Taiwan Today

It is my pleasant duty today to comply with the request of the Organizing Committee of the Congress and present to you an account about the "Importance of the Anyang Discoveries in Prefacing Known Chinese History with a New Chapter." I have taken this topic as it was communicated to me without any modification. Measured by the best method and the most strict standard of 'Dating the Past', the beginning of the known Chinese, history may be placed at the B. C. This is almost 200 years after the downfall of the Yin Dynasty, even the shorter chronology, as preferred by many sinologues from the West, is taken as a point of reference. This gap can be only partially filled, aside from the concise historical documentation left in the Book of History, by the archaeological observations at one of the cemetery sites of the Western Chou period, found in Hsints'un of Chun Hsien, in Northern Honan. With the Anyang excavations as their precedents, however, this gap is brilliantly illuminated by the radiated lights of the Yin remains. I propose to expound the importance of the Anyang discoveries by elaborating it under several sub-headings. First of all, I should say, the result of the Anyang excavations has served to restore the confidence among the Chinese historians of this generation in the high degree of authenticity regarding the source materials of a number of early documents, especially those of SsuMa Ch'ien's Memoires Historiques. This resurrected faith in the ancient historical writings is indispensable, before any research work along this line can be pursued with enthusiasm and sustained energy. Equally important, if not more so, is the fact that these discoveries have furnished the most substantial basis for the interpretation of the apparent sudden development of the civilization of the Chou Dynasty, whose archives anal art monuments, political system and social institutions, material culture and philosophical speculations have remained much in obscurity, as to their true origins and early developments. Anyang excavations supplied plenty of evidence showing that the Chinese civilization in the Yin Dynasty already attained some of the most fundamental oriental characteristics. It has become abundantly clear, after the Anyang discoveries have been made, that the Early Historical Chinese Culture is essentially a North China creation, enriched by the ability of the people responsible for this culture, to absorb all the useful cultural elements through actual contacts with alien nations, and adopt a critical as well as a receptive attitude towards new ideas, whose world migration was already current at the close of the neolithic time. The excavations have also produced material evidences linking the historical documents with a firm tie to the archaeological remains of the early historical and prehistorical periods. And, lastly, but not the least in importance, the skeletal remains recovered from the Anyang sites show an assemblage of physical traits, deviating only within a limited scope, from those of the aeneolithic northern Chinese. These are some of the items I propose to discuss. Scientific archaeology was promoted in China long before the start of the Anyang excavations. Up to 1928, there had been already a number of accurate scientific reports of careful diggings from the Chinese region, referred to by archaeologists all the world over. Those discoveries are however, mainly prehistorical, therefore undatable; their relation to the traditional records remains uncertain. In 1928, the Anyang Excavation Party, under the auspices of the National Research Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, started the field work in the village of Hsiao-fun, along the bank of the Huan River (洹), in the outskirts of the city of Anyang Hsien. It is a site that had already acquired a world reputation because of the inscribed oracle bones dug out from this site and brought to the attention of the anti-quarians, ever since the time of the Boxers' Movement. The inscribed oracle bones were important, in the eyes of the collectors during the first quarter of this century, chiefly for the reason that the inscriptions found on these relics were the earliest in China; they were hailed with religious reverence and considered as the most sacred writings of ancient China by a number of Chinese palaeographers. But, there was not lacking a voice of dissension. Chang Ping-lin, the leading classicist of this period, the foremost philologist of the classical school, a revolutionary and a friend of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, considered the inscriptions on the oracle bones as fakes, forged by a group of quacks with Lo Chen-yu as the chief plotter. Whe­ther Lo Chen-yu was a quack or not is still a pertinent question; but it happened that so far as the study of the oracle bone inscriptions was concerned, he was certainly on the right track. He was, however, by no means the founder of this study; this honor belonged rightly to Sun Yi-jang, the famous annotator of Chou-Ii, the last of the thirteen Chinese Classics glossed by the scholarship of the Ch'ing Dynasty. He was undoubtedly the first of the Chinese palaeographers who recognized the true significance of the oracle bone inscriptions and gave to the world the earliest