Life in Early China E-Book

J A G Roberts

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 83

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Imagine that you found 'dragon bones' once used to predict the future, or wrote a poem in the Book of Songs, or uncovered the terracotta army guarding the tomb of the First Emperor. Read more about life in this fascinating culture in this pocket-sized introduction.

Leseprobe

Early China

First published in 2007

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved© J.A.G. Roberts, 2007, 2011

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

J.A.G. Roberts has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7053 5MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7054 2

Original typesetting by The History Press

Early China

From Beijing Man to the First Emperor

J. A. G. ROBERTS

Contents

Introduction

On the Chinese Language

Prehistoric man in China

From legends of China’s origin to the beginning of history

The Shang Dynasty

The Zhou Dynasty – the Western Zhou

The Spring and Autumn Period, 771-481 BCE

The Warring States Period 481-221 BCE

The Age of the Philosophers

The Rise of Qin

Daily life in China at the time of the Qin

The Rise and Fall of the Qin Dynasty, 221-206 BCE

After the Qin Empire

Bibliography

Introduction

In 1901 Edward H Parker, Professor of Chinese at the University of Manchester, described the history of China as ‘wearisome’, ‘insipid’ and ‘downright stupid’. The human interest in Chinese history, he declared, only began in the nineteenth century, when contacts with Europe began to play a major part in the country’s development.

Today no historian would dream of describing China’s early history in those terms. In the 1970s astonishing archaeological finds brought early Chinese history to life. They included

1974

The terracotta army of the First Emperor – the most remarkable discovery since the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb

1975

Early Chinese law recorded on bamboo strips found in the grave of a Qin official

1976

Shang culture illustrated by the contents of the grave of Princess Fu Hao, who died c. 1250 BCE

1977

Chinese musical instruments found in the grave of Marquis Yi of Zeng,

c

. 433 BCE

It is not only archaeology which has enriched our understanding of early China. The teachings of the philosophers, among them Confucius and the Daoists, are now given renewed attention. Issues relating to Chinese medicine and diet have been related to Western concerns on matters of health. In these, and in many other topics, the history of early China has a greater significance today than ever before.

On the Chinese Language

Chinese is a tonal language, which means that words which have the same sound may be pronounced in different tones and have a variety of different meanings. The official language of China, the language known in the West as Mandarin, has four tones. A common sound like ma in the first tone may mean a mother, in the second tone hemp, in the third tone a horse and in the fourth tone to scold.

Chinese is also written in characters. Each character has its own meaning and its own pronunciation. The famous eighteenth-century Kangxi dictionary listed 47,000 characters, a good dictionary may contain up to 8,000 characters and to be able to read Chinese one has to know at least 3-4,000 characters.

In this book Chinese characters have been transliterated into pinyin, the official system of romanization, rather than the traditional Wade-Giles system. Pinyin is now used in newspapers and is being adopted generally in scholarly works. All Chinese personal and place names have been transliterated into pinyin. Thus Mao Tse-tung is rendered as Mao Zedong and Peking is transliterated as Beijing.

For the most part, pinyin spelling approximates to the phonetic values of English, with the following notable exceptions:

c

is pronounced ‘ts’ as in Tsar

i

is pronounced ‘ee’, except when it follows c, ch, r, s, sh, z and zh, in which case it is pronounced approximately ‘er’

ian

is pronounced ‘ien’

q

is pronounced ‘ch’ as in cheap

r

is similar to the English ‘r’ but is pronounced with the tongue behind the front teeth

x

is pronounced ‘sh’ as in sham

z

is pronounced ‘ds’ as in hands

zh

is pronounced ‘j’ as in jasmine

When citing Chinese names, the family name is given first, followed by the given name. Following the usual practice, Chinese emperors are designated by their reign titles, not by their personal names.

