Culture Passport

The Birth of Civilization in the Far East

It has been widely appreciated for centuries now that human civilization did not emerge from one single source. Instead there were numerous parts of the world where complex societies began to emerge gradually in the millennia following the end of the last ice age around 12,000 years ago. These nodes of early civilization are generally found in the northern hemisphere close to the Tropic of Cancer and include Egypt, Mesopotamia, northern India, Mexico and eastern China. The latter, in particular, is seen as being a major rival to the Fertile Crescent in the Near East as the place where civilization was born. Advanced cultures emerged out of the lands covering the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean and the Far East which had virtually no contact with each other for thousands of years. Thus, eastern China, specifically the fertile lands along the lower courses of the Yellow, Pearl and Yangtze Rivers, are the birthplace of civilization in the Far East. The Chinese civilization which emerged here was complex and left a great legacy to Asia and the world over thousands of years. And that same culture is said to have coalesced into the Xia Dynasty at the very end of the third millennium BCE. Or at least this used to be the accepted theory. All of that has been turned on its head in the last century, for scholars are now not entirely sure that there ever was any such thing as the Xia Dynasty! Let’s explore this complicated issue. 

China’s Early History  

The Xia Dynasty is typically identified as beginning around 2070 BCE. Social development had been occurring on a wide scale in China prior to this. Ultimately the origins of Chinese civilization can be traced back to around 10,000 BCE when the people here began transitioning from relying on hunting and gathering for their sustenance to experiment with agriculture. By the seventh and sixth millennia BCE farming was being practiced extensively along the courses of the three great rivers, the Yangtze, Yellow and Pearl Rivers. Millet and rice became staple crops that were grown abundantly and as calorific intake became more stable people were able to begin pursuing other activities that led to more complex societies.

For instance, the Yangshao culture of the fifth and fourth millennia BCE began producing a distinct type of pottery with reddish clay and decorated with black geometric designs. These people built curious villages on the middle course of the Yellow River, ones in which they dug out pits about one metre deep and then built upwards from these, so that their houses were semi-subterranean. The wheel, writing systems and other markers of early technological and cultural development all followed in the late fourth and third millennia BCE amongst the Longshan people and others. However, there was no Chinese state to speak of at this time, not in the same way that the Old Kingdom had emerged as a unifying force in Egypt, with centralised governments and rulers that conduct warfare and deploy state resources to build elaborate burial tombs. Instead China remained a region, not a power in and of itself. There were disparate groups of people living in clusters of different cultures in what are now central and eastern China, but very little to tie them together in any sense. The Xia Dynasty had traditionally been identified as changing that. 

Sources

Before exploring any further and querying the authenticity of the Xia Dynasty, it is worth pausing here to examine the sources from which our information about the Xia Dynasty has been obtained. One of the main problems, and indeed one of the main reasons why the entire concept of a Xia Dynasty has been called into doubt in recent times, is that the texts on which Chinese scholars typically relied for their information concerning the Xia Dynasty were in the main written about 2,000 years after the events they purported to describe. This is problematic, as sources like these did not cite where they were getting their information from, so we have to take at face value the stories recorded in these texts as though it is true when the reality is that it could have been very fanciful stuff, almost legendary. 

The foremost of these texts is the Records of the Grand Historian. This is a canonical work of ancient Chinese history. It was produced in the early first century BCE by a scholar named Sima Qian who is typically regarded as one of China’s first great historians. The Records are undoubtedly an excellent resource when it comes to the history of the events of the first millennium BCE in China, but even when recounting the events of the Seven Warring States or the Qin Empire, periods of Chinese history which only occurred a few hundred years before his own time, Sima Qian was prone to making some errors. Given this, the lists of kings of the Xia Dynasty and their accomplishments needs to be taken with a small mound of salt, particularly so as he was relying on oral tradition passed down from generation to generation. There would have been very little documentary evidence available to Sima Qian for him to base his accounts on. 

