Page 32 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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The Shang Dynasty

For centuries, farmers living in the village of Hsiao-t'un near An-
yang in Honan have been picking up peculiar bones which they
found lying in the fields after rain or while they were ploughing.
Some were polished and shone like glass; most had rows of oval
notches in their backs and T-shaped cracks; a few had marks on
them that looked like primitive writing. The farmers would take
these bones to apothecaries in Anyang and neighbouring towns,
who often ground off the marks before selling them as "dragon
bones," a potent ingredient in restoratives. In 1899 some of the in-
scribed bones fell into the hands of the noted scholar and collector
Liu Ngo, who recognised the writing as an older form of the ar-
chaic script already known on the ritual bronzes of the Chou Dy-
nasty. Soon other scholars, notably Lo Chen-yii and Wang Kuo-
wci, took up the study of what were, in fact, fragments of the ar-
chives of the royal house of Shang, the existence of which had
hitherto not been proved, though Chinese historians had never
doubted it.
The bones were traced to Anyang. The farmers began to dig
deeper, and before long there began to appear on the antique mar-
ket in Peking and Shanghai magnificent bronze vessels, jades, and
other objects, whose exact place of origin was kept secret. For
nearly thirty years the farmers and dealers' agents, working at
night or during the idle winter months, continued their indis-
criminate pillaging of Shang tombs. Finally, in 1928, the Chinese
National Research Institute (Acadcmia Sinica) began at Anyang
an important series of excavations which were to provide the first
definite archaeological evidence that the Shang Dynasty had ac-
tually existed and was not, as some Western writers had come to
suspect, a pious fabrication of the backward-looking Chinese. By
1935 more than three hundred graves had been discovered, ten of
which, ofenormous size, were undoubtedly royal tombs.
These discoveries posed more problems than they solved. Who
were the Shang people and where did they come from? How was
it that their earliest remains revealed a culture of such sophistica-
tion, particularly in their bronze techniques? If the Shang had ex-
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