From Heaven to Earth: Ancient Chinese History, 8500-1046 BC

introduction

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NOTE ON SOURCES

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How did China come to be what it is today?

That’s the question most people around the world are asking right now. How did China get to be one of the world’s leading countries, and after such a long period of humiliation?

It’s a good question, and there are many ways to answer it. Most historians start in 1644, when the Qing Dynasty began, the one that was ruling when the western powers came to China in the 19th century and carved it up as their own.

But China’s history starts much earlier than that, and there’s few countries in existence today that can trace their origins back so far. China can, and its first dynasty began nearly 4,000 years ago with the Xia Dynasty in 2070 BC.

We know about this period of time from a few key sources that survive today. These include the:

– Classic of Mountains and Seas;

– Bamboo Annals;

– Classic of History;

– Records of the Grand Historian.

Those four works are where the vast majority of our knowledge of this time period comes from. Those are the primary sources, although many of them weren’t written before or even during the Xia Dynasty, but much later. All of them, however, give us pieces to the puzzle that make up ancient Chinese history, but they do so in contradictory ways. What’s more, they often add mythical or simply impossible feats, life spans, and events to that history. This is done through mythology, and even the most scholarly of these sources takes part.

To the Chinese people these extraordinary people and events weren’t myths, however, they were history. The problem for the historian of the 21st century, therefore, is to separate this myth from the history, to try and figure out what happened, what didn’t, and why.

One of the main problems this causes with Chinese history is dating. Another is the tendency for myth and history to overlap. Both problems crop up continuously in the study of ancient Chinese history, and they must be dealt with. Dating is something that isn’t as problematic as it is with other cultures. The Chinese were meticulous record keepers and also great astronomers. Their calendars were accurate and many dates are derived from their celestial observations.

The records telling us those dates aren’t always as good as historians would like, however. First, many are gone. Politics was a dicey affair for much of the country’s history, and many times texts were burned, along with those who’d written them or simply tried to save them. The Fires of Qin is a good example of this.

Next, separating myth from history may seem the right thing to do to western minds, but to the Chinese it’s anathema to their culture and identity. To understand Chinese culture throughout history and into today you have to realize that myth and history were one. Those that created the world walked upon it and often came from somewhere else. What’s more, many of the earliest emperors were in fact part-deity or fully gods themselves. Most had life spans greater than 100 years and many could do supernatural things or possessed otherworldly tools and devices.

Sometimes we have dates for these demigods, such as when they ruled. Other times their history and their myth overlap, giving us a story that seemingly stretches to the very fabric of time and back again, allowing these individuals to both rule in the world we know and have a hand in creating it at a time much earlier.

They’re myths...but they’re not. And that’s the reality historians face when writing about ancient China. It’s from those sources that these sometimes mythical accounts come, and those sources will be discussed in depth for each instance when there’s doubt, or we simply do not know. For while it’s the chief role of the historian to tell us what happened, it’s also to speculate on what could have happened when our knowledge is fragmentary at best and nonexistent at worst.

And for those that’d like to argue that this should not be the case, well, look no further than our chief source for this period, Records of the Grand Historian, to see exactly the same thing. See, that was written 2,000 years after the events had actually taken place, and sometimes much later.

Yes, China’s history is long, incredibly so. It flows like a river through dynasties, the first of which was started by Yu the Great in 2070 BC. But if we want to figure out that river of succession that brought China from its ancient beginnings to its modern position at the forefront of the world, then we’ve got to go back to the source of that river. That takes us to the dawn of time.

Part I – Earliest Traces on Earth

1. The Land of Ancient China

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Who were the first people in China and how did they get there?

These are the questions we need to ask ourselves if we want to fully understand how ancient China came into being. Unfortunately the only thing we have to go one for this history is archaeological evidence found throughout Africa and Asia dating back hundreds of thousands of years. People moved out of Africa as early as 1.8 million years ago and as late as just 40,000 years ago. We know this because of several archaeological sites found in Asia and China.

No one really knows where the name ‘Asia’ came from, but that’s where the people that would become Chinese headed once they were out of Africa. Asia can be described as everything east of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains as well as the Black and Caspian Seas. On the west it’s bordered by the Pacific Ocean and to the north by the Arctic Ocean. To the south there’s the South China Sea and then fingers of land until the Indian Ocean.

Two-point equidistant projection of Asia

It’s a massive area, covering 17.2 million square miles, or 8.7% of the Earth’s surface. China is just one large part of Asia, though arguably the most important. It takes up 3.7 million square miles today, though the areas people first settled were much more compact. That’s not to say all the cultures of ancient China started in the same place – they didn’t – but those that did arise were centered around small geographic areas and didn’t roam to any large extent once they’d become sedentary.

