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The Shang-Yin Dynasty and the An-yang Finds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2021

W. Perceval Yetts
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Extract

The fact seems strange that thirty years elapsed between the known discovery of inscribed bones and tortoise shells near An-yang and the first systematic exploration of the site. Towards the end of 1928 digging was begun by an expedition sent by the National Research Institute of History and Philology, and partly financed by the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution. The work suffered from obstruction owing to the prevailing unrest; but several times it has been resumed, and three volumes have appeared under the title Preliminary Reports of Excavations at Anyang. These give interim accounts of the varied results which provide important contributions to history and archaeology.

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Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , July 1933 , pp. 657 - 685
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Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1933

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References

page 657 note 1 written in Chinese and published in Pei-p'ing by the Academia Sinica : pts. i and ii, 1929 ; pt. iii, 1931. Xotices of the finds have appeared in the 111. London News, 21st June, 1930, 1142-3, and 8th August, 1931, 222-3, 236; the North-China Sunday News, 26th July, 1931, 5, 12, and 2nd August, 1931, 3, 10, the last three articles being by H. J. Timperley. A general review by W. Eberhard, entitled Bericht über die Ausgrabungen bei An-yang (Honan), appeared in Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, 1932, 1-15. The official Reports will be referred to as PREA in this article. Other abbreviations used are ASB for Academia Sinica : Bulletin of the National Research Institute of History and Philology ; CC for Legge's Chinese Classics ; JRAS for the Jour. of the Roy. Asiatic Soc. ; KS for the Yin-hsu shu chi k'ao shih , revised edition of 1927, by Lo Chên-yü ; and MH for Chavannes' Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien. I take this opportunity gratefully to acknowledge help from Mr. L. C. Hopkins, Prof. B. Karlgren and Prof. A. C. Moule.

page 658 note 1 Based on the map in PREA, i, which includes a scale showing Hsiaot'un to be 6 kilometres from An-yang. It is corrected here to half that distance.

page 658 note 2 The seventh-century commentator Yen Sbih-ku notes that the name should be pronounced thus, the vulgar version Yuan not being correct, v. Ch'ien Han shu, xxxi, 10.

page 658 note 3 v. Oracle Records from the Waste of Yin (Shanghai, 1917), pp. 1 and 2, by this author.

page 658 note 4 Wu shih jih meng hin lu , ff. 20 seq., included in the miscellany Hslieh t'ang ts'ung k'o , undated.

page 659 note 1 v. Notes on the Archaeology of China in the Bull, of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, No. 2 (1930), pp. 193 seq.

page 660 note 1 PREA, ii, pp. 253-285.

page 660 note 2 v. Li Chi, PREA, i, 38.

page 661 note 1 v. Li Chi, PREA, i, 44 seq.

page 661 note 2 v. Pelliot, La date des “Ceramiques de Kiu-lou”, in T'oung Pao, xxii (1923), 377-382.

page 662 note 1 MH, i, 174, 176, 191-i, 198, 200, 207.

page 662 note 2 Names of those sovereigns, who are here indicated only by their order of succession, may be found in the table on pp. 670 and 671.

page 663 note 1 Concerning the passage in the Shih chi, the second-century scholar Cheng Hsiian notes that P'an Keng “established the capital at Po, in the land of Yin. From the time of this move, the House of Shang changed their name and called themselves Yin”. As to Po, the thirdcentury scholar Huang-fu Mi places the site at the present-day Yen-shih , which lies close to the confluence of the Lo and I Rivers, as remarked above, v. Shih chi, iii, 20 v°. References given in this article, unless otherwise stated, are to the text edited by P'ei Yin and printed in the Sung Po na copy reproduced by the Commercial Press.

page 664 note 1 v. Kuan fang chi lin , ix, 16, 17, the first section of the first series of his collected works, published in 1927-8.

page 664 note 2 The 29 sections of the Book of History as written in the new official script in the second century B.C. when dictated from memory by the Master Fu or Fu Sheng .

page 664 note 3 v. CC, iii, 7.

page 664 note 4 Ma Jung and Chêng Hsüan , famous commentators of the first and second centuries A.D.

page 664 note 5 A noted scholar of the fourth century.

page 664 note 6 The tradition is that Confucius compiled the Book of History in 100 sections. The work was temporarily lost at the time of the Burning of the Books (213 B.C.) ; but 29 sections were in the second century dictated from memory as noted above. A copy of the Book was said to have been among the texts, written in ancient characters formed like tadpoles , which were found at the end of the second or beginning of the first century B.C. in the hollow of a wall when the Prince of began to demolish the dwelling of Confucius in order to make room for an extension of his palace. The inscribed slips were handed over for decipherment to K'ung An-kuo , a descendant of the Sage. He transcribed them in the current li script with the aid of the Fu Sheng recension, and found that the latter's 29 sections should have been arranged in 34 sections. Besides these, he found 25 additional sections, making a total of 59, of which one was composed of preambles from the heads of the 100 original sections. This is known as the ku wén or “ancient figures” text . An-kuo's text was lost during the disorder about the end of the third century, and the alleged version of it, now extant, is generally considered to have been the spurious work of Mei Chi early in the fourth century. Doubt has also been thrown on the truth of the tradition concerning An-kuo's text. The subject is discussed by Legge in the Prolegomena of CC, iii, and by Pelliot in Mémoires concernant l'Asie orientale, ii (1916), 123-177.

