the world. However, if you took a modern  Chinese person, or even a subject of the  

Middle Kingdom's medieval dynasties, and  transplanted them into China's ancient bronze age,  

they would likely find the people of  that time utterly alien in language,  

religion and custom. In this video, we will  be examining the earliest origins of one of  

the world's most esteemed civilizations, with  an emphasis on the Kingdoms of Shang and Zhou,  

exploring exactly how far back in history a  recognizably Chinese culture can be traced.

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While it is said that Chinese  history is 5,000 years old,  

many of its iconic features are comparatively much  more recent. For example, the mandate of heaven,  

the beating heart of Chinese historiography which  frames the rise and fall of Imperial dynasties,  

did not crystallize into a solid concept  until the rise of the Zhou around 3,000 years  

ago. Meanwhile, staples of Chinese social  doctrine, like Confucianism and Buddhism,  

only started becoming mainstream parts of society  during the Han dynasty of around 2,000 years ago.  

Throughout history, the territory, religions,  cultures and languages that constitute “China”  

have undergone massive change, which problematizes  the idea of China as a linearly continuous 5,000  

year old civilization. So, how far back can one  go can still see something recognizably 'Chinese?' 

As it is with myriad other nations, the origins  of Chinese civilization in the popular narrative  

is shrouded in fantastic folklore, replete  with various mythical Emperors and Sage Kings  

possessed of various supernatural powers.  Perhaps the most famous of these is Yu the Great,  

who around 4,000 years ago stopped a devastating  flood of the Yellow River by personally dredging  

it with his superhuman strength. Thereafter, Yu  became the first ruler of a hereditary domain,  

known as the Xia, traditionally considered to be  China's first dynasty. In modern historiography,  

Yu, and the Xia dynasty have been consigned  to the realm of myth and folklore, as little  

archaeological evidence and no literary  records from this primordial era survives. 

With that said, modern archaeology has discovered  various prehistoric material culture complexes  

along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers dating  back at least 4,000 years, such as the Erlitou  

culture. These societies may well have ties  to the myth of Yu and his predecessors,  

especially since they were farming cultures who  relied on the capricious flow of the Yellow River.  

However, as they were pre-literate communities,  and left no written record of themselves, we have  

no way of knowing if they were the cultural  or linguistic predecessors of the Chinese. 

Let us now set the clock to the dying years  of China's last imperial dynasty. In 1899,  

a malaria epidemic erupted in Beijing. At  the time, it was believed that the cure  

to this disease was to grind up ancient  dragon bones and mak e a soup from them.  

Taking advantage of this fad, peasants from  Anyang village in Henan Province began digging  

old ox bones and turtle shells out of the  ground and passing them off as dragon remains.  

Many of these bones had odd scratchings on them.  Fearing these marrings would lower their value,  

the peasants of Anyang smoothed them off  before selling them. However, some of these  

specimens soon circulated into the hands of  a scholar, who realized something remarkable:  

these etchings were, infact, a hitherto unknown  form of ancient Chinese writing, so different  

from the modern Chinese script that the peasants  had no clue what they were defacing. Henceforth,  

archaeologists flooded into Anyang, and discovered  something remarkable: an ancient settlement, and  

3,200 year old seat of the royal house of Shang. The Shang state, which extended over only a small  

portion of modern China, is considered the  first historically attested Chinese polity  

because unlike the Xia state which supposedly  predated them by centuries, the Shang left  

behind an observable written record in the form of  those aforementioned bones. Known to scholars as  

'oracle bones', the archaic characters written  upon them represent questions posed by the people  

of Shang to the spirits, such as if the lady of  their royal family would give birth to a son,  

whether they should attack neighboring  tribes, or whether sacrifices should be made.  

The oracle bones were then tossed into a fire,  and the manner in which the heat cracked the bone  

along the writing determining the spirit's answer. Few in the historical community deny that the  

3,200 year old remains found at Anyang represent  a culture directly ancestral to modern China.  

The most glaring testament to this lies  in their written languages. The runes  

etched onto Shang oracle bones represent clear,  archaic versions of modern Chinese characters,  

which allows us to infer that, at least  amongst their elite and priestly castes,  

their spoken language was ancestral  to today's Chinese dialects as well. 

