Page 37 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

a book, ts'e: # The inscriptions on the bones are either declara-
.
tions of fact or of the ruler's intentions, or questions about the fu-
ture that could be answered with a simple yes or no. They relate
chiefly to agriculture, war, and hunting, the weather, journeys,
and the all-important sacrifices by means of which the ruler at-
tuned himself to the will of heaven. They reveal that the Shang
people had some knowledge of astronomy, knew precisely the
length of the year, had invented the intercalary month and divided
the day into periods. Their religious belief centred in a supreme
deity, Ti, who controlled the rain, wind, and human affairs, and in
lesser deities of the heavenly bodies, of the soil, of rivers, moun-
tains, and special places (the genii loci). Special respect was paid to
the ancestral spirits, who lived with Ti and could affect the desti-
nies of men for good or ill, but whose benevolent concern in the
affairs of their descendants could be ensured by sacrificial rites.

14 Reconstruction ofa home at Hiiao-
t'un. Anyang. Late Shang Dynasty.
After Shih Ch'ang-ju and Kwang-chih
Chang.
The Shang people built chiefly in wood and tamped earth. Re-
mains have been found of several large buildings; one of them,
over ninety feet long, was raised on a high plinth, its presumably
thatched roof supported on rows of wooden pillars, of which the
stone socles remain. Another was laid out axially with steps in the
centre of the south side, and but for its roof would not have looked
so very different from any large building in North China today.
Some of the more important buildings were adorned with for-
malised animal heads carved in stone, and their beams were
painted with designs similar to those on the ritual bronzes. The
most popular method of construction—presumably because it
was cheap and provided good protection against the piercing cold
of the North China winter—was the pan-chu ("plank building")
technique, in which the earth was tamped between vertical boards
with a pole: the smaller the diameter of the pole, the stronger the
wall.
In spite of sixty years of excavation, a mystery still hangs about
Anyang. One of the first things the excavators noticed was that it
did not have the defensive wall that surrounded every major
Chinese city until modern times; moreover, the buildings, unlike
those at Chengchow and P'an-lung-ch'eng, are aligned north/
south and strung out in no apparent order. Perhaps Anyang was
not a capital city at all, but merely the centre of the royal tombs,
sacrificial halls, bronze workshops, and the dwellings of the offi-
cials and priests, artisans, and humble folk who served them. If so,
where was the administrative capital of late Shang? Perhaps it was
17
opyriyruea material