyal to the Shang were forced to move and troops were stationed to watch them.

The new dynasty

was stabilized only after the eastern expedition of the Duke of Zhou and the building of the eastern capital. The Zhou regime was a dictatorship by the slave-owning nobility.

It was based on a coalition of the royal clan and

other noble clans, with or without the same surname as the royal family, under the supreme authority of the king. In each of the fiefs, power was based on a similar coalition of the ruling family and other noble clans, with or without the same surname, under the supreme authority of the fiefholder. Under Zhou rule there were many fiefdoms, some ruled by clans with the same surname as the royal house and some ruled by clans with other surnames. Of the latter there were those who were related by marriage to the Zhou rulers, leading clans surviving from the Shang period, and also fiefdoms trans¬ formed from old tribes. Some had been set up before and were then recognized by the Zhou ruling house; others were estab¬ lished after the reclamation of land and construction of city walls and ancestral temples. The Zhou enfeoffment policy had a positive significance in the development of production.

The

principal fiefdoms were Jin, Wei and Yan to the north of the

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

80

Huanghe River, and Xu, Cai, Chen, Song, Cao, Lu and Qi to the south of the river. The state of Wu in the far southeast gradual¬ ly became important, and so did Qin and Zheng which were established later. This enfeoffment policy benefited vassals who were related to the royal house in one way or another. It also preserved the power of the noble clans which, though unrelated to the new dynasty, did not challenge its authority.

In this way the Zhou

Dynasty won the general support of the nobility. At the height of its power, the Zhou domain extended south across the Changjiang River, northeast to present-day Liao¬ ning, west to Gansu, and east to Shandong.

In the northeast

the Su Shen tribe inhabiting the vast area from the Songhuajiang to the Heilongjiang rivers presented King Wu with an arrow that had a head made of stone and a shaft made of wood. King Wu inscribed some words on the shaft and gave it to the state of Chen which kept it in its treasury down to the Spring and Autumn period.

After the successful eastern expedition

of the Duke of Zhou, this tribe again sent an emissary to offer congratulations. The Zhou Dynasty established a patriarchal clan system. Within the clan there was a distinction between major and minor lineages. The king made the eldest son born of his wife heir to the throne — this was the major lineage.

The other

sons born of his wife and of his concubines became the heads of minor lineages. The vassal lords with the royal surname be¬ longed to minor lineages in relation to the king, but in their own states they established the same kind of lineage system with a major lineage and many minor ones.

A dafu (great

officer) belonged to a minor lineage in relatiop to the vassal lord, but within his own fief he also maintained a system under which the first son of his wife was his legitimate heir representing the major lineage.

Thus by combining blood re¬

lationship with an enfeoffment policy, the nobles bearing the same surname were united. At the same time, the royal house

�CHAPTER IV

81

intermarried with the ruling families of the fiefdoms and be¬ came related to those with different surnames. The king of Zhou of a younger generation called the vassal lords with the same surname paternal uncles and those with different sur¬ names maternal uncles. Such a clan relationship, coupled with intermarriages, strengthened the ties between the royal house and the vassal lords. Of the various officials under the king the taislni or taibao (prime minister) was the most powerful. There were a minister of civil administration and land affairs (situ), a minister of military affairs (sima), a minister of construction (sikong), a minister of justice (sikou), and officials in charge of agricul¬ ture. Most of the official posts were held by nobles by heredi¬ tary right; the fiefs were, of course, also hereditary.

The

political organization in each fiefdom was similar to that at the royal court. The king and the vassal lords each had his own armed forces.

As in the Shang Dynasty, the main fighting force

was composed of soldiers riding in chariots. To maintain the rule of the dynasty, rites and laws were formulated.

Punishments were used to control the slaves and

common people while the function of ritual was to maintain the hierarchy within the nobility.

Mainly an expression of

different political status, the ranks also indicated seniority and the relative position of men and women. The power of the king was bestowed by Heaven or the Lord on High.

Like the Shang, the Zhou Dynasty identified

its ancestral god with the supreme god.

The Zhou admitted

that the Shang kings were the elder sons of the Lord on High, but since they had failed to live up to his expectations, the Lord on High shifted his favour from the east to the west.

As

the Zhou Dynasty embodied the divine will, it was given supreme power over the human world. But the mandate of Heaven was not permanent; it depended on whether the con¬ duct of posterity met with the approval of Heaven. Here again the ancestral god became separated from the supreme god, because the former was not the only son of the latter. It seems that the supreme god of the Shang was autocratic, while that of the Zhou, though autocratic, was also rational. The Shang god belonged to the Shang alone, while the Zhou god did not, but stood above dynasties and tribes. In this respect the Zhou religion was more developed than the Shang religion, and this also reflected the political ideas of the Zhou Dynasty in its early period.

