The Yellow River and the roots of Chinese civilization

The Yellow River runs about 5,400 kilometers. It begins high on the Tibetan plateau and ends at the Bohai Sea, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean on China's northeast coast. In Chinese it is called the Huang He. "Huang" means yellow, and the name is exact. The water really is the color of weak mud, because it carries more silt than almost any other large river on Earth. To understand how Chinese civilization began, we must start with this color. It tells us about the soil, the farms, the floods, and the people who learned to live beside a dangerous river. First, a word about the word "civilization." Historians use it for a society with certain features. These usually include cities, writing, metal working, and a government strong enough to organize large numbers of people. The word is useful but not perfect. Some societies have only some of these features, and some historians argue the list is too narrow. Keep this in mind. In this lesson we will watch these features appear slowly, one by one, over many thousands of years. Let us begin with the land. After leaving the Tibetan plateau, the Yellow River flows through the middle of northern China and crosses a region called the Loess Plateau. Loess is a fine, pale yellow soil made of silt that the wind blew in over a very long time. The wind carried it from the deserts and dry lands to the north and west. The deposits are enormous. In places they are tens of meters thick, and in some places they reach hundreds of meters. The river cuts through this soft material and picks up huge amounts of it. That is why the water is yellow. Loess matters for history for a simple reason. It is light, loose, and fertile. A farmer in the ancient world had no iron plow and no ox team in the earliest periods. He had digging sticks, stone tools, and wooden tools. Heavy clay soils would have defeated him. Loess did not. It could be worked with simple tools, and it gave good crops. This was a real advantage for the first farmers in the region. Now we come to the second half of the story, the danger. The Yellow River drops its silt as it slows down on the flat land to the east. This land is called the North China Plain. Over centuries the silt piles up on the riverbed. The bed rises. In some places the river ends up running higher than the fields around it, held in only by its banks. When the water rises in summer, the banks can break, and the river spills across the plain. Then it may find a new path to the sea and abandon the old one. This has happened many times, and we have good records of it. In 1194 CE the river shifted so that it ran south of the Shandong peninsula, and it flowed that way for centuries. In 1855 it moved back north. There were terrible floods in 1887 and 1931, which killed very large numbers of people. In 1938, during war with Japan, Nationalist Chinese forces deliberately broke the river's banks to slow the Japanese army. The flood stopped some troops, but it also drowned and displaced huge numbers of Chinese civilians. These are well-documented events. They come from the medieval and modern periods, long after our subject. But they show what the river was always capable of. You will often read that the Yellow River is "China's sorrow." This is a famous phrase. We should be careful with it, though. It is a later popular label, not an ancient saying that we can trace to the earliest farmers. It also tells only half the truth. The same river that flooded the plain also built the plain, and made it fertile. The river was both a gift and a threat. The climate adds a further problem. Northern China has a monsoon-influenced climate. A monsoon is a seasonal wind pattern that brings heavy rain in summer. In the north, the rainfall is not steady. Some years bring too much, and floods destroy the crops. Other years bring too little, and drought does the same. So early farmers lived with real uncertainty. A society that could store food, share risk, and plan ahead had a better chance of surviving. This pressure is one reason, among several, why we later see organized communities and leaders. There is another point about climate. Between roughly 6000 and 3000 BCE, in the period called the mid-Holocene, northern China was somewhat warmer and wetter than it is today. The Holocene is the name for the current geological period, which began about 11,700 years ago, after the last Ice Age. The warmer, wetter conditions helped farming spread and villages grow. Environment did not decide everything, but it set the stage. Now to the farmers themselves. The main crop of the north was millet. Millet is a small-seeded cereal grass. It tolerates dry conditions better than wheat or rice, which suits a semi-arid region. Two kinds were domesticated in northern China. To domesticate a plant means to breed it over many generations, by selecting the seeds that suit human needs, until it changes and depends on people. The two millets are foxtail millet, whose scientific name is Setaria italica, and broomcorn millet, Panicum miliaceum. Archaeologists have found evidence of early millet use at sites such as Cishan, in Hebei province, and Nanzhuangtou, also in Hebei. The evidence there goes back perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 years. The word "perhaps" is honest. Dating this far back is difficult, and scholars continue to refine the numbers. Animals came alongside the plants. Pigs were domesticated early in China, and they remained very important for thousands of years. Pigs eat scraps and waste and turn them into meat, which suits settled villages well. Dogs were also kept. Later came cattle, sheep, and goats. A village with millet in storage pits and pigs in pens could stay in one place all year. That is the basis of permanent settlement. Here we must correct an old picture. For a long time, textbooks described the Yellow River valley as "the cradle of Chinese civilization." The idea was that everything began there and spread outward. Evidence now shows this is too simple. Rice, the other great Chinese staple, was domesticated further south, in