Shang - (c. 1650 - c.1050 B.C.)

Three legendary dynasties of ancient China - the Xia, Shang, and Zhou - were known to us until recently only through writings from the Zhou dynasty. But in 1928 archeologists from the National Government's Academia Sinica began excavations of the last Shang capital in Anyang, north of the Yellow River in Henan province. 'Oracle bones', inscribed with archaic characters, which had been sold for many years by farmers from that region to apothecaries in neighboring towns had been traced to the site of this ancient capital. More than 300 graves had been uncovered by 1935, ten of which were of enormous size and considered to be royal tombs

The Shang bronze artifacts from Anyang until 1950 had been almost solely responsible for our knowledge of the early bronze culture in ancient China. The metalworkers craft was quite sophisticated by that time and sacrificial vessels unsurpassed in the world were being produced. Later finds in the 1950's at Erlitou, a city between Louyang and Yanshi south of the Yellow River, thought to be a capital of the Xia dynasty, showed a much earlier development of the bronze culture and include ceramic crucibles, bronze artifacts and objects of jade.

The Shang capital at Zhengzhou also shows the power of the Shang king through a sophisticated public works effort resulting in a city wall 4 miles around as high as 27 feet made of tamped earth as hard as cement. Remains of post and beam construction similar to that in Beijing's Forbidden City testify to the advanced architectural knowledge of this civilization.

The crudest form of ceramics from this period consists of a gray earthenware with cord markings, incised patterns or repeated stamped motifs ranging from squares and coils to zoomorphic images. Various ritual forms of tripod granaries and bowls became models for bronze vessels. The finest ceramic vessels were fine white almost porcelain-like pottery actually made from the fine loess blown across the North China Plain from the deserts to the north. It is wheel finished and fired to about 1000 degrees. The decorative patterns, stamped in the wet clay, became the inspiration for bronze designs. One of the finest examples of this Shang pottery is the white stoneware urn at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C.

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