Luckily a slightly older source is available in the shape of the Bamboo Annals, an annalistic history discovered in the tomb of the fourth century BCE King Xiang of Wei. It purports to present details of Chinese history going back to ancient times, including a timeline of the Xia Dynasty. It is supplemented by the Shujing or Book of Documents, a collection of documents, speeches and royal edicts allegedly issued by Chinese rulers over many centuries.

It is regarded as one of the foundational texts of Chinese literature and is sometimes ascribed to Confucius. Finally, a literary text, The Classic of the Mountains and Sea, which dates to around the fourth century BCE, contains numerous references to individuals and events which are said to have occurred during the era of the Xia Dynasty. Yet nearly all of these texts were produced in the second half of the first millennium BCE, in or around 1,500 years after the events they purport to describe, while the only earlier text, the Book of Documents, is only marginally older, being written sometime around the seventh century BCE. These are supplemented by archaeological and material evidence, but this can really only tell us a certain amount about events 4,000 years ago and where it does it very rarely substantiates what we are told about the Xia Dynasty in these classic texts of early Chinese literature. So, the basis for what has been passed down about the Xia Dynasty is flimsy to say the least. 

The Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors

We get a good sense of how difficult it is to take the received narrative of the Xia Dynasty at face value by examining the story of the Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors who preceded the Xia Dynasty. The Three Sovereigns are depicted as being quasi-divine beings who presided over a period of peace and prosperity in ancient China. The most commonly identified three figures are Fuxi, Nuwa and Shennong. Much as was the case with the polytheistic religions of most of the world’s earliest civilizations, these were viewed as immanent gods who intervened in the world. They were often referred to as the August Ones. Fuxi is credited with teaching humanity with some basic skills such as how to hunt, create fires and cook. Similar stories abound in polytheistic mythology elsewhere and the story of Fuxi mirrors that of Prometheus in Greek mythology. Nuwa is a female sovereign and is said to have forged humanity from yellow clay or earth, while Shennong was identified as teaching humans to farm and use the abundance of nature to their benefit. These Three Sovereigns are now viewed as culture heroes of ancient Chinese society and are not realistically viewed as having been real historical characters. 

Things seem more plausible when it comes to the Five Emperors that allegedly succeeded the Three Sovereigns. These were Huangdi or the Yellow Emperor, Zhuanxu, Ku, Yao and Shun. These were deemed to be sage kings or philosopher kings who imparted great wisdom to the Chinese people and much of the laws, systems and structures of society. For instance, Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, was understood to have devised the Chinese calendar and the first writing systems. Ku was viewed as the unifier of China, while Shun was said to have promoted agriculture and other infrastructural development. Much in the way that Lycurgus as a founder of ancient Sparta or Romulus and Remus as the builders of Rome were probably fictional or at least based so loosely on historical characters as to be almost completely different figures, so too the Five Emperors are generally identified as not being real people today. Historians have then tended to think that the Xia Dynasty rulers, who followed immediately after the Five Emperors, were the first real life rulers of China. But if we begin to look at their stories, it seems rather unlikely. 

Yu the Great and the Great Flood 

The first ruler of the Xia Dynasty was King Yu, otherwise known as Yu the Great. He is understood to have ascended to the throne of a unified Chinese state of some kind around 2070 BCE and ruled for several decades thereafter. His reign is intimately connected with the Great Flood.

