Yinxu

Yinxu (殷墟) is the name of the archaeological site of the last capital of the Shang dynasty, the first Chinese dynasty confirmed by contemporary written records. It lies just north-west of the city of Anyang in Henan Province, in the plain of northern China, about 500 km south of Beijing. The ancient city spread across both banks of the Huan River, which curves through the site.

The name means “Ruins of Yin”. Yin was the name later Chinese historians used for the Shang, especially in its last phase, after the capital was moved to this place. The Shang themselves seem to have called their capital “Shang” or the “Great Settlement Shang” (Da Yi Shang).

Yinxu is not a single building but a huge landscape of remains: foundations of rammed-earth palaces and temples, residential areas, workshops for bronze casting, bone carving and jade and pottery making, roads, drainage ditches, cemeteries of ordinary people and the tombs of the kings themselves.

The site is famous above all for oracle bones, which contain the earliest substantial body of Chinese writing, and for its bronzes, which show the high point of Bronze Age casting in East Asia. UNESCO inscribed Yinxu on the World Heritage List in 2006, recognising it as testimony to a “golden age” of early Chinese culture.

The heart of Yinxu is at Xiaotun, on the south bank of the Huan River where it bends. Here archaeologists found more than 80 foundations of large buildings, made of rammed earth: layers of soil pounded hard between wooden boards. On these platforms stood timber halls with thatched roofs. Scholars interpret them as palaces, ancestral temples and altars. There were no stone walls: Shang architecture was built of earth and wood, and only the foundations, post holes and bases survive.

Instead of a city wall, a large ditch ran along the west and south of the palace area, with the river on the other sides. Around this core lay many clusters of houses, workshops and family cemeteries spread over some 30 square kilometres, suggesting a loosely organised city of lineages rather than a tightly walled town.

On the north bank, at Xibeigang near Houjiazhuang, lies the royal cemetery. Its largest tombs are huge pits with sloping ramps leading down from two or four sides, forming a cross shape. The burial chambers lay more than ten metres deep. Around them are over a thousand smaller pits containing sacrificial victims, horses, chariots and other offerings.

Visitors to the site today see reconstructed buildings, preserved chariot pits, the tomb of Fu Hao and a museum. Most of the site, however, lies under fields and the modern town, and much remains to be excavated.

The Shang kings believed that their dead ancestors and other powers, including a high god called Di, controlled the weather, harvests, illness and victory in war. To learn their will, the king’s diviners practised pyromancy, divination by fire. They prepared the shoulder blades (scapulae) of cattle and the flat under-shells (plastrons) of turtles, carved rows of hollows into the back, and then applied heat to the hollows until the bone cracked with a sharp sound. The shape of the cracks, often like the character 卜 (bu, “to divine”), was read as an answer.

Afterwards scribes often carved a record into the bone. A complete inscription can contain the date, the name of the diviner, the question (“charge”), the king’s prediction, and sometimes what actually happened. Topics include rain and harvests, hunting, military campaigns, childbirth, illness, dreams, and which ancestors should receive which sacrifices. One well-known set asks whether Fu Hao’s childbirth will be good.

About 150,000 pieces of inscribed oracle bone and shell have been found, most of them at Yinxu. The inscriptions use around 4,000–5,000 distinct characters, of which only about a quarter to a third have been deciphered with confidence. Many are clearly ancestors of modern Chinese characters.

The oracle bones are extraordinary because they record the concerns of real kings in their own time, rather than stories written down centuries later. They are the foundation of our knowledge of Shang history, religion and language.

Shang artisans made bronze vessels for offering food and wine to the ancestors, as well as weapons, tools and chariot fittings. Unlike early Near Eastern and European metalworkers, who often hammered metal or cast it in simple moulds, Shang founders used sectional piece-moulds made of clay, which allowed complex shapes and decoration to be cast directly. Foundry sites at Yinxu have yielded thousands of mould fragments, showing large-scale, organised production.

The largest known Shang bronze, the Houmuwu ding, was found at Yinxu in 1939. It is a rectangular cauldron 1.33 m high weighing about 833 kg, the heaviest bronze vessel known from the ancient world. Its inscription, formerly read as “Simuwu”, is now usually read as “Houmuwu”, an offering to a royal mother named Wu. The vessel is now in the National Museum of China in Beijing.

