Shang Dynasty

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The Shang Dynasty was the second of the traditional Chinese dynasties, ruling the North China Plain across roughly the second half of the second millennium BCE — conventionally dated to about 1600–1046 BCE, though the early figures are reconstructions rather than fixed years. It is the earliest period of Chinese history for which there is contemporary written evidence, and that evidence is unusual: most of it consists of records of divination, inscribed on bone.

The Shang kings ruled from a series of capitals, the last and best known at Anyang in modern Henan, where excavation since the 1920s has recovered royal tombs, bronze foundries, and tens of thousands of inscribed oracle bones. These were the shoulder blades of cattle and the under-shells of turtles, prepared and then touched with a heated point until the surface cracked; a diviner read the cracks as the answer to a question put to the ancestors or the high god Di. Many were afterward inscribed with the question, sometimes the king’s own forecast, and occasionally the outcome. They record concerns of the throne — harvests, weather, war, childbirth, the proper offerings to the dead, whether a given ancestor was sending sickness. This is pyromancy, divination by fire and heat, and it stands at the head of a long Chinese divinatory tradition that later runs through the Yijing.

The religion the bones disclose centered on the dead. The Shang held that deceased kings and forebears persisted as powers who could help or harm the living, and who required regular sacrifice on a fixed ritual calendar; above them stood Di, a remote high god governing weather and victory, approached not directly but through the ancestral line. Scholars generally see in this royal ancestor cult the deep root of the ancestral reverence that remained central to Chinese religion long after the dynasty fell. The Shang were also master bronze casters, and their ritual vessels — cast for offering food and wine to the dead — are among the finest metalwork of the ancient world.

For a long time the dynasty was known only from much later texts, and some historians doubted it had existed at all. The oracle bones settled the matter: the king list they preserve corresponds closely to the Shang succession recorded centuries afterward by the historian Sima Qian, confirming a dynasty that transmitted accounts had remembered but could not document. The Shang fell to the Zhou around 1046 BCE, whose founders justified the conquest with the claim that Heaven had withdrawn its mandate from a corrupt last king — a charge written by the victors, and one of the earliest expressions of an idea that would shape Chinese political thought for three thousand years.

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