Many different traditions have a legend of a flood which is part of their origin story. There is one in Judaism that was subsequently absorbed into Christianity and Islam, while the people of Mesopotamia also had a great flood in their origin stories. These are usually associated with god or other celestial beings. The Chinese one is rare in being tied to an allegedly temporal ruler, leading many to assume over the centuries that the Chinese Great Flood was a real occurrence. According to the ancient sources the heartlands of China were plagued in the early years of Yu’s reign by extensive flooding, something which is not entirely implausible when we consider how early Chinese society clustered around the Yangtze, Yellow and Pearl Rivers and how integral these were to agriculture and life in general here. Yu’s predecessors had tried to stop the floods by buildings dams, dykes and other bits of infrastructure to bring it under control. All had failed though, that is until Yu came along. He was asked by the last of the Five Emperors, Shun, to oversee a flood project and so rose to become ruler. Instead of trying to battle the floodwaters after they had breached the great rivers, he employed tens of thousands of labourers to begin dredging the rivers and deepening the channels in them. In this way he made the rivers wider and deeper and diverted the excess water out into the Yellow Sea. The story went that Yu worked tirelessly to bring this about, overseeing the project for thirteen years and rarely returning home. But he was successful, ending the flood and bringing more land than ever under agriculture. 

The Nine Provinces and Creation of the Xia Kingdom

Yu was greatly respected on account of his success in ending the Great Flood and he managed to establish a hereditary dynasty thereafter, the Xia Dynasty. He also undertook a wide range of other reforms to the kingdom which formed the basis for much of Chinese society and governance for millennia to come. One of the most important was his alleged reorganisation of the Xia kingdom into nine provinces. The nine provinces were Jizhou along the Yellow River, one known for its fertile lands and role in agriculture; Yanzhou, a province in the east equivalent to the modern-day province of Shandong; Qingzhou, a province said to be heavily forested at the time and the source of timber for the building of Xia cities and towns; Xuzhou, a province between the modern-day provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui; Yangzhou in the south-east, which was a great source of fish and salt; Jingzhou in the south; Yuzhou in the central plains, which was said to be a significant province for administering the kingdom from; Liangzhou, a province in the northwest that was significant for controlling the trade routes to the east; and Yongzhou in the southwest, a province known for mineral wealth and mines. The creation of the nine provinces was said to have been a seminal moment in the development of a strong Chinese kingdom and indeed China has continued to be known as a country of large provinces down to the present day, with this concept dominating its administrative system. 

The Xia Dynasty 

Yu was the just the first, albeit the most important, of the Xia monarchs. The dynasty which he founded was said to have ruled over China for the better part of half a millennium, with many studies proposing a cut-off point around 1600 BCE, although the chronologies presented in works like the Bamboo Annals and the Records of the Grand Historian differed very considerably. We have several lists of the monarchs involved, though the accounts of their reigns can hardly be considered authoritative historical accounts. For instance, we learn of the third Xia king, Tai Kang, Yu the Great’s grandson, that he ruled for the better part of three decades but was eventually overthrown by Zhong Kang on account of having been too addicted to hunting, a pastime that distracted him from ruling. Of Zhong Kang the foremost story we have is that his astronomers failed to warn the people of a solar eclipse, leading to panic amongst the people when it occurred. This period of poor Xia leadership only came to an end when Shao Kang, the sixth king of the dynasty, claimed the throne after a civil war. He was said to have then gone on to restore the Xia kingdom to the power and prosperity it had enjoyed under Yu the Great. Shao Kang was also identified as playing a role in the origins of the Chinese practice of ancestor worship. Throughout all of this the Xia monarchs and the Chinese kingdom that they ruled over were portrayed as moving their capital frequently and also waging war on foreign tribes from Mongolia and Manchu, the people who would be identified as the Guifang in a later era. Eventually the Xia Dynasty gave way to the Shang Dynasty. The Shang era lasted from around 1600 BCE down to 1046 BCE and is much more historically and archaeologically attested to than the Xia period.  

Erlitou Culture 

All of this is not suggest that there was not something equivalent to the Xia Dynasty and the state that rulers like Yu the Great purportedly ruled over in China towards the end of the third millennium BCE and into the second. The most important of these was the Erlitou culture that covered an extensive part of China during the Early Bronze Age, roughly between 1900 BCE and 1500 BCE. This society is named after the archaeological site of Erlitou near what is now Yanshi in Henan Province.

