Recasting the past

Decoding history

During the 1920s, the 3,000-year-old Yinxu Ruins were discovered in Anyang, Henan province. An abundance of oracle bones-the earliest form of Chinese writing carved onto animal bones to be used as records-were unearthed, which helped to recast the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th century-11th century BC) from a mythical entity into an indisputable part of Chinese history. Yinxu is now proved to be the location of the last capital city of the Shang era.

So, what about the earlier Xia Dynasty?

According to the Bamboo Annals, a collection of chronicles from the Warring States period (475-221 BC), the dynasty existed for 471 years before the Shang era and spanned the reigns of 17 kings over 14 generations.

In 1959, scholar Xu Xusheng led a research team on a field trip to Henan, following clues from key works of ancient historiography, including Shi Ji, or Records of the Grand Historian, from the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24).

Xu Xusheng discovered the vast site at Erlitou village, but later concluded that his findings marked out the capital of the early Shang Dynasty-historically known as Xibo-by analyzing the patterns of the cultural relics unearthed there.

His supposition remained the dominant theory in Chinese academia until the early 1980s, when a "younger" set of city ruins covering an area of some 2 sq km were found just 6 km away from Erlitou. As it appeared to date back to the early Shang Dynasty, another theory rose to become the mainstream hypothesis: namely that the Erlitou site was in fact Zhenxun, the last capital of the Xia Dynasty as recorded in the Bamboo Annals.

From 1996 to 2000, a national-level program for the specific periodization of the Xia and Shang dynasties was organized, involving a host of top Chinese archaeologists, paleographers, historians and astronomers.