interpretation of these archaic Chinese characters. Sun Yi-jang not only deciphered many individual characters found on the oracle bones, and successfully linked them with the bronze inscriptions of the Yin and the Chou; in many respects he was able to furnish Classical Philology of China a new orientation, which inspired and instilled a new spirit, into the succeeding generation, and led gradually to the founding of the National Research Institute of History and Philology within the frame of Academia Sinica. So when Anyang was chosen in 1928 by the National Research Institute of History and Philology as the first site for systematic excavation, it was done only after very careful deliberation and with the full confidence that it would turn out to be a key site for the interpretation of the ancient remains of the proto­ historical period, discovered already in great abundance in North China. These expectations, it may be justifiably said, have been fulfilled as much as circumstances had permitted up to 1937, when the Anyang Excavation Party was compelled to stop work after the cannonade of the Marco Polo Bridge, on the 7th of July. In these nine years, fifteen seasons were spent in the field in Anyang, where a field headquater was established by the Archaeological Section of the Institute during this period; and from this place reconnaissance and digging parties were sent out in successive seasons to various sites in different directions. In the Anyang region itself, the village of Hsiao-fun was chosen as the man site for field operation, while trial diggings were carried out in its immediate neighbourhood, where important discoveries were made from time to time; of which the most important and significant are the Hou-kang site in the southeast of Hsiao- t'un, and the Hou-chia-chuang site in the north­ west of Hsiao-t'un. Hou-kang is the first stratified site that showed a cultural sequence, linking together the prehistorical to the historical period, properly studied by a competent archaeologist, while Huo-chia-chuang proved to be the cemetery site of the Yin Dynasty of which the dwelling site is located in Hsiao-t'un. I shall not burden you with any detailed catalogue of the artifacts discovered from this region; but it is necessary to acquaint you with the general nature of the discoveries. In the early twentieth and during that brief period known as the Chinese Renaissance, there was a very important group of intellectuals, who called themselves "Doubters of Antiquity". These agnostics disbelieved ancient Chinese traditions in toto,and made the claim that the so-called Yin Dynasty was still in a stone age, whatever its meaning. Most of these "Doubters" were trained at the feet of the eminent Chang Ping-lin, and rebelled against their master in the tide of the Renaissance, but without much positive contribution. This period of vigorous intellectual chaos, however, is not without its social value; at least it helped to hasten the birth of scientific archaeology in China, although scientific archaeology subsequently proved that both Chang Ping-lin and his rebellious pupils were in the wrong, as far as Chinese antiquity is concerned. The total yield of inscribed oracle bones from twelve seasons' diggings at Hsiao-fun amounts to 24,918 pieces, according to the latest estimate of the Institute; so, it dispelled, once for all, any doubt about the genuineness of the oracle bone inscriptions. This, of course, does not mean that in the curio markets there are no fakes. It definitely proves, however, that those forgeries are copies of something historically real. In the case of the employment of bronze in the Yin Dynasty, hundreds of articles were found from the site of Hsiao-t'un alone, ranging from ceremonial vessels to weapons and articles of daily use. Besides, there were also discovered casting moulds, pottery articles used in connection with the bronze foundry, and ingots of tin as well as copper ore like malachite. All these show clearly that not only the Yin Dynasty was in a full-bloomed bronze age, but also Hsiao-fun was actually one of the centers of the bronze industry in the Far East in the latter part of the second millenium B. C. So those Doubters of Antiquity stopped their utterance of some of the most flaming nonsense, as soon as the discoveries at Anyang were made known. Systematic study of the individual characters and the exact contents of the oracle bone inscriptions, initiated first by Sun Yi-jang and followed by the brilliant efforts of Professor Wang Kuo-wei and members of the National Research Institute, led to the important conclusion that the Genealogy of the Royal House of the Yin Dynasty, as recorded by SsuMa Ch'ien is correct almost beyond any dispute. Practically all the names on the list of Kings which appear in SsuMa Ch'ien's chapter on the Yin Dynasty in the Memoires Historiques, are also found in the inscriptions of the newly discovered archaeological specimens. The Yin people were devoted ancestor worshippers. Ceremonies were performed and sacrificial offerings were made at regular intervals. On each occasion, the name of the particular ancestor to whom the offerings were made or from whom advice was sought, was mentioned in the records of divination and incised on the bones used for this purpose. Sometimes, when a