the region of the Yangtze River. It reached the north later. So early China did not have one origin. It had several regional centers of farming and culture, developing side by side. The Yellow River was one of them, and a very important one, but not the only one. Let us now look at the main Neolithic cultures. "Neolithic" means the New Stone Age, the period when people farmed and kept animals but still made their tools mainly from stone. An archaeological culture is a name for a group of sites that share a style of pottery, tools, and housing. We do not know what these people called themselves, or what languages they spoke. The names are modern labels, usually taken from the place where the culture was first found. The earliest we will mention is Peiligang, in Henan province, dated to about 7000 to 5000 BCE. Alongside it stands Cishan, which we have already met. Both were early millet-farming communities. They made pottery, ground stone tools, and lived in small villages. These are the quiet beginnings. Next comes the Yangshao culture, from about 5000 to 3000 BCE, in the middle Yellow River valley. It is named after the village of Yangshao in Henan. The Swedish geologist and archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson found it in 1921. Yangshao is famous for its painted pottery. Potters decorated red clay bowls and jars with black designs, including geometric patterns and fish and human faces. The most famous Yangshao village is Banpo, near the modern city of Xi'an. It had a ditch around the settlement, which probably served for defense or drainage or both. Inside were houses, partly sunk into the ground, with posts holding up roofs. Pottery kilns stood outside, and there was a cemetery. Banpo shows us a community with a clear plan, shared work, and a settled way of life. The burials there do not show great differences in wealth, which suggests a fairly equal society. We should be careful, though. Different Yangshao sites vary, and archaeologists debate how to read the burial evidence. After Yangshao we come to the Longshan culture, from about 3000 to 1900 BCE. The name comes from a site in Shandong province. Longshan is known for a distinctive black pottery, very thin and highly polished. The potters used a fast wheel and controlled the firing carefully. This took skill, and it suggests specialists, people who spent their time making pottery rather than farming. Longshan communities also built walled towns using rammed earth. Rammed earth is a building method in which workers pack soil into a wooden frame and pound it down until it is hard as stone. The method was used for thousands of years in China. Walls of this kind needed many workers and someone to direct them. Longshan also shows signs of conflict. Archaeologists find evidence of violence, and the walls themselves suggest that people feared attack. At the same time, burials show growing differences. Some graves hold many goods, and others hold almost nothing. So Longshan is the period in which inequality becomes visible. A few people had more wealth and more power. This is a vital step toward the state, although the road was long. It is worth stepping outside the Yellow River valley, because other regions were just as impressive. In the northeast, the Hongshan culture, from about 4700 to 2900 BCE, produced fine jade objects and built ritual structures, including platforms and temple-like buildings. In Shandong, the Dawenkou culture produced rich burials and fine pottery. In the northwest, the Majiayao culture made some of the most beautiful painted pottery of the ancient world. The most remarkable may be Liangzhu, in the lower Yangtze region, from about 3300 to 2300 BCE. Liangzhu people carved jade into striking objects. Two types are famous. The bi is a flat disc with a hole in the center. The cong is a tube that is square on the outside and round inside. Both appear in later Chinese ritual, though we do not know exactly what they meant at Liangzhu. Liangzhu also had a large walled site and a complex system of dams and water channels. This is a major piece of hydraulic engineering. Hydraulic means related to the control and movement of water. Liangzhu shows that a large, organized, wealthy society could exist in the south, thousands of years before the traditional dynasties. It was not on the Yellow River at all. So how should we describe the relation between all these regions? The archaeologist K. C. Chang, a very influential scholar, used the idea of an "interaction sphere." This means a set of regions that remained distinct but traded goods, copied styles, and shared ideas over long distances. Another scholar, Su Bingqi, proposed a "regional systems" model. In his view, several areas developed complex societies in parallel and influenced one another. Both ideas lead to what we call the multiregional view. China did not grow from a single center, like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. It grew more like a web. This is a good moment to explain how thinking on the subject has changed. In the early twentieth century, archaeology in China was new. When Andersson found Yangshao pottery in 1921, he noticed similarities to painted pottery from Central Asia and the Near East. Some scholars suggested that Chinese civilization had come from the west, brought by migrants or by ideas. This was called the question of foreign origins. Later Chinese scholars challenged it, and further digging produced more evidence of local development. Another scholar, Fu Sinian, proposed an east-west model. In it, Yangshao culture lay in the west and Longshan culture lay in the east, two traditions that later met and combined. This was a useful idea at the time, but it too has been revised. A third older view was the "Central Plains nuclear" model. The Central Plains is the area around the middle Yellow River, in modern Henan and neighboring provinces. This model said that civilization began there and spread outward to "less advanced" regions. Today most scholars have moved away from it. The mainstream position is that Chinese civilization developed mostly from within, through the interaction