Page 26 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

A History of Modern Chinese Archaeology

X I A O N E N G Y A N G | Traditional Chinese antiquarianism, particularly the jin shi xue (the study of ancient Chinese
1
bronzes and stone stelae), has endured for one thousand years. In contrast, modern field
archaeology has come to be practiced in China only recently, starting in the early twentieth
2
century. It is a young sibling if compared with Roman, Greek, and Egyptian archaeology. Mod-
ern Chinese archaeology is distinguished from previous efforts to investigate physical remains
by its scientific methodology of field surveys and excavations.
A series of momentous discoveries during the first decade of the twentieth century —
in particular, the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions at Anyang in Henan province and the Han-
Tang manuscripts, paintings, textiles, and wooden slips from Dunhuang and Jiuquan in Gansu
province, stimulated modern Chinese archaeology. 3 Evolving from traditional sinology, after the
political revolution of 1911 it absorbed the Western disciplines of palaeontology and geology.
Initiated and first practiced in China by Japanese, Russian, and Western scholars and explorers,
most of them self-taught, Chinese archaeology would eventually come to be a province of
Chinese intellectuals.
5
Despite the interruptions imposed by political and social turmoil, the discipline devel-
oped rapidly over the course of less than a century, and much of China's early history has been
rewritten as a result. The achievements of Chinese archaeologists have drawn attention and
admiration from around the world. Chinese archaeology has in fact entered a golden age, 6 the
result of a developmental process comprising four stages: initiation (18905-19105); formation
(19205-19405), institutionalization (1949-1976), and maturation (1977 to the present).

18905-1910$: INITIATION
Long known as the "Central Kingdom," China was battered during the nineteenth century and
the first decade of the twentieth century by totalitarianism, poverty, and foreign invasion. In
1911, Chinese intellectuals and patriots engineered the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and the
7
Republic of China was established. One of their foremost goals was the pursuit and importa-
tion of science and democracy from the West, epitomized by the May Fourth Movement of
8
1919. If the door of China was first cracked by foreign forces, it was the Chinese people who
enthusiastically swung it wide open.
Chinese intellectuals eagerly embraced foreign scholarship, including that of Western
archaeologists. Liang Qichao (1873-1929), a key reformer and a leading scholar, was among the
first to apply Western archaeologists' periodization of the prehistoric era to China. His 1901
essay summarizing Chinese history refers to three successive prehistoric periods — delineated
by the use of stone, bronze, and iron tools — a chronology established by the Danish archaeol-
ogist Christian Jiirgensen Thomsen (1788-1865). Although the periods vary in length in differ-
ent regions, Liang suggested that the sequence applies to prehistoric China, and he further
Cat. 126, detail posited the existence of a Stone Age before the legendary figure Shen Nong and a bronze age

25