Shang bronzes are decorated with the taotie, a symmetrical mask-like design with eyes, horns and jaws, often formed of two animals in profile. Its meaning is debated; it may represent spirits or simply be a powerful decorative motif.

Yinxu also provides the earliest evidence of chariots in China. Pits containing two-wheeled chariots buried with their horses, and sometimes their drivers, appear around the time of King Wu Ding. Because the chariot appears suddenly and fully developed, most scholars think it was introduced from the steppes of Central Asia. Workshops for bone objects (such as hairpins and arrowheads), jade carving and pottery complete the picture of a large, specialised urban economy.

Almost all the large royal tombs at Yinxu were robbed in ancient or modern times. In 1976 the archaeologist Zheng Zhenxiang and her team found a smaller tomb near the palace area at Xiaotun, designated M5, which had never been disturbed. It turned out to belong to Fu Hao, a consort of King Wu Ding.

The tomb was a pit about 5.6 by 4 metres with a wooden chamber, yet it held extraordinary riches: more than 460 bronze objects (including about 200 ritual vessels and 130 weapons), about 755 jades, over 560 bone objects, ivory cups, and around 6,900 cowrie shells, which were used as a form of wealth. Many bronzes bear her name. Sixteen human victims and six dogs were also buried with her.

Fu Hao is mentioned in many oracle-bone inscriptions. They show her leading military campaigns with thousands of troops, conducting sacrifices, and holding her own estate. The king divined about her childbirths and illnesses. She is the most vividly documented woman of Shang China and shows that elite women could hold military and religious power.

Because the tomb is intact and well documented, it is a key reference point for dating Shang objects and for understanding the reign of Wu Ding, the period from which most oracle bones come.

Traditional Chinese histories, above all the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) by Sima Qian (c. 100 BCE), say that the Shang moved their capital several times until King Pan Geng settled at Yin. From then until the fall of the dynasty, twelve kings ruled there. The last, Di Xin, was remembered in later Zhou-dynasty writings as a cruel tyrant, a portrait that served to justify the Zhou conquest.

The oracle bones allowed scholars to test these traditions. In 1917 the scholar Wang Guowei showed that the names of Shang kings and ancestors in the inscriptions largely matched Sima Qian’s king list, written a thousand years later. This proved that the Shang dynasty was historical and that the Shiji preserved genuine information, although with some errors in order and relationships.

The inscriptions reveal a state centred on the king and his ancestral cult. The king was the chief diviner and offered sacrifices to a large pantheon of ancestors according to a regular schedule. Royal power depended on alliances with lineages and on warfare against neighbouring peoples, such as the Qiang to the west.

Around 1046 BCE, according to the dating proposed by the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project, King Wu of Zhou defeated Di Xin at the Battle of Muye, and the Shang capital was abandoned. The Zhou allowed Shang descendants to continue ancestral rites in the state of Song. The exact date of the conquest remains debated, with proposals ranging over several decades.

Human sacrifice was a regular part of Shang royal religion. Oracle-bone inscriptions record offerings of people to ancestors, sometimes by the dozen or hundred at a time, and many of the victims were prisoners taken in war, especially Qiang people. Estimates of the number of victims recorded in inscriptions run into the thousands.

Archaeology confirms these records. Around the royal tombs at Xibeigang are well over a thousand sacrificial pits, many containing decapitated skeletons laid in rows. Large tombs also contained attendants buried with the dead, possibly relatives, guards or servants. Animal sacrifices, including horses, dogs and cattle, were also common.

Scientific studies of skeletons, including analysis of strontium and oxygen isotopes in teeth and of ancient DNA, have begun to show where victims came from, how old they were and how they lived. Such work helps restore a human identity to people who appear in the inscriptions only as numbers.

Human sacrifice declined after the Shang and was increasingly criticised in later Chinese thought, though retainer burial continued in some states for centuries. At Yinxu, remembering the victims is an essential part of understanding a society that also produced great art and the beginnings of Chinese writing.

For centuries farmers near Anyang dug up old bones and sold them to pharmacies as “dragon bones”, a traditional medicine ground into powder. A popular story says that in 1899 the scholar Wang Yirong, while being treated for illness, noticed ancient characters on bones bought for his medicine. The details of this story are probably legendary, but Wang was indeed among the first to collect inscribed bones and recognise them as ancient writing.