major service was to take place, all the ancestors or a number of them might be worshipped collectively, then a whole list of the names of the kings and queens in a definite order would appear in the oracle bone scripts. Specimens with such records are the most extraordinarily valuable, as they furnish, in addition to the names of individual kings and queens, also the order of succession of the various rulers. It is on the basis of inscriptions of this type, that the late Professor Wang Kuo-wei succeeded in the reconstructing of the Genealogy of the House of Yin and reaffirmed the high authenticity of the source materials of the Memoires Historiques by Ssu-ma Ch'ien, written more than two thousand years ago. Professor Wang's effort to check and cross­ check the archaeological discoveries with various ancient historical documents and vice versa was particularly fortunate, because in the successful accomplishment of his work, we find not only a substantial identification of the archaeological records with historical traditions, but also a strong link of history to prehistory. Works along this line have been further elaborated by archaeologists of Academia Sinica in the field, and new links appeared in the various tomb contents and pit deposits, where inscribed oracle bones were associated with bronzes, bronzes found together with potteries and various other artifacts whose history can be traced back to ages of even greater antiquity. In these links, early Chinese history was found merged into protohistory, and protohistory into prehistory in close succession. One of the most interesting groups of material evidences discovered at Hsiao-t'un and most fitting to illustrate these relations, is the finding of a vast number of uninscribed oracle bones, made both of tortoise shells and ox scapula: drilled scorched and with crack signs in which were found answers to queries according to ancient prescriptions, but without the incised characters as generally known. These unwritten documents of scapulimancy were evidently the earlier form and the forerunner of the inscribed bones; at the same time, they also represented an advanced stage of this occult practice, of which the more primitive­ form had left its evidences in the remains of the neolithic Black Pottery Culture in Ch'eng tzu-yai, where at least six authentic pieces of oracle bones were discovered from the lower stratum. They were prepared in a much more elementary way; the bones are the shoulder blades of ox and deer; no tortoise shell was employed. So it became increasingly clear in the course of our excavations in North China, that only the royal house of the Yin Dynasty had developed the means and enjoyed the privilege of putting on record by inscriptions of queries made and answers given, while the commoners in this era, though equally devoted to this occult practice, had to be satisfied with the crack signs, unrecorded. The latter was certainly the more ancient usage inherited from the neolithic age that left its remains on the Shantung peninsula and the Huai River valley as their centers. Scapulimancy, on the basis of these findings, evidently originat among the people used to cattle and deer breeding, probably still nomadic, certainly without any writing, but with plenty of rituals and superstitions. Both the writing and the employment of tortoise shells are Yin innovations; they did not make much use of the shoulder blade of deer, in spite of the fact that more than one species of this animal thrived in the neighborhood of Anyang during this period. Whether the Black Pottery people were the originators of scapulimancy or not is difficult to say; but the place of its origin may be located with some degree of assurance within the sphere of the Lungshan Culture. While scapulimancy was evolved from a remote past in the Far East submerged beyond the latest phase of neolithic culture in North China, the development of the bronze dagger­ axe Ko(戈) lasted more than one thousand years from the mid-Yin period (c. 1400 B. C.). all through the long reign of the Chou Dynasty, down to the time of Ch'in Shih Huang Ti (c. 246-210 B. C.), when this weapon finally merged with the spearhead, and developed into Chi (战). I have elsewhere traced the evolution of this particular fighting implement and found that the dagger axe of the Yin period is typologically the simplest, with a crude hafting technique, a blunt posterior part and no necking at all. The first development of 'Hu' or necking, took place in the early Chou period; it was gradually lengthened in the course of time, till finally the standard type of K'ao Kung Chi's model description was fully evolved in the period of the Warring States. The result of this study established two points: 1. the classical type of Ko prescribed by the text of K'ao Kung Chi was a late Chou development; it did not exist in early Chou or Yin; 2. the morphological development through a period of over one thousand years, as shown by collections of the various periods, indicates a systematic endeavor made at the improvement of this weapon, with many trials and errors and a firm effort to achieve perfection. The weapon was therefore invented by the Yin people and developed by the Chou continuously without any interruption. The typological evolution of this fighting implement