mass human sacrifice and crucially ,written texts on oracle bones.1928 they finally found the location and they started the excavation .From the excavation they found nearly 30,000 oracle bones documenting divination performed on behalf of nine late Shang kings .I love all the portraits of the people .Yes ,yes .There is something so optimistic about their faces .They thought that their task is to prove that Chinese history was true .Epoch-making ,in world archaeology ,really .Absolutely ,yes.
Now we knew that they were historical .Yes .Anyang was the final capital of the Shang Dynasty .They ruled for 500 years ,controlling the whole of central China .The first Chinese state .Their authority rested on force but was validated by divination .The Shang kings and their diviners burned cracks in tortoise shells or cow bones to speak to the ancestors .So basically ,they chose one piece of bone or shell and then they drilled some holes ,and then they heat up these holes with some special plants and then these will create some cracks ,and then they look at the pattern of these cracks .And the cracks come the other side ,is that right ?Yes .And then they can read these patterns and make their predictions about whether these divinations are auspicious or it is actually against the will of the ancestral spirits ,so they should not be carrying out the activity they were asking for .So the diviners are asking for the favour of the ancestral spirits .Yes .So basically it‘s their special way to communicate with their ancestors .The ancestors are the key people in their mental universe .Yes .Fantastic.
Basically ,in every aspect of the their society ,including ,for instance ,the harvest .This one is even about praying for rain .Rain and water would be a big part of their concerns living in the Yellow River plain ,I suppose .Yes ,for agricultural society it is absolutely crucial .And unlike the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt or the cuneiform of Babylonia ,the archaeologists had no need of a key to decipher them for they could see at once that the signs on the oracle bones were the direct ancestors of today‘s Chinese writing.
That‘s the character for rain in modern language .And in oracle bones it‘s like this with three drops ,so essentially it ‘ s the same idea ,fundamentally .This rain character is characterised by these raindrops .Yeah ,yeah .Out of these prehistoric
pictographs came the modern Chinese script with its tens of thousands of signs .So through their script the Chinese are uniquely connected to their deep past and its ways of thinking .More so than any other culture on earth .There seem to be …Is this fanciful ?There seem to be themes that we trace all the way through Chinese history the reverence for the ancestors ,the divination ,the control of writing and writing as a source of power .Is that fair ?I agree .I think communicate or interaction between the ancestral spirit and the acquisition of social power is indeed a recurrent theme throughout Chinese history .So power came from the ancestors .In the oracle bones there is a sacred place .It has the same name as the dynasty ,Shang.
This is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai ,that‘s for sure .And the archaeologists now turn to a little town in Henan with a tantalizing name .Shangqiu ,the mound or ruins of Shang .We are now inside the Ming Dynasty city .This was built in 1511,the previous one destroyed by floods .Lots more underneath it ,of course .What‘s fascinating is it‘s still called Shangqiu ,the ruins of Shang .So was this the ancestral place of China‘s first great dynasty ?That question has intrigued Chinese archaeologists since their first explorations here in the 1930s.
But the Bronze Age layers here are 30 feet deep in Yellow River silt .Recently ,though ,geophysical surveys and test cores have detected the outline of a much earlier city .And the clues to what it was were in the oracle bones found at Anyang .In the 1930s a Chinese scholar called Dong Zuobin worked on the Bronze Age scratched into the oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty .Thousand upon thousand of them ,and through the 1930s,when China was driven by civil war and Japanese invasion ,he worked transcribing these inscriptions in what ,I suppose ,you could call self-effacting loyalty to the Chinese past while the catastrophes of the modern world surrounded him .You see there his transcription of one of the turtle shells with all the splits and the inscriptions on them .And he worked out the order of the Shang kings and their calendar and their rituals and their journeys .What he discovered was that the kings came back to do special rituals at the city called Shang .That was here .Its name meant ―the place where the ancestors were worshiped ‖.So state and ancestors were tied together .And amazingly ,cults and
legends about the Shang still survive here at a mysterious temple at the edge of town .The Mound of Shang ,it‘s a great artificial hill .The legends say this mound was built before the Great Flood ,that here mankind first got fire ,stolen from the gods .And tradition also said this had been a kind of observatory where the Shang kings watched the stars that protected their dynasty .Because they believed that the stars were powers in heaven and if we understood them properly then we‘d know best how to run our kingdom .So the oracle bones and the later myths are clues to early Chinese beliefs about society and the cosmos .Divination ,ritual and writing were the basis of state power For their sacred ceremonies they cast beautiful bronzes to hold food and wine offerings to the ancestral spirits ,which were consumed at the royal feasts .Some of them bear the symbols of the different lineages of the royal and noble families .Like the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians ,the Shang practiced human sacrifice .The oracle bones list the victims .They were captives from the subject peoples the Shang ruled ,killed as offerings to the powers of nature ,as the Shang diviners asked the ancestors in heaven for