In 1903 Liu E published the first book of rubbings of oracle bones. The scholar Luo Zhenyu traced them to the village of Xiaotun at Anyang and identified the place as the ruins of the Shang capital. Wang Guowei’s work followed, confirming the historical value of the inscriptions.

In 1928 the newly founded Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica began scientific excavations at Yinxu, led at different times by Dong Zuobin, Li Ji and Liang Siyong. In fifteen seasons up to 1937 they uncovered palace foundations and the royal tombs, and in 1936 found pit YH127, which contained over 17,000 pieces of inscribed shell. These were among the first large-scale scientific excavations conducted by Chinese archaeologists, and Yinxu is often called the birthplace of modern Chinese archaeology.

The Japanese invasion halted the work in 1937. After the civil war, the finds and records of the Academia Sinica excavations went to Taiwan, while excavations at Yinxu resumed in 1950 under the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing. Both collections remain essential for research, a legacy of China’s twentieth-century divisions.

When did Yinxu become the capital? Traditional histories place Pan Geng’s move to Yin around 1300 BCE. Yet the oracle-bone inscriptions begin only with Wu Ding, and the earliest archaeological phase at Yinxu is modest. In 1999 a large walled city was discovered just north-east of Yinxu across the Huan River, now called Huanbei (“North of the Huan”). It covered about 470 hectares, was occupied for a few decades around 1350–1300 BCE and was then burned and abandoned. Many scholars think Huanbei was the predecessor of Yinxu, perhaps the city of Pan Geng or an earlier king, and that the capital moved to the Xiaotun area around the time of Wu Ding (c. 1250 BCE).

Absolute chronology. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project (1996–2000) combined texts, astronomical records in inscriptions (such as lunar eclipses), radiocarbon dating and archaeology to propose dates such as 1046 BCE for the Zhou conquest and c. 1250–1192 BCE for Wu Ding. Its methods and conclusions have been criticised by some scholars outside China, and alternative dates for the conquest, such as the traditional 1122 BCE or 1027 BCE (derived from the Bamboo Annals), continue to be cited; earlier scholarship had proposed dozens of dates between about 1130 and 1018 BCE. The dates remain approximate.

Periodisation of the bones. Dong Zuobin divided the oracle bones into five periods based on the diviners named in them, their calligraphy and content. Later scholars refined this scheme by grouping inscriptions by diviner groups and by the archaeological context of their discovery. The “Li group” inscriptions, for example, have been dated by different scholars to very different reigns, a long-running debate that affects reconstructions of Shang history.

What kind of state was the Shang? Some historians describe a territorial kingdom with provinces; others, using the inscriptions, see a smaller core ruled directly by the king, surrounded by allied and hostile polities whose loyalty shifted. The inscriptions show only the concerns of the royal court at Yinxu and may overstate its reach. Other Bronze Age cultures of the time, such as Sanxingdui in Sichuan, show that the Shang was one of several complex societies in what is now China.

Written evidence. The oracle bones are primary sources of a special kind: they record divinations, not narratives, and were made for and by the royal court. They are collected in large corpora, notably the Jiaguwen heji, and studied through palaeography, grammar and the reconstruction of sets of related inscriptions. David Keightley’s Sources of Shang History (1978) remains a classic methodological introduction in English. Bronze inscriptions, still short at Yinxu, become much longer in the Zhou period.

Archaeological evidence. The stratigraphy of pottery and bronze styles allows Yinxu to be divided into four main phases. Settlement surveys map neighbourhoods, workshops and cemeteries across the site, and show a city organised around lineage groups. Excavations of foundries and workshops reveal production methods and the organisation of labour.

Scientific methods. Radiocarbon dating, including the dating of oracle bones themselves, has been used to anchor the chronology. Isotope analysis tracks diet and mobility; ancient DNA studies explore the origins of the population and of sacrificial victims; metallurgical analysis traces the sources of copper, tin and lead used in bronzes, some of which may have come from distant regions.

Critical reading of later texts. Accounts of the Shang in Zhou-period and Han-period texts, including the Shiji, were written long after the dynasty’s fall and partly shaped by Zhou ideology, such as the idea of the Mandate of Heaven used to justify the conquest. Comparing them with contemporary inscriptions shows both how much later tradition preserved and how it reshaped the past.