Moreover, our limited window into Shang  spiritualism reveals many familiar  

Chinese features. As is still the case in  many contemporary households in Taiwan,  

Hong Kong and the mainland, the worship of family  ancestors was a core pillar of Shang society.  

Shang Kings in particular appeared to draw their  power from the spirits of their royal ancestors.  

Through this, a hierarchy existed, in which  the long dead outranked the recently dead,  

who outranked the Shang King, who outranked  all other living humans. The importance of  

ancestors is further emphasized in how the Shang  created great sacrificial vessels out of bronze,  

in which was placed wine and various cooked dishes  for the enjoyment of their long deceased kin.  

On top of human ancestors, the Shang also  worshiped a variety of nature spirits,  

and had a chief deity, Di, who determined the  natural order and the fate of Kingdoms. Di,  

whose name shares the modern Chinese character for  'Emperor', would play an incredibly important role  

in the Chinese psyche for millenia to come. In government, the Shang polity also seems to  

have resembled an early version  of later Chinese statecraft.  

The ancient Shang were ruled by a hereditary  monarch and his royal family, which presided  

over a bureaucratic court of appointed individuals  with specialized departments of responsibility.  

This can be seen as a precursor to the highly  centralized courts of later Chinese dynasties  

such as the Han, Song, and Qing which would  emerge thousands of years down the line.  

Indeed, the literati of those later  dynasties considered the Shang to be  

their direct cultural predecessors. For example,  in his sweeping work on the history of China,  

the historian Sima Qian of the Han dynasty  wrote a genealogical account of the house of  

Shang, in which he names several of their Kings,  including Wu Ding, who reigned around the time the  

city at Anyang was at its height. However, unlike  his accounting of the Yellow Emperor and the Xia,  

Sima Qian's attestations of the Shang can be  corroborated with hard archaeological evidence,  

as the names of the Shang Kings he writes about  also appear on the oracle bones found at Anyang. 

With all that said, the Shang Kingdom was still  a drastically different state than what one would  

expect from a typical Chinese dynasty, with many  features of Shang society not considered part of  

conventional Chinese cultural continuity. For one  thing, Shang gender roles appear very different  

from the later Chinese norm. This is exemplified  by the perhaps the most remarkable of finds at the  

Anyang archaeological site: the tomb of Lady Hao.  Found interred in a massive mausoleum alongside  

thousands of ornate luxuries of jade, ivory and  bronze, Fu Hao was one of the sixty-four consorts  

of the aforementioned King Wu Ding. However,  far from lounging around in a royal harem, Fu  

Hao was a renowned warrior who led her own armies  and launched conquests into neighboring states,  

all while owning and administering her own lands  outside the capital, essentially making her a  

critical member of the Shang military aristocracy.  While many famous women would serve as warriors  

throughout Chinese history, the remains of  Fu Hao is evidence that in the Shang realm,  

female fief-holders and military leaders were  a normalized part of the state apparatus,  

a highly unusual idea for China's later  dynasties, for whom, at least ostensibly,  

women were far less politically active. In her campaigns, Fu Hao took many captives  

from foreign tribes, who would then be used as  ritual victims in cult rites. This brings us  

to the topic of human sacrifice, a gruesome staple  of Shang religion. The mass slaughter of hundreds,  

if not thousands of captives was a  common occurrence at the Shang capital,  

and while human sacrifice would persist for some  centuries after the Shang's eventual collapse,  

it would become a taboo and ultimately abolished  practice by the time of the Han dynasty. 

Perhaps the largest thing holding the Shang  apart from later Chinese dynasties was that  

in all likelihood, its demographic makeup was  hardly Chinese to begin with. Deep in antiquity,  

the area that is now modern China was far more  ethnically and linguistically diverse than today,  

with vast swathes of it inhabited by speakers  of non-Chinese tongues potentially ancestral  

to todays' Viet, Thai, and Tibetan languages,  among many others. This was likely the case  

even in the Shang's Yellow River valley heartland.  Thus, while later Chinese dynasties ruled during  

eras where the Chinese language and writing system  had assimilated more evenly across the land, the  

Shang state resembled more a deeply multicultural  feudal confederacy, with the ancestrally Chinese  

writing system seen on their oracle bones used  mainly by their elite caste and royal house.  

