Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ bronze foundries produced thousands of tons of beautiful bronze work, including huge vessels. One wonders how people in such an early civilization could work with several tons of molten metal at a time. The industrial accident rate must have been horrific, and deforestation must have been extensive to produce the needed fuels. Very possibly, tracts of forest were reserved and selectively cut, as was done for later metalworking activities (Wagner 2008).

      The Shang bureaucracy was complicated and lavish enough to include Many Dogs Officers, who took care of the hunting hounds. There were also Many Horses Officers (Keightley 1999: 280; 2000: 111–12). These officials are frequently mentioned in oracle bone inscriptions. There were cooks, supposedly including the legendary Yi Yin, cook to King Tang. (The latter, at least, was apparently real.) Yi Yin came as part of the entourage of the bride in a royal marriage and appeared carrying a bronze ding, a big three-legged meat-cooking dish (So 1992: 11). Thousands of dings survive (maybe one of them is Yi Yin’s), and residue analysis confirms that they were for cooking meat. Yi’s teachings on cooking appear in the records of Lü Buwei in the third century CE; alas for ancient lore, it is fairly clear from the third-century writing style that they are apocryphal (see the discussion of Warring States foodways below in “Later Zhou and the Warring States”). The ordinary people, meanwhile, ate mallows and onions—for which, Wang Chong reminds us, no gourmet cook is needed (1907: 69). (Mallows, the Malva parviflora complex, are humble herbs that were an extremely common food among the poor and ordinary folk in old China; they became a symbol of poverty and thus were shunned by later generations [E. Anderson 1988]. They are, however, quite good and are also among the most nutritious foods known to science. Wang refers to the fruits, a children’s snack still popular in my youth in California, where they were known as “cheeses”—they look and taste like tiny green cheeses.)

      Weather and pests were an endless problem. Wind was a constant and major concern; David Keightley, who did archaeological work in the area, says from experience that the Shang kings did not exaggerate: the wind is ferocious. Situated in a fertile and lush but climatically challenged part of China, Shang could lurch from lavish abundance to desperate want and back to prosperity in quite short time ranges.

      Time was critical: seasons and dates had to be coordinated for planting. The Chinese obsession with almanacs and calendars had begun, driven by the need to manage planting and harvest. I should correct here the common scholars’ belief that the rulers had to prepare calendars for the stupid peasants. Evidently these scholars have never farmed. Farmers know perfectly well when to plant and harvest and have many ways of determining this. The calendars were, instead, for timing elite rituals. However, the farmers later got some imagined benefits: the calendars included predictions about the coming year’s weather. Dawn and dusk were important, but night was a scary time to stay indoors; lamps do not exist in the archaeological record (Keightley 2000: 25), and burning straw or wood for light could go only so far.

      Shang had quite powerful rulers, who had extensive authority. They constructed vast earthworks: walls, altars, building complexes. They were buried in enormous tombs, along with vast numbers of human and animal sacrifices. (Ian Morris, 2010: 213, has rather morbidly estimated that “a quarter of a million people” were sacrificed during the dynasty’s long run. However, this number seems a bit high.) Kings became deified ancestors, requiring a hundred or so individuals to accompany them into the other world. Even larger sacrifices of both humans and horses were sometimes made. One king went out with 79 humans, 28 horses, a deer, and, most oddly, three monkeys (Lu Liancheng and Yan 2002: 161). One wonders why the simians. Guard dogs were also sacrificed in some cases, presumably to guard the dead in the afterlife.

      As elsewhere, however (Bellah 2011: 213), human sacrifice ended after a few centuries. During Zhou, some human sacrificing continued, and animal sacrifices including dogs were frequent (Falkenhausen 2006: 181–82), but sacrifice rapidly diminished and finally died out. I think the old Marxian explanation is the best: kings simply could not afford the loss of labor power, whether human or animal.

      Human sacrifice declined early enough that Confucius was unaware of it (though burials show it was still being done locally in his time). He was horrified that people sacrificed straw figures of people and animals, since it seemed too much like the real thing; he did not know that the real thing had indeed been the rule and was not altogether extinct in remote states even in his own time. Straw itself then gave way to pottery by Qin and Han times. This delights archaeologists, since we have wonderful pottery models—accurate and often artistically beautiful—of virtually everything a dead person could wish. Alas for archaeology, pottery gave way a few centuries later to paper models, which are still the rule in Chinese memorial rites. They are burned ritually, thus “sent to the sky,” where they become the real thing in the world of the deceased.

      In Shang, the king could order farmers to work collectively in the fields. Officers supervised (Keightley 1999: 279). In one storage pit, “444 stone sickles showing wear were discovered with gold leaves, stone sculpture, bronze ritual vessels, and jade artifacts. Such precious items would be found neither in the storage pit of an ordinary farmer nor in a stone workshop. The implements must have been stored there by a master” (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 28). He was evidently a noble—either an administrator or an owner of an estate. The Shang used stone implements to conduct slash-and-burn agriculture in forests, as well as upland agriculture on grass and brush steppes. (Bronze is impractical for farming, though it was used for lack of anything better; it is expensive and brittle and does not hold an edge well.) The bottomlands especially were valued as fertile farmland. Ash, vegetable debris, and presumably dung restored soil fertility (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 29).

      Worship was directed especially at the high god Di (“heavenly king” or “thearch”) or Shang Di. (This shang means “above” and has nothing to do with the dynastic name, which means “merchant.” Legends related that it got this meaning because the Shang elite became merchants when the dynasty fell. There is no proof of this, but it is an intriguing idea.) The high god was known in Zhou as Tian, “Heaven.”

      Dead kings—along with earlier, otherwise forgotten ancestors—routinely caused trouble when their wants and needs were not met. One of the main jobs of shamans and diviners was to find out which ancestor had been offended when things went wrong. Anything from the living king’s sickness to a drought or plague of locusts could be caused by shortchanging an ancestor when sacrifices were made. Therefore, many sacrifices were intended to keep the ancestors from punishing the living or to make up for previous slights that caused the ancestors to punish the living. This custom survives today, as among the Akha minority of the far south: “a man who had a stroke made the connection that his stroke was caused by not offering the correctly colored chicken at his ancestral offerings” (Tooker 2012: 38). In Shang, this practice not only provided excuses for state-building rituals but also trapped Shang in a round of destruction. Humans and wealth goods were sacrificed at an appalling rate.

      The vast majority of written records of Shang are questions to the gods and ancestors, carved on scapular bones and turtle shells. The bones and shells were cracked by heat, the cracks being read as answers to the questions. Often the answers were then carved on the bones.

      These oracle bones can provide a whole ethnography of Shang (Flad 2008; Keightley 2000, 2006). They show, most obviously, consumption of sheep, pigs, turtles, deer, and so on. The inscriptions are somewhat less clear. There is continuing controversy as to what they are “really” about. If all that mattered was the forecast, it would have been easier to write it down with a brush, as indeed the scribes sometimes did (Keightley 2006); why go to incredible effort and expense to carve it? Evidently something about state power and authority is involved. Showing off expensive evidences of ritual divination may have been the goal. Presumably there was a validating religious idea that only carved oracles were truly effective. The Shang gods, like so many gods worldwide, probably demanded that the worshipers show seriousness by diligent hard work.

      Writing seems to have been invented—or just possibly diffused as a concept from the Near East—around СКАЧАТЬ