Prehistoric man in China

The fossil remains of early man in China were found in the 1920s at Dragon Bone Mountain, Zhoukoudian, thirty miles from Beijing. These were of homo erectus, who lived between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago, who was a predecessor of homo sapiens, that is modern man. At this time north China had a relatively mild climate, buffalo, deer and sheep grazed the grasslands and wild pig and rhinoceros could be found in the undergrowth. Beijing man was a hunter gatherer who made tools of quartz and greenstone and could use fire. He had a flat skull, protruding mouth and a relatively large brain. In 1941, when China was at war with Japan, these finds were removed for safety and then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Many thousands of years later homo sapiens, who had probably come from Africa, began to occupy sites in China. Three skulls, found in the Middle Cave at Zhoukoudian gave an unconfirmed radiocarbon date of 16,922 BCE. Deposits of stone tools made by homo sapiens have been found in various places in northern Shaanxi.

From about 8,000 BCE the climate of East Asia became warm and moist. North China was covered with dense forests, elephants roamed the land and crocodiles could be found in the rivers. Neolithic cultures, marked by the cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals, began to appear.

In 1973 an example of an early Neolithic settlement was found at Hemudu in south-east China. Finds included terracotta pottery, the remains of pigs and buffaloes and articles made of wood and bone. The bone articles included whistles made from the bones of birds. These whistles, which emit a very high note, may have been used to lure birds rather than to make music. A notable feature of the Hemudu settlement was that its people were cultivating wet rice.

The best-known Neolithic site is the village of Banpo near Xi’an, which was occupied from about 4,500 BCE. Its inhabitants cultivated millet using polished stone hoes and knives. They had domesticated animals, the most common being pigs and dogs, but the remains of sheep and cattle have also been found. They supplemented their diet with fish and they also went hunting, killing deer and other animals. They clothed themselves with a fibre made from hemp and possibly with silk, as silkworm cocoons have been found on the site.

Banpo had a residential area comprising some one hundred houses and other buildings. The earlier houses were half underground, while the later houses stood on ground level and had a wooden framework. Each house had a central pillar to support a thatched roof, a fire pit and a door which faced south. Some of the floors were dressed with white clay and clay was used to make ovens, cupboards and benches. This part of the village was surrounded by an artificial moat for protection from wild animals. There was a cemetery, where adults were buried in individual graves, often with a ceramic vessel beside the body. Infants who had died were placed in pottery jars and buried near the houses.

In another sector of the village was the pottery. Six kilns have been found and over half a million fragments of pottery have been dug up. The kilns made pots for drinking, cooking, storage and burial. One type of pottery, a coarser variety made out of grey clay, was decorated with cord marks, or incised patterns. Some pots have scratch marks on them, which have sometimes been interpreted as an early form of writing. Finer pots, made out of red clay, have human or animal designs painted on them using manganese dioxide for black and iron oxide for red designs. The pots were then fired at a temperature of 1000-1400 degrees centigrade. The most famous piece of painted pottery is a basin which bears a drawing of a fish on its side and a human face in the bowl. The human face was very rarely depicted, one of the few other examples being that of a modelled human head with a painted mask on the lid of an urn found on a site to the west of Banpo. A snake appears to run up the back of the head and the person depicted appears to be wearing a collar or ruff round his or her neck.

The people of Banpo belonged to the Yangshao culture, Yangshao being the name of a village in the province of Henan which was excavated in the 1920s by the Swedish archaeologist J Gunnar Andersson. Yangshao culture, which spread over Henan and Shaanxi between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, was marked by the appearance of villages defended by moats, which had sophisticated methods of producing and storing food and which had a well-organized society, possibly headed by women.

Soon after Andersson made his discoveries at Yangshao, archaeologists found a completely different type of Neolithic pottery at Longshan in Shandong province. Longshan pottery was black and decorated with rings and grooves. It was much finer than Yangshao ware, was elevated on a circular foot or on legs and may have been made on a potter’s wheel. Longshan culture, which seemed more advanced than that of Yangshao, spread along the middle and lower Yangzi valley. When an excavation at Miaodigou in Henan found that Yangshao ware was found below