To add on to this, Shang Kings seem  to have led highly mobile lives,  

constantly riding around to ensure the loyalty  of their many militant confederates. This is  

a big contrast to later Chinese Emperors, who  were largely confined to their massive palaces. 

It therefore follows that the Shang were  constantly absorbing foreign influences  

into their culture. The use of chariots in  war, for example, was likely adopted from an  

indo-European speaking Caucasian people, native  to the modern Xinjiang desert, and ancestrally  

related to many of todays' European and Northern  Indian populations. Later Chinese dynasties would,  

of course, absorb cultural practices from  their non-Chinese neighbors too. However,  

while from the Han Dynasty onwards, Chinese  high culture was the sun around which all  

east Asia orbited around, during the Shang  Dynasty, the proto-Chinese world was but one  

of many mid-sized realms, likely no more or less  influential than many other states in the region. 

Ultimately, the Shang polity's relationship to the  cultural continuity of Chinese civilization is a  

complex one. It is perhaps best described as a  Chinese state that existed before Chinese culture  

had become aware of its own identity and special  nature. A good historical parallel could be early  

Rome when it was but a small city-state among the  many diverse peoples of the Italian Peninsula,  

oblivious to the thousands of years of deeply  established Imperial tradition it was starting.  

For China, the core of those  Imperial traditions would begin  

with the successors of the Shang, the Zhou. Originally, the Zhou were one of the Shang's  

many vassals. They were a semi-nomadic people,  and perhaps speakers of a non-Chinese language.  

If tradition is to be believed, then around  1100 BC, their King, Wen, pursued a deliberate  

acculturation policy to make his people imitate  the language and patterns of the prestigious  

Shang. So prosperous and powerful did King Wen  become that he began to outshine his overlord.  

When he died in 1050 BC, his son and heir, King  Wu, would bring tensions with the Shang to a head.  

If the hilariously anachronistic account of Sima  Qian is to be believed, then he accomplished  

this in a single morning, slaughtering over  500,000 loyal Shang soldiers in the process. 

King Wu of Zhou had overthrown the house of  Shang, but establishing rule over the multitudes  

of vassal states the Shang had once controlled  would be no easy feat. The Zhou needed to make  

a case as to why the tribes who had once bowed  to the Shang now owed their loyalty to this new  

house of overlords. To that end, they utilized  the chief Shang god Di, rebranding him as Tian,  

which directly translates to 'sky', but is  generally translated in English as 'heaven'.  

King Wu and his successors promoted the idea that  their ascension to power had occurred only because  

almighty Heaven, ever omnipotently controlling  the fate of the civilized world, had deemed it  

to be so. Furthermore, if the last Shang King  had not been so ruthless, corrupt, or depraved,  

then Heaven would not have seen fit to cast  him down and replace him with a new ruler. Thus  

was born one of the longest enduring political  philosophies in the world, the mandate of heaven. 

This philosophy might have died in the crib, if  not for the fact that, when King Wu of Zhou died  

in 1043 BC, a rebellion broke out in an attempt  to overthrow his heir, who was a powerless child.  

This rebellion was put down by one of the late  King's brothers, known to history as the Duke of  

Zhou. After emerging victorious, the Duke of Zhou  could easily have deposed his underage nephew and  

ruled himself, but he didn't, and ensured the son  of King Wu was restored to his rightful throne,  

because it was the child who had been given Tian's  mandate, not he. This set the precedent that the  

Mandate of Heaven, by which monarchs could only  be deposed by divine will, not human machinations,  

would become a real and active force in  Chinese politics for millenia to come. 

If Shang was an archaic, dubiously Chinese state  not yet aware of its own nature, then the Zhou  

was when that awareness began to truly blossom,  and the prestige of cultural continuity began to  

cement in the minds of the Chinese literati.  Many elements of Shang courtly life, such as  

ancestor worship, divination through bones, and  the written language, were directly continued by