page 665 note 1 K'ung Ying-ta , A.D. 574-648.

page 665 note 2 In proof thereof Wang Kuo-wei cites a passage in the biography of Hsiang Yü , Ch'ien Han shu, xxxi, 10 v°.

page 665 note 3 KS, i, 1, 2.

page 665 note 4 The tradition is that these Annals, together with other texts also •written on bamboo slips, were in’ A.D. 281 found by robbers who broke open a royal tomb dating from about 299 B.C. The tomb was at Chi near Wei-hui , in north Ho-nan. They were lost probably during the Sung period, and there is dispute as to the manner in which the current text was compiled to replace the lost one. Judged by excerpts from the old text surviving in T'ang writings, the present recension differs from the other, v. MH, v, 446-479, and Maspero, T'oung Poo, xxv (1927-8), 368, 386.

page 665 note 5 This comment by the eighth-century scholar Chang Shou-chieh appears in the 1908 standard edition of the Shih chi, iii, 5 r°, but the text has the obvious error “ 773 years ”, not “ 275 ”. The passage here quoted from the Bamboo Annals does not occur in the extant text.

page 666 note 1 Shih chi, iii, 21 r°.

page 666 note 2 Shih chi, xiii, 4 v°.

page 666 note 3 CC, iii, Proleg., 137.

page 666 note 4 , A.D. 1223-1296. This work is included in the collection Hsüeh thing t'ao yüan .

page 666 note 5 By Huang-fu Mi. Only 13 passages of the original 55 chapters remain and are included in the collection of reprints called Chih hai .

page 666 note 6 Shih chi, vii, 7 v°, and MH, ii, 272.

page 666 note 7 By the fifth-century author P'ei Yin .

page 666 note 8 First century A.D.

page 666 note 9 Hsieh Tsan .

page 667 note 1 A geography of the seventh century, now lost.

page 667 note 2 Cf. CC, iii, Proleg., 135.

page 667 note 3 The current text of the Annals has Pei-mêng , and so had the ancient text as quoted in the tenth century, v. inf., p. 669.

page 667 note 4 ix, 35 v°, seq.

page 667 note 5 of the eighteenth century.

page 668 note 1 This is incorrect. The last name to appear is Wen Wu Ting, as Lo himself notes, and he identifies it with the twenty-eighth sovereign, son of Wu I. v. KS, i, 4v°.

page 668 note 2 v. Tung Tso-pin in a valuable article, History of the Yin-hsü Site in ASB ii, 224-240.

page 668 note 3 Entitled in the third series of his collected works Hai-ning Wang Chung-ch'io Kung i shu (1928). The study was begun by Chu Yu-ts'êng and completed by Wang Kuo-wei.

page 669 note 1 K'ung Ying-ta's commentary on the P'an Keng chapters in the Book of History is quoted to the effect that “ Yin is 30 It to the south of Yeh ”. The same remark is quoted from Ssü-ma Chêng's commentary on the Hsiang Yu chapter in the Shih chi. On the other hand, the latter's contemporary, Chang Shou-chieh, in his commentary on the Yin Annals in the Shih cki, gives the distance as 40 It, as quoted above on p. 667.

page 669 note 2 Entitled Ku chin jén piao .

page 670 note 1 According to the Shih chi, iii, 20 v°, this was a name of No. 24. The words are: “Tsu Chia ascended the throne, and he was Ti Chia.” In Shih chi, xiii, 4v°, the twenty-fourth Sovereign is called only Ti Chia. But Lo Chen-yu correlates the Ti Chia of the An-yang finds with No. 12 (or possibly No. 13), because the context of one inscription, in which the name occurs, indioates that this Ti Chia reigned before No. 16. v. KS, 5 r°.

page 670 note 2 Though the pronunciation of or in ancient Chinese was like the Mandarin ch'iang (v. Karlgren's Diet., No. 354), it must have been like yang and in archaic times. In a number of the inscriptions plainly serves as a “ borrowing “ (chia chieh) for “ sheep “ . The latter is the reading given by Lo Chen-yu for the character in the An-yang inscriptions ; but Tung Tso-pin reads (v. PREA, ii, 331-3 ; iii, 425), and so does Takata Tadasuke in Ku chou p'ien , lxxxix, 21, 22. Hopkins now accepts this view.

page 672 note 1 v. Tung Tso-pin, A Chronological Table concerning the Oracle Tortoise Shells and Bones in ASB, ii, 241-260.

page 674 note 1 Alligators and a kuei-pi are pictured in two articles by Hopkins in JBAS, 1913. These are deolared by Felliot to be fakes, T'oung Pao, xxii (1923), 7. Other of these “ miniatures “ appear in JRAS, 1911, pi. v B, following p. 1034, and in Catalogue of a Collection of Objects of Chinese Art, London (Burlington Fine Arts Club): 1915, pi. 55.