of many regions. Contact with outside regions did occur, and some technologies, such as certain crops and perhaps bronze-working knowledge, probably did arrive from Central Asia. But the overall development was local. We should say this with confidence, while remembering that new discoveries can still change the picture. Now we reach the threshold of the state. A state is a political organization with a government that holds power over a defined territory and can make rules, collect resources, and use force. The key site is Erlitou, in Henan province, near the modern city of Luoyang. It dates to roughly 1900 to 1500 BCE. At Erlitou archaeologists found a large palace-style complex built on platforms of rammed earth, with courtyards and halls laid out in a careful plan. They also found workshops where bronze was cast. Bronze is a metal made by mixing copper with tin. It is harder than copper and easier to cast into complex shapes. At Erlitou, craftsmen made ritual vessels, which are containers used in ceremonies, probably to offer food and drink to ancestors or spirits. Workers also made fine objects from turquoise, a blue-green stone. Think about what this means, using only the evidence. Someone organized the labor to build large platforms. Someone controlled the supply of copper and tin, which had to be brought from elsewhere. Craftsmen worked in specialized workshops and made luxury goods for an elite. This is the kind of society we call a state, or at least a proto-state, which means an early form of state. Most scholars agree that Erlitou was a powerful center. They do not agree on how large its authority was, or exactly what kind of government it had. This brings us to one of the most famous questions in Chinese history: was Erlitou the capital of the Xia dynasty? A dynasty is a line of rulers from one family, who pass power from parent to child or between relatives. Chinese tradition says the first dynasty was the Xia. The tradition appears in later written works. The most famous is the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, written by Sima Qian around 100 BCE. Sima Qian was a court historian of the Han dynasty. He collected older texts and stories and wrote a history of China from the earliest rulers to his own day. Another source is the Bamboo Annals, a chronicle written on bamboo strips. It was found in a tomb in the third century CE, and its text has a complicated history, with questions about what part is original. These texts say that before the Xia came legendary sage kings, among them Yao, Shun, and Yu the Great. Yu is the most important for our subject. According to tradition, a great flood once covered the land. Yu's father tried to stop it by building dams, and failed. Yu succeeded by digging channels to lead the water to the sea. He worked for years, and the story says he passed his own door several times without going in. Because of his success, Shun gave him the throne, and Yu founded the Xia dynasty. Afterward, tradition says, rule passed from father to son, which began the pattern of hereditary kingship. Notice how well this story fits the geography we began with. A great flood, a hero who tames the water, and a ruler who earns his right to rule through that service. Some people have used this to argue that the need to control floods created the first Chinese state. A version of that idea comes from the twentieth-century scholar Karl Wittfogel. He argued that large irrigation and flood-control works required a powerful central government, and that this produced a harsh, all-powerful ruler. He called it hydraulic despotism. Despotism means rule by a single person with unlimited power. The theory is clever, but for early China most historians reject it. The archaeology shows that states and social inequality developed first, and large water projects came later. Early flood control, as far as we can tell, was done at a local level, not by a giant central bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is a system of government run by trained officials who follow set rules. So the flood story may express later ideas about kingship more than real events. That does not mean the flood story is pure fantasy. In 2016 a team of scientists published a study in the journal Science. They examined evidence from the upper Yellow River, in an area near the Jishi Gorge. They argued that a landslide had blocked the river, created a huge lake, and that the dam eventually broke and caused a catastrophic flood around 1920 BCE. They linked this to the legend of Yu. The study attracted a great deal of attention. It is also debated. Some scholars question the dating, and others doubt that a flood in the far upper river could be connected to a story told about the middle and lower river. And even if the flood was real, the link to Yu is an interpretation, not a proven fact. A careful historian says: this is interesting, and it is possible, but it is not settled. So what can we say about the Xia? Here the honest answer is divided. There are no written records from the time of the Xia itself. Everything we know in writing comes from texts composed more than a thousand years later. Because of this, many scholars outside China treat the Xia as unproven. They say that without contemporary writing, we cannot show that the Xia existed as a dynasty, or that Erlitou belonged to it. They point out that Erlitou can be studied as an important archaeological culture without any dynasty name attached to it. Many Chinese scholars take a different view. They argue that the later texts preserve real memories, that Erlitou fits the time and place given in the tradition, and that it is reasonable to identify it with the Xia. This is a serious position, and it rests on the idea that the traditional histories should not be dismissed without cause. In fact, the Shang dynasty, which came later, was once considered legendary too, until the discovery of writing at its capital proved it was real. That is the story of our next lesson. Some scholars use this example to argue for taking the Xia tradition seriously. Others reply that the Shang was confirmed by written