Extensive excavations have been carried out here since the 1950s, revealing that a large urban centre covering some three square kilometres existed here in the first half of the second millennium BCE. There is evidence of a degree of urban planning, including a royal complex of some kind replete with a palace, residential areas, workshops and ceremonial and civic centres including temples. The people who lived here must have been reasonably advanced in their social progress. The streets, for instance, are laid out in a grid-like pattern, something which doesn’t happen by accident and indicates a level of bureaucracy and government organisation that is not altogether unlike the organisational abilities one would expect of the Xia Dynasty. That palace complexes are found here also indicates that the government was strong enough to organise thousands of labourers to facilitate such construction projects. 

The Erlitou culture extended beyond the Erlitou site itself and has given rise to the theory that the people who lived here in Henan Province and elsewhere in the Early Bronze Age were the basis for notions of a Xia Dynasty and the kingdom ruled over by quasi-mythical characters like Yu the Great. Whoever these people were, they were also skilled metallurgists. Their burial sites have been found to have included ritual objects and votive offerings which included well-made weapons, tools and artefacts. Indeed, the workshops at Erlitou indicate that metalworking was organised on planned lines within the city. These people clearly did not control a vast tract of land that was a forerunner of the Chinese empire that came later. But much like the Sumerian city states of Mesopotamia and the other side of Asia in the third millennium BCE, they were important forerunners of the larger kingdoms and empires that emerged from the lands of the Yellow, Yangtze and Pearl Rivers in centuries to come.  

Was the Xia Dynasty Real? 

So, was the Xia Dynasty real? As we have seen, there is little archaeological evidence to support it, while there is archaeological evidence to support the existence of the Erlitou culture instead. The written evidence for a supposed Xia Dynasty and a Chinese kingdom at that time is rather more substantial, but the sources involved, as venerated as they are in Chinese culture, were written in or around one and half to two millennia after the events they describe. They are vague and present legendary stories about biblical floods and indolent rulers. For these reasons a school of historical inquiry arose in China in the early twentieth century, just after the imperial system had come to an end and a Chinese Republic had been ushered into existence, with challenged the many myths about China’s ancient history. The historians of the Doubting Antiquity School or Yigupai were very sceptical about the historicity of the Xia Dynasty. So they should have been. It almost certainly never existed in the format described in the Bamboo Annals, Records of the Grand Historian and other narratives. But it is of value nonetheless. Origin myths and fabulous histories like this can tell us quite a lot about a culture and the values of its people in times gone by. While the Xia Dynasty might not have existed in the way which the ancient texts argued it did, the very fact that many Chinese scholars of a later period believed that the origins of the Chinese state and the imperial system could be found in the era between the twenty-first and seventeenth centuries BCE is significant in and of itself. The stories of rulers gaining control over nature and allowing agriculture to flourish, as Yu the Great was portrayed as doing, were also important. Chinese people might not have known exactly what happened in Xia times, but they knew enough to realise that changes had occurred back in that era that had formed the basis for the later evolution of a Chinese state and culture. 

__________________________________________________

Sources: 

Sarah Allan, ‘The Myth of the Xia Dynasty’, in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 2 (1984), pp. 242–256. 

Sarah Allan, ‘Erlitou and the Formation of Chinese Civilization: Toward a New Paradigm’, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 66, No. 2 (May, 2007), pp. 461–496. 

Anne Birrell, ‘The Four Flood Myth Traditions of Classical China’, in T’oung Pao, Second Series, Vol. 83, Fasc. 4/5 (1997), pp. 213–259. 

David N. Keightley (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley, California, 1983). 

Edward L. Shaughnessy, ‘On The Authenticity of the Bamboo Annals’, in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (June, 1986), pp. 149–180. 
Robert L. Thorp, ‘Erlitou and the Search for the Xia’, in Early China, Vol. 16 (1991), pp. 1–38