page 674 note 2 The subject is treated by many Chinese and” Japanese authors, and in English by Hopkins, of whose writings I have given a list in the George Eumorfopouloa Collection Catalogue of the Chinese and Corean Bronzes, etc., i, 73, 74. See especially the articles in JRAS, 1915, 49-61, 289-303, and New China Review, i (1919), 111-119, 249-261.

page 675 note 1 v. CC, iii, 452.

page 675 note 2 v. Chavannes, La divination par Vecaille de tortue dans la haute antiquite chinoise in Jour. Asiatique, Jan.-Feb., 1911, 127-137, and Jung Chao-tsu , Evolution of Divination in ASB, i (1928), 47-87.

page 676 note 1 PREA, i, 208.

page 676 note 2 v. Legge, The Lî Ki, Sacred Books of the East, xxvii, 92.

page 676 note 3 KS, iii, 65 r°.

page 676 note 4 PREA, iii, 423-441.

page 676 note 5 v. Tung Tso-pin in PREA, iii, 481-522.

page 677 note 1 Little attention has been paid to it since it was described by L. C. Hopkins and R. L. Hobson in Man, xii (1912), 49-52, under the title A Royal Belie of Ancient China.

page 677 note 2 There are, however, criteria which might be taken as evidence that a dragon with horns existed in the animal art of the Shang-Yin period. For instance, the head of a creature with open jaws, carved in ivory or bone, appears to have the same sort of short horns, with rounded tips, as the British Museum piece. It belongs to the Crown Prince of Sweden, and it is represented by Siren, A History of Early Chinese Art (London, 1929), i, pi. 12. Many bronzes have this type of creature which has one leg, and is named “K'uei dragon” in the early catalogues; but often it lacks horns.

page 678 note 1 Wu shih jih mêng hén lu, 21 r°. Probably Pere David's “tailed deer”, Cervus (elaphurus) davidianus, which in recent years has survived solely in the Duke of Bedford's herd at Woburn Park, now numbering about 200 head. Allusions in classical literature to the mi prove that in ancient times it was plentiful in the marshes around the lower stretches of the Yellow River, v. Mollendorff, The Vertebrata of the Province of Chihli in Jour. North China Br. Roy. Asiatic Soc, 1877, 68-75.

page 678 note 2 Reproduced in fig. 4 of an article by A. Bernhardi, Frühgeschichtliehe Oralcelknochen aus China, in Baessler-Archiv, iv (1913-14), 14-18. The author stigmatizes it as counterfeit, which Hopkins denies in JSAS, 1913, 906. Another example is on a shoulder-blade in the Museum fur Völkerkunde, Berlin, which is reproduced in fig. 11 of Bernhardi's article.

page 678 note 3 If not actually indigenous to that part of China in those times, the elephant seems to have been well-known, v. Hsü Chung-shu , Domestication of Elephants by the Tin and the Migration of Elephants to the South in ASB, ii, pt. i, 60-75. According to the tradition cited by Mencius, certain Shang-Yin sovereigns had parks in which wild animals were kept. v. CC, ii, 280-1.

page 679 note 1 PREA, ii, 287-335.

page 679 note 2 Wu shih jih méng hén hi, 21. Five examples are pictured in Yin-hsü ku ch'i wu t'u lu (1916), 7-11.

page 679 note 3 v. la Chi's article and the photographs opposite p. 250 in PREA, ii.

page 679 note 4 K'ao ku t'u , iv, 45 ; v, 12, by Lii Ta-lin , whose preface is dated A.D. 1092.

page 680 note 1 Li Chi, PREA, ii, 240-9. Reference should also be made to an article contributed by this author to the Volume of Essays in Honour of Mr. Ts'ai Ytian-p'ei on attaining the Age of Sixty-five Pei-p'ing: 1932, pp. 73-104. It is •entitled Five Kinds of Bronze Implements from Yin-hsil and Problems of their Analogues . Those treated are (1) Arrow-heads (2) “Hooked weapons” 3) Spears ; (4) Erasing knives ; (5) Celts

page 680 note 2 v. Li Chi, PREA, iii, 447-480, and a short article by Hopkins and Yetts in JRAS, 1933, 107-113.

page 680 note 3 v. Li Chi, PREA, ii, 337-347.

page 681 note 1 In Kolcka , No. 397 (1921), and Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, No. 1 (1926), 46, 47.

page 681 note 2 By H. J. Timperley in North-China Sunday News, 26th July, 1931, and later by Li Chi in Symposium on Chinese Culture (1932), 224, 225.

page 683 note 1 v. Li Chi, PBEA, iii, 447 seq.

page 683 note 2 v. Tung Tso-pin, PBEA, i, 165, fig. 277, and p. 191.

page 683 note 3 The implication being that the inscription was probably written during the reign of the twenty-ninth sovereign, but certainly not earlier than that of the twenty-seventh.

page 683 note 4 v. Maspero, La Chine antique, 46.

page 685 note 1 v. Li Chi in PREA, ii, 337-347; Fu Ssŭ-nien in PREA, ii, 349-386; and Hsü Chung-shu in PREA, iii, 523-557.