evidence from the Shang itself, and that the Xia has produced nothing of the kind. There is also a political side to this debate. Between 1996 and 2000, the Chinese government sponsored a large research effort called the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project. Its aim was to fix firm dates for the earliest dynasties. It produced figures such as 2070 BCE for the beginning of the Xia. Many scholars outside China criticize these dates. They say that the evidence is too thin to support such precision, and that the project began with the assumption that the Xia was real. Supporters answer that it brought together excellent scientific dating and historical research. As students, we should simply note that the dates are contested, and we should treat 2070 BCE as one proposal and not as an established fact. Let us think about how a historian handles all this. For the periods we have covered, we have almost no written sources. The main evidence is archaeology: pottery, tools, houses, graves, bones, seeds, and the remains of buildings. Archaeology is powerful, but it cannot tell us names, beliefs in the people's own words, or political events. For these we depend on written texts, which arrive late. The Shujing, or Book of Documents, is a collection of speeches and announcements claimed to be from ancient rulers, though many parts were written much later. The Shijing, or Book of Odes, is a collection of poems and songs, some of which may date to the early first millennium BCE. The Zuozhuan is a long narrative history of the Spring and Autumn period, from the first millennium BCE, famous for its detailed stories. The Bamboo Annals, as we said, is a chronicle with a difficult history. And the Shiji of Sima Qian pulls many of these together. All of them were written centuries or even a thousand years after the events they describe about the earliest times. The authors lived in a world with kings, officials, and strong ideas about how rulers should behave. They looked back at the distant past and shaped it to carry lessons. Yao, Shun, and Yu appear in these texts as ideal rulers, wise and moral. They may reflect real memories, but they also reflect the values of the people who wrote about them. That is why the careful historian reads these sources with great attention, but does not accept them as simple records. We should now return to the question of the "cradle." Was the Yellow River the cradle of Chinese civilization? The best answer is: it was one cradle, and a central one, but not the only one. The Yellow River region gave rise to millet farming, to Yangshao and Longshan, to Erlitou, and later to the Shang. These cultures laid the base for what later became the core of Chinese political history. Yet the Yangtze region developed rice farming and Liangzhu. The northeast had Hongshan, and Shandong had Dawenkou. All of these contributed. Jade working, for example, a deep part of later Chinese ritual, owes a great deal to the east and south, not only to the Yellow River valley. Why, then, do many histories still center the Yellow River? One reason is that the early dynasties we can document, the Shang and the Zhou, arose in the middle and lower Yellow River region, and later Chinese tradition made that region the heart of the nation. A second reason is that the later written histories, composed by people in that region, naturally focused on it. So the emphasis partly reflects real importance and partly reflects the viewpoint of the surviving sources. A good historian notices that difference. Finally, let us ask the key question of cause. Why did states appear here? There is no single answer, and historians still discuss it. Several factors seem to have worked together. Productive farming created surplus, which is extra food beyond what people need to eat at once. Surplus can support specialists, such as potters, bronze casters, and priests. Conflict and the threat of war encouraged people to build walls and accept leaders. Trade in valued materials, such as jade, turquoise, and metal ores, gave advantages to those who controlled it. Ritual and religion gave certain families special roles, especially in dealing with ancestors and spirits. And the uncertain environment, with its floods and droughts, rewarded communities that could cooperate and store food. None of these alone explains the rise of the state. Together they created conditions in which a few powerful centers, like Erlitou, could appear. Let us gather the thread. A silt-laden river flowed across fertile loess. Farmers grew millet and raised pigs, and their villages multiplied. Over thousands of years they moved from the simple settlements of Peiligang to the painted pottery villages of Yangshao, and then to the walled, unequal towns of Longshan. All the while, other regions, from the Yangtze to the northeast, developed their own rich cultures and exchanged ideas with the north. By about 1900 BCE, at Erlitou, we find palaces, bronze workshops, and ritual vessels, the signs of an early state. Whether this was the Xia dynasty remains one of the open questions of world history. Later Chinese writers told of a flood-taming hero named Yu, and modern science has offered evidence of an ancient flood, but neither proves the legend. What we can say with confidence is that Chinese civilization grew from within, through the interaction of many regions, over a very long time. The Yellow River was central to this story, but it was not alone, and it was not a simple cause. It gave farmers a rich soil and a dangerous neighbor. People answered with cooperation, organization, and, in time, rulers. In our next lesson, we move from archaeology into the first real writing. We will visit the Shang dynasty, whose kings cracked heated bones to ask questions of their ancestors, and whose scribes carved the answers into the bone. Those oracle bones give us, for the first time, the voices of early Chinese people themselves. They will show us that the traditional story of an ancient dynasty was not all legend, and they will take us from the world of silent pottery into the world of names, rituals, and written history.