serves to link the Yin and the Chou cultures together on a common foundation, which had never been so clear before the days of scientific archaeology. The bronze works of the Yin Dynasty, of which the dagger-axe Ko constitutes only a minor example, are also typologically linked to the Stone Age Culture of North China, through a series of comparative studies of potteries and stone artifacts. Many of the magnificent bronze articles discovered in Anyang derived their forms from neolithic prototypes: the shapes of bronze vessels followed those made of pottery and wood, and bronze tools and weapons copied faithfully shapes of those of the stone. The continuity of forms exhibited through different media furnish another clue, indicating the close relationship of the Yin Culture to the culture developed in the neolithic age. The Yin Dynasty certainly introduced many new elements not found in any of the earlier remains; these new elements had enriched the cultural contents of Early China and inspired subsequently the creative genius of the Chou Dynasty. Some of them need a more comprehensive and detailed study before a definite opinion could be pronounced as to their beginnings and sudden appearance in China during this period; and to what extent and degree, the Yin people were responsible for these introductions. Under this heading, I should like to place such items as the system of writing as found on the oracle bones, the chariot and the horse complex, and large-scaled human sacrifice. The easy way out would be of course to at­ tribute all these elements to foreign sources. But there are difficulties, aside from the chronological puzzle. The case of the oracle bone writing illustrates this point. There are more than two thousands of these characters, deciphered and undeciphered. Many of these characters were highly evolved and must have taken some time to reach the stage as found the oracle bones. The problem is, where did this evolution take place? Similar question may be asked of other newly introduced cultural traits of the Yin time. There is, of course, a number of discoveries from Hsiao-t'un that definitely show the many-sided contacts with the outside world China must have had during the Yin Dynasty, and even earlier. Among the bronzes, there are examples like the socketed celts and socketed spearheads; among potteries the trumpet-shaped and round-bottomed jars; among stone artifacts, the T-shaped axe: all these were evidently results of acculturation, and serve as substantial indications of China's intercourse with the Far West as early as the second millenium B. C. If the cultural contents of the Yin Dynasty as shown by the Anyang remains is to be out­ lined as a whole, the typically oriental factors, it seems to me, apart from the written scripts are the following three features. They are scapulimancy, sericulture, and decorative art. There is little doubt that all these three elements originated and were developed in North China, representing respectively the religious economic and artistic life of the early Chinese prior to the beginning of the Chou Dynasty. About the occult practice of scapulimancy, it is important to note that it was known neither to the ancient Mesopotamians, Hebrew, Egyptians, nor to the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, although since the Christian era, it had spread far and wide in Europe and North Africa. The fact that many of the oracle bones from the Anyang remains were inscribed with the ancient Chinese scripts, and up to the present, they constitute almost the only source of the earliest Chinese writing discovered by modern archaeology, indicates the importance of the role scapulimancy played in the development of the cultural life of this period. The early history of sericulture has never been properly worked out; the mythological lore that sericulture originated in the reign of the Yellow Emperor and invented by his first queen, like most folklores, would no doubt remain shrouded in ancient mystery. Modern archaeology, however, has established the fact that the textile industry of silk was one of the most important crafts of the Yin Dynasty. Silk fabrics, recovered on bronzes of the Yin age have been examined by experts with full confirmation as to their true nature; and in the Yin scripts, both the character for silkworm and that for silk occur in a number of places. An artificially half-cut cocoon of the Bombyx mori was dug out by me personally from the painted pottery site at Hsi-yin in southern Shansi as early as 1926. Thus, similar to scapulimancy, the spinning and weaving industry of silk began its development in North China way back in the neolithic age, and had remained an exclusively Chinese cultural complex till late historical time. Its diffusion to the West is a matter of known history. In another paper on the "Diverse Backgrounds of the Decorative Art of the Yin Dynasty," I have discussed in some detail the different sources of the art patterns most commonly employed by the artists of this period. What is particularly emphasized in this paper is the theme that the decorative art of the Yin, as represented by the bronzes, sculptures and bone carvings, in every case shows a uniform attempt to combine several traditions into one style. The main portion of these traditions, diverse