Why the West Rules--For Now (34 page)

Who were these top people? Taosi, a site four hundred miles away in the Fen River valley, may provide some clues. This is the biggest
settlement known from these times, with perhaps ten thousand inhabitants. A huge pounded-earth platform may have supported one of China’s first palaces, though the only direct evidence is a decorated fragment of a destroyed wall found in a pit. (I will return to this in a moment.)

Thousands of burials have been excavated at Taosi, and these hint at a steep social hierarchy. Nearly nine out of every ten graves were small, with just a few offerings. Roughly one in ten was bigger, but about one in a hundred (always male) was enormous. Some of the giant graves held two hundred offerings, including vases painted with dragons, jade ornaments, and entire pigs, sacrificed but not eaten. In a striking parallel to Jiahu, the prehistoric cemetery discussed in
Chapter 2
, the very richest graves contained musical instruments: clay or wood drums with crocodile skins, large stone chimes, and an odd-looking copper bell.

When I talked about Jiahu in
Chapter 2
, I mentioned the archaeologist Kwang-chih Chang’s theory that Eastern kings developed from prehistoric shamans who used alcohol, music, and repetitive rituals to convince themselves (and others) that they traveled to spirit worlds and talked to ancestors and gods. Jiahu had not been excavated when Chang developed this idea, and he could trace evidence only back to about 3500
BCE
; but pointing to Taosi and similar sites, he suggested that it was between 2500 and 2000
BCE
that ancient China’s religious and royal symbols crystallized. About two thousand years later the
Rites of Zhou
, a Confucian handbook on ceremonies, would still list all the instrument types found in the Taosi graves as appropriate for elite rituals.

Chang believed that other literature produced around the same time as the
Rites of Zhou
also reveals memories of the period before 2000
BCE
. One of the most significant, if also most cryptic, passages may come in the
Springs and Autumns of Mr. Lü
,
*
a survey of useful knowledge compiled in 239
BCE
by one Lü Buwei, chief minister of the state of Qin. Lü pronounced, “
The Way
of Heaven is round; the Way of Earth is square. The sage kings took this as their model.” The sage kings were said to be descendants of the high god Di, and the last of these sage kings, Yu, was supposed to have saved mankind by digging
drainage ditches when the Yellow River flooded. “
But for Yu
,” another text said, “we should have been fishes.” The grateful people made Yu their king, the story runs, and he founded China’s first fully human dynasty, the Xia.

Lü Buwei believed in his book’s accuracy, reportedly suspending a thousand pieces of gold above it outside his city’s main market and offering the money to anyone who could show that he needed to add or remove a single word. (Fortunately, publishers no longer require this of authors.) But despite Lü’s touching faith, King Yu sounds about as credible as Noah, the West’s version of a blameless man who saved humanity from floods. Most historians think the sage kings were entirely fictional. Kwang-chih Chang, though, suggested that Lü’s book preserved genuine, albeit distorted, information about the late third millennium
BCE
, the age when something resembling kingship was taking shape in the East.

Chang saw a link between Lü’s story that the sage kings took the roundness of heaven and squareness of earth as their model and the
cong
, a type of jade vessel that appeared in rich graves in the Yangzi Delta region around 2500
BCE
then spread to Taosi and other sites. A
cong
is a square block of jade with a cylindrical opening drilled through it, the circle and square expressing the union of heaven and earth. The circle-square remained a potent emblem of royal power until the fall of China’s last dynasty in 1912
CE
. If you brave the crowds at the Forbidden City in Beijing and peer into the dark interiors of the palaces, you will see the same symbols—square throne base, round ceiling—repeated over and over again.

Perhaps, Chang suggested, memories of ancient priest-kings, men who claimed to move between this and the spirit world and used
cong
to symbolize their power, survived into Lü’s day. Chang called the years 2500–2000
BCE
“
the Age of Jade
Cong
, the period when shamanism and politics joined forces and when an elite class based on its shamanistic monopoly came into being.” The most spectacular
cong
were surely royal treasures; the biggest example, engraved with images of spirits and animals, has been dubbed by archaeologists (whose humor is nothing if not predictable) the King
Cong.

