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

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СКАЧАТЬ family ritual. The Xia supposedly ruled from 2205 to 1766 BCE, when they were conquered by the Shang, probably from farther east.

      The last emperor of Xia became the prototype of the “bad last emperor,” who lost the Mandate of Heaven—the legitimacy of his rule in the eyes of the people and the gods—by sinning. He supposedly had a meat forest—trees hung with drying meat—and a lake of ale (or “wine”—jiu, i.e., fermented grain drink). Supposedly he went swimming in it, and the courtiers drank from it like beasts. This exaggeration was cut down to size by Wang Chong (1907: 486–89) in the Later Han dynasty. Wang, a chronic skeptic, debunked this and other fantastic tales of heroic drunkards (including Confucius). But the lure of a sinful wish-fulfillment fantasy was too much for the Chinese historians, and the lake of wine remained—often, though, with a skeptical disclaimer. Stories of bad last emperors proliferated thereafter, providing excuses for their removal by subsequent conquering dynasts.

      The existence of a Xia Dynasty continues to be debated, but there certainly was a major chiefdom or early civilization at that time and place. The main city site known so far is Erlitou, often identified as the capital of the Xia Dynasty. It was large and complex, with stunning art and monumental architecture including many large buildings and walls. It peaked at around 24,000 inhabitants (Liu and Chen 2012:270), and more in large suburbs. During Xia times (perhaps a bit earlier), bronze technology was introduced from the Near East (see, e.g., Sherratt 2006). The evidence for Near Eastern origin of Chinese bronzemaking is now overwhelming (Golas 1999), but the Chinese were quick learners. A huge bronze industry flourished at Erlitou, with copper being mined as much as a hundred miles away.

      The site seems to have had all the trappings of civilization—except one: true writing. We have tallies, symbols, and possible ancestors of characters, but no real characters. Erlitou’s art style spread all over the core area of what would later be China (Allan 2007). A dragon made of turquoise stones, arranged carefully, was found in a grave at Erlitou (Lawler 2009).

      A fascinating speculation on Xia religion and behavior exists in the Li Ji, a Han Dynasty text. The Han writers (or Warring States writers they were copying) assumed: “At the first use of ceremonies, they began with meat and drink. They roasted millet and pieces of pork; they excavated the ground in the form of a jar, and scooped the water from it with their two hands … when one died, … they filled the mouth … with uncooked rice, and (set forth as offerings to him) packets of raw flesh” (Legge 2008: 216). The Li Ji goes on to reconstruct a whole prehistory, including ideas that the very earliest people knew no fire, ate their food raw, and lived in nests; later they invented fire, liquor, and other foods and took to extensive use of the liquor in ceremonies. These ancient times were considered a sort of golden age, rough and hard but natural and free from guile. Because of this, there were no crop failures or disasters, and heaven and earth produced dews and sweet wine (227). Acquaintance with neighboring peoples gave early writers a sense of what simpler, less civilized cultures might do or have done.

      Other large and impressive towns existed in many parts of north China at the same time. Current thinking suggests a mosaic of chiefdoms throughout the region (see, e.g., Hui 2005; Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999). There may have been 10,000 (give or take many thousand!) small independent local societies, with the number shrinking to a couple of thousand states or near-states during Shang times and perhaps still 1,200 at the end of Western Zhou (K.-c. Chang 2002b: 126). They rapidly declined to the well-known couple of dozen Warring States after 500 BCE. K.-c. Chang (2002a, b) points out that the growth of polity size enlarged the work forces available to the rulers of the states that managed to grow. He maintains that productivity per worker did not increase much during this period (a debatable claim). Of course the elites in the loser states became part of that work force!