as they were in their past, was evolved in the Far East with North China as the center. The outcome of these synthetic efforts was the creation and the development of an art system, balanced in composition and highly individualist­ic in style; it is a style that not only led to the further evolution in the Chou Dynasty, but also inspired many local developments in different regions surrounding the whole Pacific area. It is essentially a symbolic art, dominated by animal motifs, at the same time still retaining a number of patterns geometrical in appearance. In this art, a discerning eye may be able to find the fusion of decorative elements originally developed in the Painted Pottery Culture, the Black Pottery Culture, and a Wood­ carving Culture. Specimens of this art, that survived the onset of time, whether in bronzes or jades, stone sculptures or bone-carvings all show a vigour and ingenuity seldom excelled by other art groups, prior to the beginning of the first millenium B. C. Students of the ancient Chinese bronzes are all aware of the fact that without an adequate supply of archaeological evidences, it is one of the most difficult tasks to draw a line between the Yin and the Early Chou style of the bronze decoration. Nothing illustrates better the essential continuity of the Yin and the Western Art than this puzzling experience of the connoisseurs three thousand years after their creation. The Chou people were ethnically by no means much different from the Yin. Whatever political and social changes they effected after the seizure of the ruling power from the Yin was done purely out of political considerations, rather than following the dictates of tribal custom. The true relation between the Yin and the Chou has been much clarified by a number of recent historical researches. It has been shown by verses in the Book of Poetry that the Chou and the Yin had intermarried for two generations. The mother of the founder of the Chou Dynasty was a Yin princess. Thus the Chou succession to the Yin, as the sovereign power of the ancient Chinese Empire, in the nomenclature of the ethnologists, may be simply a case related to the avunculate. While the Chou people were ethnically closely related to the Yin, the same cannot be said of the Yin, relations with their aeneolithic predecessors according to the preliminary results of physical anthropology. The average alpha value of seven direct measurements on the skulls of the Yin series in comparison with similar measurements of Davidson Black's Pooled Prehistorical Series of North China has been calculated; and the result shows a difference that speaks of uncertainty of common origin of these two series. The Yin skulls are bigger than the prehistorical series in all the seven direct measurements taken for comparison: they are, head length and head breadth, auricular height and basion-bregma height, sagittal arc, transversal vertical arc, and horizontal circumference; the last two measurements and the basion-bregma height show the biggest differences. The Yin people, in other words, possessed a bigger head than the prehistorical folks of North China. The average cranial index of the Hou-chia-chuang skulls based on 135 measurements of the adult males, is 76.96; the average for the 25 aeneolithic series, reported by Davidson Black is 74.96, while the mean value for the 40 specimens of Black's Pooled Prehistorical Series, including the 25 aeneolithic skulls, is 76.00. There was an evident increase of the brachycephalic element in the composition of the Yin population as compared with the inhabitants of the prehistorical period. But this must not be taken as an indication of any fundamental change of the ethnical composition of the Yin Dynasty population as compared with the aeneolithic period. The limited number of measurements and traits chosen for comparison scarcely justifies any basic conclusion of this kind. Besides, there is hardly any doubt that the Yin people were essentially mongoloid, just as the inhabitants of North China in the prehistorical period were, and the Chinese of the historical period have always been. I have examined, at random, most of the upper frontal incisors still existant and intact in the Hou-chia-chuang skulls, and found them all shovel-shaped. It is a well-known theory that this particular morphological character is distinctively mongolian. The almost universal presence of such a physical trait among the Hou-chia-chuang skulls is sufficient to prove their racial character. China is continental in size; so whatever changes that may have taken place in this area, have been on a continental scale. The cultural and racial history of China is comparable in magnitude with those of the whole of Europe. Only viewed from this angle and studied on this basis may a proper perspective be gained in the interpretation of Chinese ancient history and her archaeological remains. * A paper presented before a joint session of the English Pacific Science Congress and the Fourth Far Eastern Prehistoric Congress held at Manila, P. I. in November 1953. Princely Treasures The treasures of a Prince are three: land, people, and public affairs. He who treasures jewels and jades will bring disaster on his own head. 諸侯之寶三，土地，人民，政事。珠寶玉者，殃必及身。 From The Book of Mencius. Translated by Durham Chen.