Economic Development Under Zhou Slavery

The slave system was well developed under Zhou rule. The king, vassals and high officials owned slaves of different status and under different names and forced them to create great wealth for them. The slave-owners held power and were also dominant economically. The common people living in the capital cities were called guo ren, also interpreted as “freemen”. The peasants in rural communes were called ye ren or “people in the fields”. After the Zhou conquest a large number of the Shang peo¬ ple and their slaves became slaves of the new rulers. An¬ cient records state that King Wu attacked 99 states, taking prisoner large numbers of people who possibly became slaves. The kings of Zhou conducted expeditions to the east and the south and frequently fought against the Gui Fang tribe in the north. In one battle 13,081 men and many chariots, horses, cattle and sheep were captured. Convicts were another source of slaves. The common people who revolted against the nobles were considered to have “committed crimes” and criminals were often converted into slaves and forced to per¬ form all sorts of labour. But they were not necessarily slaves for life, and were generally released after serving their sen¬ tences. Bronze inscriptions record the grants by the Zhou kings and nobles of tens, hundreds or thousands of slave families.

�84

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

One of the characteristics of the slave system in ancient China was the organization of the slaves on a family basis, although this was not the case with all slaves. In these inscriptions gifts of slaves are often mentioned along with gifts of all kinds of utensils, money, cattle, horses and land. This shows that slaves were treated in the same way as utensils or animals. They could be bought and sold. According to one inscription, five slaves were worth a horse and a bundle of silk. There were fewer cases of slaughtering slaves and pris¬ oners of war under Zhou rule than under the Shang, but it was still rather common to bury people alive to accompany the dead, though in smaller numbers. This shows that, under the Zhou slave system, production could obviously absorb a greater labour force than under the Shang. In the bronze inscriptions there are many examples of slaves being forced to perform productive labour — mostly farming and in some cases handicraft work. The royal house was nominally the owner of all land in the country. The royal domain around the capital was directly owned while the nobles and officials each had his own fief. These fiefs were hereditary and, to a large extent, could be handled freely by their owners.

The land system was one

of ownership by the slave-holding nobility. A poem from the Zhou Dynasty describes thousands of people working in the fields.

The grain of the slave-owner

piled high on the farms. The poem says that a thousand granaries and ten thousand baskets should be prepared to handle the grain. This is probably a description of a bumper harvest with the slaves working collectively on the land. Within the rural commune, farmland was periodically dis¬ tributed on the basis of fertility. An able-bodied peasant could use 100 mu of the best land and 50 mu of fallow; or 100 mu of middle-grade land and 100 mu of fallow;'or 100 mu of poor land and 200 mu of fallow. The peasant worked a piece of land distributed to him and let another piece lie fallow. Land was redistributed after several years. Between

�CHAPTER IV

85

the fields were irrigation canals along which roads were built. Although there is no definitive proof, this may have been the farming system that was later referred to as the “well fields” (jingtian Eight households are supposed to have cultivated one plot of land each with a common field in the middle. According to one interpretation, the crops from the central field were given to a lord. The character jing #, “well”, resembles such a group of nine fields. The peasant clans lived together in the rural communes. The settlements were called yi or she and were surrounded by open fields. They had their own houses, gardens or orchards. Between them there was equality, but the neigh¬ bourhood leaders controlled who was joining or leaving these communities. Women were brought together for “making ropes at night”. The peasants were given land by the com¬ mune to produce grain, vegetables, fruits, domestic animals, fuel and clothing to support themselves. Tools for farm production used during the Zhou period were not much different from those of the Shang Dynasty. But production was improved as the slaves and the peasants of the communes had accumulated much experience over a long period. The main method of farming was called ou geng, or “two men working together”.

This was probably designed

to make deeper ploughing possible.

The system of' fallow

was a progressive development and gradually replaced the slash and burn method. The technique of simple drainage and irrigation was also improved as were weeding, seed breed¬ ing and pest control. People grew rice, sorghum, sticky millet, wheat, beans, millet, mulberry, hemp, melons and fruits. There was a greater variety than in the Shang period, covering nearly all the principal crops we have today. Handicrafts continued to develop. After conquering Shang, the Zhou kings sent the “six clans of Yin people” and “seven clans of Yin people” to the states of Lu and Wei, and among these there were rope-makers, makers of two different kinds of vessels and potters as well as makers of flags, horse har-

�OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

86

nesses, files and axes, fences and mallets. These captured handicraftsmen played an important role in the development of Zhou handicrafts. Bronze casting continued to be an important handicraft, especially the building of chariots which were not only a means of conveyance for the nobility but, more importantly, a kind of military equipment. As more fiefs were established, the construction of buildings also developed. Zhou handicrafts and trade were mainly controlled by the nobles or officials and served the nobility. The status of the workers and their leaders was inherited. At this time slaves, cattle and horses, arms and jewellery were exchanged through barter, and in the capital there were markets under state control. Cowries were still used as money, with strings of shells as the units of calculation. Metals were also used as means of exchange. Among the common people barter mostly involved daily necessities.