      Shamanism flourished, and shamans obviously had great power, but exactly how much is hotly debated. Chang (2002a) also notes that Chinese civilization resembled Native American civilizations, and differed from West Asian (and later European) ones, in seeing continuity with nature and revering nature spirits and nature-related deities who were close to humans. They seem to have been psychologically as close as ancestors. As noted above, Chang felt that the East Asian–American universe was one of “continuity” between humans and the rest of the cosmos, divine or worldly. The West, to Chang, displays “rupture” between people and nature and between people and their remote heavenly gods (K.-c. Chang 2002: 193). This is supported by texts from Mesopotamia from the same time period: works like the Epic of Gilgamesh display a strong contrast between the civilized and the wild, with the latter being disliked and feared. This attitude runs through Western literature and philosophy from that time on and is indeed in dramatic contrast with China’s cosmology.

      The Shang Dynasty, in contrast to Xia, is now quite well known (K.-c. Chang 1980, 1983; Keightley 2000; Loewe and Shaughnessy 1999). It began around 1500 to 1600 BCE, not 1766 (as traditional histories recorded). It ruled the central Yellow River region, and its power seems to have extended well up and down stream, as well as west into the Wei Valley and north into the North China Plain. Shang was a brilliant but local civilization, centered on the great central plain of north China, depending on intensive agriculture and pig-raising. It seems to have begun its glory days by conquering the Erlitou polity; it was probably a semiperipheral marcher state conquering the local core, thus beginning a pattern that was frequently repeated in northern China. The Shang people built a capital nearby at Yanshi but soon afterward moved the seat of government downriver to Zhengzhou, which grew to at least 25 square km (Lu Liancheng and Yan 2002: 152) with a population of around 104,000 (Liu and Chen 2012: 282), a huge size for an early city. The capital then moved again, finally settling at Anyang, where another huge city grew up.

      The Shang world was a world of small city-states, and Shang may have been little more than a league of them (Keightley 2000; Lewis 2006, see esp. 137). However, in later times it was clearly a true state. It was probably a typical early Asian state: centered on the capital with the boundaries vague (Keightley 2000: 56–57)—what anthropologists call a galactic polity.

      Anyang was twenty-four square kilometers in extent, making it forty-five times as large as any other settlement remotely close, so we are clearly dealing with a real capital of a real state (Li Feng 2008: 25). About 500 place names appear in the oracle bones. This happens to be about the number of place names known to the average person, worldwide; there seems to be something about the human brain that makes 500 places perhaps the highest easily learned number (Hunn 1990).

      Excavation of Zhengzhou is handicapped by the fact that it is still a flourishing metropolis. Many cultural traits have lasted the entire 3,500 years since it was a capital. These begin with the intensive agriculture and pig raising but also include some startling details. When I visited Zhengzhou in 1978, I became fascinated with the ash-glazed high-fired brownware in the town market. Notable was a pottery kettle with three short, stubby legs, which was sold by the hundred. There were also cups and bowls. In the city’s excellent Shang Dynasty museum, I found the same kettles, cups, and bowls—not merely similar, but almost identical. The oldest of these are the earliest known ash-glazed high-fired pottery in the world. The technique is simple; I have seen it done at traditional kilns. The potter, or his assistant, simply mixes ash, water, and some of the pottery clay. Then the potter gives the pot (already made and dried, but not fired) a quick whirl in this mix and then fires it. The ash fluxes the feldspar in the clay into a good glaze. The style and technique produced pots so cheap and serviceable that no one could improve on them over the centuries. Today’s “sand pots” (made of sand-tempered clay) carry on the tradition and are essential for making good Chinese stews, because they distribute the heat smoothly and evenly, “sweat” a bit in cooking, and do not create the ruinous hot-spots and cold-spots of aluminum ware.

      The Shang world depended on agriculture, which was already quite intensive and involved millets, wheat, barley, rice, vegetables, fruits, and domestic animals. Far from being a largely ceremonial or political site, the capital city was a major manufacturing and commercial hub; at least this was true of the final capital, Anyang (R. Campbell et al. 2011). Vast workshops made artifacts СКАЧАТЬ