guidance ,anxiously watching the stars for omens of auspiciousness and omens of disaster .To them ,time ,as revealed in the movements of the stars and planets ,was a truly portentous dimension ,full of danger as well as auspiciousness ,the planets would reveal heaven‘s judgment on their earthly rule .That brings us to one of the key ideas in early Chinese thought ,the Mandate of Heaven .The early Chinese believed their rulers should protect the people ,keeping harmony with the order of heaven .It was said the first Shang king had been offered himself as a sacrifice in time of drought .But legend said the last Shang king was so depraved and cruel that heaven withdrew its mandate ,and it gave a sign .Five planets came together in the rarest of conjunctions .As this happens only once every 516 years ,we can pin down the very day .So you can follow any single planet ?Yes .It‘s just wonderful .We asked the Beijing Planetarium to work out the exact date of the omen and to show us the night sky at that moment .So it‘s what historians always want to do ,is actually go back in time .Mr Liu can do it for us .He can actually take us back to late May 1058 BC on this computer system ,which is 1059 BC on historians‘ calculations .This time ,this place ,the sky you can see them .The tribes
who lived under the Shang tyranny saw the sign and made an alliance under a man known for his virtue ,King Wen of the Zhou .This five-planet conjunction happens once every 516 years ,but that moment was the closest that has ever happened in human history and at that time the early Chinese chronicles say: when the five planets gather in the constellation called the Chamber, a great vermillion bird landed on the alter of the earth on Mount Qi .In its beak was a jade scepter ,and it spoke ,saying ,‖Heaven has commanded that the king of the Zhou ‖should overthrow the king of the Shang and take the kingdom .‖In the final battle ,the wicked Shang king saw his subjects had turned against him .So he burned his palace with his treasures and his concubines and put on his jade suit and walked into the fire .And so the ancestors passed the mandate to the king of the Zhou .And he laid down the pattern of rule for future ages .Rulers must be virtuous and keep harmony between humanity and the cosmos by observing the rites and the music of the heavens .And ,amazingly ,some of the ritual traditions of the Zhou have come down to us today .China‘s oldest religion is Taoism .In their ceremonies and their music the Taoists .the ―seekers after the Way ‖,are a living link with these ancient ideas about the relation of the kingdoms of earth and heavens .In Daoism Heaven and Earth are two kingdoms ,those kingdoms have the same spirit ,the same king .Daoiam has inherited China‘s ancient beliefs from the Xia ,Shang and Zhou dynasties. It‘s rooted in Chinese culture and speaks to the ordinary people .And these very ancient customs and beliefs are still held in affection and practiced by the ordinary Chinese people today .Daoists believe that humans should practice good deeds .And through this practice they realize they are immortal. In later times the Zhou came to be seen as model rulers ,fulfilling heaven‘s mandate .But China‘s fate throughout its history has been to fragment in times of crisis .Eventually Zhou power disintegrated .And the heartland of China descended into chaos .Across the middle land ,feuding kings and warlords fought for supremacy .Surrounded by their armies ,even in death .Amazing sight ,isn‘t it ?This is one of more than a dozen chariot burial pits that have been uncovered in the middle of Luoyang in the last few years .This with excavated in 2003 during the modern building boom .There‘s 18 chariots and their horses
here ,associated with the tombs of the kings of the Eastern Zhou .It‘s the world of Achilles and Hector in more than just the military hardware .Politically ,just like Agamemnon ,the kings here in the central plain of China depended on the co-operation of vassal states ,smaller kingdoms .Sometimes more than 100 of them .But these were rivals fighting each other ,just like the Greek heros sacking cities and enslaving their populations .So political instability ,warfare and violence were endemic .And for that reason ,perhaps ,this is the time when a ferment of ideas grows about the nature of kingship ,the function of states ,duties ,obligation and morality.
Out of this begins the first golden age of Chinese philosophy .Right across the Old World in the sixth century BC ,thinkers and rulers were debating these ideas .A new age of human thought had dawned ,what we call the Axis Age .The Greek philosophers ,the Old Testament prophets ,the Buddha in India ,all of them were wrestling with ideas about conscience and social justice and human autonomy .How can a king be just in violent times ?What is law and what is virtue ?Here in China it was said 100 schools bloomed .And the most famous thinker came from an obscure state in eastern China .He was descended from a family of Shang diviners ,oracle-bone crackers .And his obsession was not the inner life but how we act in the public world .Small-town China ,but what a small town .Because this place ,Qufu .has nearly 3,000 years of continuity ,life on this spot .And it gave birth to one of the most influential figures in the history of the world ,Confucius.
Ni hao .Confucius lived in a time of cultural and political crisis .China divided into many small states that were always fighting each other and sometimes even divided in themselves ,like this one ,the state of Lu ,whose capital was Qufu .Confucius rose eventually to a quite high ministerial job in which he played a crucial role brokering a peace deal between three feuding clans and persuading them to demolish their fortifications and acknowledge the duke here as their lord .And that kind of experience gave him the idea of his mission ,which was nothing less than to restore civilization by teaching rulers to be virtuous .Confucius had a very clear vision .There is definitely this sense of passion him that he wants to be recognized .He