If Chang was right, religious specialists turned themselves into a ruling elite between 2500 and 2000
BCE
, much as they had done in Mesopotamia a thousand-plus years earlier, with jade, music, and temples on
beaten-earth platforms as amplifiers for their messages to the gods. One site even had a shrine (admittedly small, just twenty feet across, and only on a low platform) shaped like a
cong
.

By 2300
BCE
Taosi looked like an Uruk in the making, complete with palaces, platforms, and chiefs on their way to becoming godlike. And then, suddenly, it didn’t. The elite compound was destroyed, which is why the only trace of a palace is the fragment of a painted wall found in a garbage pit that I mentioned earlier. Forty skeletons, some dismembered or with weapons stuck in them, were dumped in a ditch where the palace had stood, and some of the biggest graves in the cemetery were looted. Taosi shrank to half its previous size and a big new town grew up just a few miles away.

One of the frustrating things about archaeology is that we often see the results of what people did but not the causes. We can spin yarns (Barbarians burn Taosi! Civil war destroys Taosi! Internal feuds tear Taosi in two! New neighbor sacks Taosi! And so on.) but can rarely tell which is true. In this case, the best we can do is to observe that the fall of Taosi was part of a larger process. By 2000
BCE
the biggest sites in Shandong had also been abandoned and population was falling across northern China—at just the same time, of course, that drought, famine, and political collapse were racking Egypt and Mesopotamia. Could climate change have brought on an Old World–wide crisis?

If Taosi had recorded flood levels with a Yellow Riverometer like Egypt’s Nilometer, or if Chinese archaeologists had done micromorphological studies like those at Tell Leilan in Syria, we might be able to say, but these kinds of evidence do not exist. We might scour the literary accounts written two thousand years after these events for information, though as with the stories about sage kings, we cannot tell how much their authors really knew about such early times.

“
During the reign
of Yu,” the
Springs and Autumns of Mr. Lü
says, “there were ten thousand
guo
under heaven.” Translating
guo
as “chiefdom,” a small political unit based on a walled town, many archaeologists think this is quite a good description of the Yellow River valley between 2500 and 2000
BCE
. Some scholars go on to argue that there really was a King Yu, who ended the age of ten thousand
guo
and imposed the rule of a Xia dynasty on them. The literary sources even provide a climatic cause, though instead of a Mesopotamian-style dust bowl they speak of torrential rain in nine out of ten years, which was
why Yu needed to drain the Yellow River valley. Something like this certainly could have happened; until two decades ago, when the Yellow River started running dry in places, people regularly called it “China’s sorrow” because it flooded most years and changed course on average once each century, ruining or killing peasants by the thousands.

Maybe the story of Yu is based on a real catastrophe around 2000
BCE
. Or maybe it is just a folktale. We simply don’t know. Once again, though, while the causes of change are obscure, its consequences are clear. While the towns of Shandong and the Fen Valley bounced back by 2000
BCE
(Taosi even got a monumental platform twenty feet tall and two hundred feet across), the advantages of backwardness—so important in Western history—now kicked in, and even more impressive monuments began filling a former backwater, the Yiluo Valley.

We do not have enough evidence to know why, but the Yiluoans did not simply copy Taosi. Instead they created a whole new architectural style, replacing the big buildings that were easy to see and approach from every angle, which had been customary for a thousand years in northern China, with closed-in palaces, their courtyards surrounded by roofed corridors with only a few points of entry. They then tucked the palaces away behind tall rammed-earth walls. Interpreting architecture is a tricky business, but the Yiluo style may mean that relationships between rulers and ruled mutated in new and perhaps more hierarchical directions as priestly leadership spread to the fluid frontier in the Yiluo Valley.