The Zhou Dynasty from Prosperity to Decline

After the death of King Wu, the Duke of Zhou was in charge of state affairs for seven years until King Cheng came of age. The four decades under King Cheng and his son King Kang were marked by political stability and economic pros¬ perity. Under the next rulers, King Zhao and King Mu, the strength of the dynasty was at its height and wars were fought against the peoples of the surrounding areas. These conflicts intensified with the Zhou side enjoying the initiative. King Mu, powerful and ambitious, is said to have toured the regions far out in the west. After King Mu and throughout the reigns" of King Gong, King Yi, King Xiao, King Yi and King Li, thevprestige of the dynasty gradually declined and contradictions between the royal house and the people began to surface. King Li exploited the capital residents or freemen more mercilessly

�CHAPTER IV

87

than ever and that roused general opposition. His ministers advised him to stop his oppression, but he refused to listen. Instead, he suppressed all public discussion. His tyranny continued for three years; then the capital residents could no longer tolerate it and rose in armed revolt. the royal palace and forced the king to flee.

They attacked Then they sur¬

rounded the residence of the Duke of Zhao where they had heard that Prince Jing, heir to the throne, was hiding.

The

Duke made his own son take the place of the prince, thus saving the heir who later became King Xuan. After King Li had fled, the Duke of Zhou and the Duke of Zhao, descendants of the two mentioned earlier, took charge of the government; this period was called the gonghe.

One

account says that the man in power was Duke He of the state of Gong, hence the name gonghe. The first year of gonghe was 841 B.C.

From that year on, we have accurate dates of

recorded Chinese history. King Li died in Zhi (now Huoxian in Shanxi) 14 years after his flight. The Dukes of Zhou and Zhao had Prince Jing enthroned as King Xuan.

In the first years of his rule severe

droughts occurred, but they did not develop into a serious situation. Later King Xuan carried out wars against some neighbouring tribes and states and won some victories, but was defeated in wars against the Jiang Rong tribe1 and against the Tiao Rong and the Ben Rong tribes.2

For a time during

King Xuan’s reign there were signs of prosperity.

But the

contradictions between the Zhou state and the neighbouring peoples and the social contradictions in the Zhou-controlled areas were not resolved. Moreover, continuous wars consumed much of the dynasty’s manpower and material resources. lrrhe Jiang Rong tribe first inhabited Gua Zhou (west of presentday Dunhuang County in Gansu Province) and later moved eastward. 2 The Tiao Rong and Ben Rong tribes lived in the area around present-day Mingtiaogang north of the Zhongtiao Mountains near Yuncheng County in Shanxi Province.

�88

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA

King You, who succeeded King Xuan, was a stupid, selfindulgent and cruel ruler. The existing contradictions grew worse. As the Book of Odes pointed out: “Some people leisurely stay at home, some work untiringly for the country, some lie in bed doing nothing, some always have to go to war, some drink and make merry, some are fearful of meeting disaster, some talk nonsense or gossip, some have to do all kinds of work.” The struggles between big and small slave¬ owners became sharper with the small slave-owners complain¬ ing: “People have land, you take it away; people own slaves, you seize them!” Uninterrupted famine and severe earth¬ quakes compelled people to leave their homes and wander about. Those who were politically sharp used the earthquakes as a pretext to warn that “high cliffs may turn into deep valleys, while valleys may become hills and mountains.” The Zhou Dynasty faced a crisis. During King You’s reign the neighbouring peoples made continuous attacks. He dismissed Queen Shen and the crown prince Yi Jia and made his favourite concubine Bao Si queen and her son heir to the throne. Marquis Shen, father of Queen Shen, attacked the king in collaboration with the Quan Rong tribe1 and Lti, Zeng and other states. As the vassals refused to send him reinforcements, King You was killed at the foot of Mount Li. The capital was sacked and its treasures plun¬ dered. Under the threat of the Quan Rong and their allies, the Zhou ruler had lost control of the old capital by 771 B.C. In the following year King You’s successor, King Ping, moved the capital to Luoyi with the support of some of the nobles and vassals. From this year the dynasty is known as Eastern Zhou. The dynasty’s power and prestige had declined sharply, and history entered a new stage.

1 The Quan Rong tribe led a nomadic life in the Jing and Wei river valleys, or present-day Binxian and Qishan counties in Shaanxi Prov¬ ince, during the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

The Early Eastern Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring States Periods: Transition from Slavery to Feudalism

The Qin and Han Dynasties: the Growth of Feudal Society

The Three Kingdoms, the Jin, the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Sui and the Tang: the Earlier Period of Ascendancy of Chinese Feudalism

The Five Dynasties, the Song and the Yuan: the Later Period of Ascendancy of Chinese Feudalism

The Ming-Qing Period: the Twilight of Feudalism

Semi-Colonial and Semi-Feudal Society; The Old Democratic Revolution