One area where most of the early cultures rose up was the North China Plain, often called the Central Plain in China. The vast alluvial plain is an expanse of land that covers 158,100 square miles of flat area, most of which is just 160 feet above sea level.

The land is fertile, mainly due to the flood waters which come off the Yellow River so frequently. These are often helped, if not caused outright in some years, by the strong humid winds coming in from the Pacific and mixing together with the dry winds flowing down from the interior mountains.

China’s Geography

This mix often created disastrous results for those living along the river, and over the centuries this problematic region developed administratively to deal with the unpredictability of the river. The forces of nature had to be marshaled, and man created government to do so. But before he created government he needed culture. We know of this culture from those archaeological sites that have been found.

The finds at these sites tell us about the people of ancient China, how they lived, and what they believed. They also tell us when the ancient Chinese began making the transition from the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, to the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. The key to this change was agriculture and the use of tools.

Following that we continue to move through large swaths of time, called ages or epochs. There’s the Copper Age, which began as early as 5000 BC in some parts of the world, but got to China a bit later and coincided with the Bronze Age, which generally started around 3000 BC. The difference between the two ages is that people figured out how to add tin to copper to form bronze.

These ages also have geologic names, and the first period of our history passes through the Pleistocene Epoch and then into the Holocene Epoch. The Pleistocene lasted from 2.5 million years ago until 11,700 years ago when the Holocene began, which continues today. During the Holocene there was an event called the Holocene Climate Optimum, which lasted from 9000 to 5000 BC.

During the Holocene Climate Optimum the weather around the world changed drastically. The North Pole saw temperature increases of 7°F while temperatures in Siberia could have risen by as much as 11 to 16°F. The colder northern forests in China receded by hundreds of miles, allowing people to move further north. In the Sahara desert the land became lush and green and dotted with lakes.

The world’s climate became much more hospitable at this time and then much wetter as another smaller event took place within this larger event. The Piora Oscillation started and lasted from 3200 to 2900 BC. In the European Alps, glaciers advanced and the winter tree line dropped by 300 feet. In the Middle East the Dead Sea rose more than 300 feet before receding again as the area became more dry. And in Africa the lush wet and jungle-like lands began to be replaced with desert as the long period of arid weather took root in the once fertile land.

No one knows what caused the change in weather. It could have been a change in the generally-accepted 1,500-year climate cycle or it could have been part of a larger natural disaster – ice samples taken from Antarctica show high levels of methane in 3250 BC, perhaps caused by a meteor or volcanic eruption. It was clear the optimal period of warm weather people had enjoyed during the Holocene Optimum was now finished.

These were times of changing weather patterns, and much of the Earth back then would have been unrecognizable to us today. What’s now desert was once lush jungle, and in China some cultures rose up in areas that later became unsustainable due to the changing weather patterns that characterize the transition from one epoch to another.

These changes didn’t stop people from forming into larger family and then political units, and may have even encouraged it. The dominant form of human organization at this time in China was the clan or tribe. These clans moved about and were composed of large family units. In later years these clans would combine with other clans in the same geographic area, creating small clusters of culture. Many of these cultures rose up in China during the Neolithic Era. In the centuries that followed these clans would become the basis for the political states that formed and gave rise to the dynastic systems of government that ruled for centuries at a time.

2. The Path to Ancient China

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Who were the first people in China and how did they get there?

These are the questions we need to ask ourselves if we want to fully understand how ancient China came into being. Unfortunately the only thing we have to go on is archaeological evidence found throughout Africa and Asia dating back hundreds of thousands of years.

People moved out of Africa as early as 1.8 million years ago and as late as just 40,000 years ago. We know this because of several archaeological sites. One site in the Caucasus has skulls dating to 1.8 million years ago (homo erectus georgicus), and with animal bones and tools. Similar has been found in China. A connection between Africa and China was found with skulls in Central China that dated back from 200,000 to as early as 50,000 years ago.

That would have been around the same time that Homo sapiens first got to Asia from Africa according to most accepted opinions in the field today. This Out of Africa model supposes – with the archaeological evidence – that humans first left Africa to move outward around 100,000 years ago. How long it would have taken the first to reach Asia is anyone’s guess, but some could have made it within a generation if they really felt like walking. Most models say it took around 30,000 years, however. What’s more, it’s highly likely there’d already been other people, or species of people, living in Asia up to that time, and may well still have been.

Possible Human Migration Map

Homo Sapiens (1); Neanderthals (2); Early Hominids (3)

The people that we think of as living in China today most likely came up out of Africa 100,000 years ago, gradually headed east along and over the coasts of the Indian Ocean over 60,000 years, and made it to the areas of southern Asia by about 40,000 years ago. They would have settled along the