We might think of this as the East’s Uruk moment, when one community left all rivals behind and turned itself into a state with rulers who could use force to impose their decisions on and raise taxes from their subjects. That community was Erlitou, which exploded into a true city with 25,000 residents between 1900 and 1700
BCE
. Many Chinese archaeologists believe Erlitou was the capital of the Xia dynasty said to have been established by the sage king Yu. Non-Chinese scholars on the whole disagree, pointing out that the literary references to the Xia only begin a thousand years after Erlitou was abandoned. Perhaps, they suggest, the Xia—along with King Yu—were made up. These critics accuse Chinese scholars of at best being gullible about mythology and at worst of peddling propaganda, bolstering modern China’s national identity by pushing its origins as far into antiquity as possible. Not surprisingly, these arguments get nasty.

The debate is mostly beside the point for the questions we are discussing here, but we cannot avoid it completely. For my own part, I tend to suspect that there really was a Xia dynasty, and that Erlitou was its capital, even if the stories about Yu are largely folktales. As we will see in the next section, whenever we can check them, it’s clear that later Chinese historians did rather well at transmitting names; I just cannot imagine Yu and the Xia being invented out of whole cloth.

Whatever the truth, though, Yu, the Xia, or whoever ruled Erlitou could command labor on a whole new scale, building a string of palaces and perhaps an ancestral temple on stamped-earth platforms in the new, closed-in style. One platform, supporting Palace I, must have taken something like a hundred thousand workdays to complete. A quarter of a mile from it archaeologists found slag, crucibles, and molds from bronze casting strewn across two acres. Copper had been known since 3000
BCE
, but long remained a novelty item, used mostly for trinkets. When Erlitou was established around 1900
BCE
, bronze weapons were still rare, and stone, bone, and shell remained normal for agricultural tools well into the first millennium
BCE
. The Erlitou foundry thus represented a quantum leap over earlier craft activity. It churned out weapons and craftsmen’s tools, which must have helped with the city’s success, but also produced remarkable ritual objects—bells like the earlier example from Taosi; plaques with inlaid turquoise eyes, animals, and horns; and ritual vessels a foot or more in diameter. The shapes invented at Erlitou (
jia
tripods,
ding
cauldrons,
jue
pouring cups,
he
pitchers for heating wine) became the East’s ultimate amplifiers for religious messages, displacing jade
cong
and dominating rituals for the next thousand years.

These great vessels have been found only at Erlitou, and if Chang was right that royal power flowed from the king’s claim to stand at the junction of this and supernatural worlds, bronze ritual vessels were probably as important to Erlitou’s power as bronze swords. The king of Erlitou had the loudest amplifier; lords of lesser
guo
might have concluded that it made sense to cooperate with the man the spirits could hear best.

For the king, though, bronze vessels must have been a headache as well as a tool. They were hugely expensive, requiring armies of craftsmen and ton upon ton of copper, tin, and fuel—all in short supply in the Yiluo Valley. In addition to carving out a small kingdom (guessing
from the pattern of settlements, some archaeologists estimate that it covered about two thousand square miles), Erlitou may have sent out colonists to grab raw materials. Dongxiafeng, for instance, set in copper-rich hills a hundred miles west of Erlitou, has Erlitou-type pottery and great mounds of debris from copper smelting, but no palaces, rich graves, or molds for casting vessels, let alone the vessels themselves. The archaeologists may just have dug in the wrong places, but they have been looking there a long time; most likely copper was mined and refined at Dongxiafeng then sent back to Erlitou—the East’s first colonial regime.

ANCESTOR-IN-CHIEF

Backwardness may have advantages, but it has disadvantages too, not least that as soon as a periphery forces its way into an older core it finds itself confronting new peripheries similarly intent on forcing their way in. Erlitou was the most dazzling city in the East by 1650
BCE
, its temples gleaming with bronze cauldrons and echoing with chimes and bells, but a mere day’s walk beyond the Yellow River would have taken an adventurous urbanite into a violent world of fortresses and feuding chiefs. Two skeletons found in a pit just forty miles from the big city show unmistakable signs of scalping.