The other feature of a culture after its politics and its mythology/religion that helps to mould (and inheres in) a culture is its self-history (in a way, derived from the other features). Since Sima, the first real historian of China, we can say China has had a self-conscious history and it is quite unusual for a culture to have developed that so quickly – he died in 90 BCE. Sima Qian’s (司馬遷’s) history, containing its distinctive poetry and models of heroism, is a culmination of an idea that has roots in Chinese religion so I’ll return to that for a bit to explain why we have it. We can also look back at what preceded him as we do to construct our own history from the fragments that remain from the earliest writings.
We can be fairly sure that before the first writings we now have there was a period when songs and dances that (among other things) told a kind of oral history were passed down through the generations. Earlier writings written on perishable materials such as silk may also have once existed. As I mentioned in an earlier post the first writing we can still see today was done for ritual purposes. What I didn’t note is how political that writing was and how we can still use it today to create partial early histories.
On oracular material opposing questions (such as: it will rain/it will not rain?) would be written before it was worked on by an official consulter of the oracles. Another slightly more complex example of such writing would be: we take 15 Xiang prisoners tomorrow/we take no Xiang prisoners tomorrow? The oracle’s answers would also be written on the bone or shell and also the actual outcome. That actual outcome is our first example of history (and also, over a period of years, a written reason for a ruler to dispose of a relatively unsuccessful consulter of oracles). In the second example, if the consulter’s people took, say, 9 Xiang prisoners and the oracle had said yes to “we take 15 Xiang prisoners” (given only the two options) that would be taken as a successful prediction. From what we have today it seems that eighty percent of all predictions were accurate (naturally there may have been a tendency to destroy the evidence of many unsuccessful predictions). Incidentally, this Shang era form of writing two opposing ideas such as rain/not rain may have survived into modern Chinese in a common question-form X not (bu - 不) X.
Writing was seen in its earliest form as magical and sacred because of the novelty of the power it could potentiate (as in every other early written culture, really). A king could discover without needing a great memory how good his oracle consulters were if only he had full access to it, for example. History was also already being rewritten by oracle consulters seeking to keep their jobs in this magical craft (and perhaps maintain the prestige of their families) by discarding actual written evidence of bad predictions. Dating suggests that this writing began in around the 13th Century BCE – late Shang. It wasn’t really self conscious history, it was more holy relic, but today we can use it (for example we can work out that somebody took a certain number of prisoners having a certain name (e.g. Xiang) somewhere in the 13th Century BCE).
This idea of the sacredness of writing is borne out by the next form of writing (chronologically) that we have discovered. It appears people wrote to the ghosts of ancestors on the insides of bronze vessels (called Hu) evidently used for special (mainly family) religious feasts to which the ancestors were welcomed. The ancestors would ‘eat’ the steam or smoke from the meal and be edified by the successes of their descendents via the writing on the inside of the Hu not otherwise readable once the Hu was made. The kinds of writing we have been able to decipher include especially things designed to impress the ancestor such as “the king gave me some land” or “the king gave me some fancy gear”. These vessels were handed down as heir looms and religious relics and objects in aristocratic families so that we now know a certain king gave certain things to certain aristocrats at (not entirely) certain times. Again, it’s a kind of history but not intended as the kind of history we write today. The likelihood of an aristocrat lying to his dead ancestors is as clear (or unclear) as the likelihood of a consulter of oracles destroying incriminating evidence.
Even in around 900 BCE we have a famous pot apparently belonging to a Shi Qiang (Shi in this case meant scribe rather than being a family name) containing a list of the names of the leaders of a clan dynasty in order from the founder (along with some of their alleged personal attributes). It begins by referring to rituals performed by the ‘son of heaven’ (the Emperor) to appease ‘spirits above and below’.
New vessels would be cast anytime someone had news for the ancestors so within an aristocratic family we can potentially trace (as could aristocrats) a succession of bits of good (generally) news. The next stage in the formation of the idea of history was probably prompted by this tangible if biased family history thus available to the aristocrats. That stage was the writing down of the Hu ‘histories’ (as collected over the generations) outside the Hu and in some kind of chronological order. One of these (apparently written in the 4th Century BCE) was found near Hebei in the tomb of a King Cuo of Zhong Shan. It was written from bottom to top and right to left as traditional Chinese books still are.
Archaeologists have attempted to answer a few historical questions with the above data treated longitudinally about how Chinese religion and culture have branched off from any potential earlier common religions and cultures. A major distinguishing feature of the early Chinese religious observance is the marked centring on the family (and the apparently pervasive use of alcohol). Indications are (from peasant burial site data) that around 98% of the population were illiterate at around the time the ninth or tenth Century BCE pot was produced.
So how did state history develop? It might be fairly guessed that it probably progressed naturally from oracular results as I’ve mentioned to the biased family histories of the senior families that eventually led state structures in the late Zhou era of Spring and Autumn. The increase in fighting in this period and concomitant taxes and laws produced a raison d’être for the state and hence also for the loosely based-on-truth but one-sided state propaganda that the family histories were conveniently suited to producing. Naturally the historical value of these was augmented by the contemporaneous recording of a king’s orders (the laws) by specially appointed recorders and a recording of matters that bear on how well and loyally aristocrats especially followed them.
Clan loyalties became a further subject for written discourse (also especially in connection with the general loyalty question). Finally brief somewhat stilted state histories (like Kong’s own Spring and Autumn Annals) often written in antique language were written. Commentaries were later written on and included with these to ‘flesh them out’ somewhat. Cyril Birch’s Anthology of Chinese Literature Volume 1 provides some examples of the style of such state histories as well as Sima Qian’s.
Sima can best be described as a Han court astrologer/astronomer and scribe. The bulk of his work concerned the correct ascertainment of lunar calendar dates and appropriate intercalations for both astrological and court reasons so he was already a dater of events for multiple purposes. His was the first real China-wide history and a template for all later histories (especially up to the modern period). Many of the records he used in the history’s production had first been collected by his father (apparently in anticipation of producing a similar work so it became a family project). When Sima was accused of an offence that was capital for non-eunuchs it is said he emasculated himself, so important did he consider his continuation of his father’s work. The usual practice of those of his class in such a situation would have been suicide.
The work contained 130 chapters including chapters like: Annals (the general history), chronologies in relation to specific issues, treatises on things like music and the science of hydrology, genealogies and biographies. That was the template.
After more than 400 years of relative unity over China, I’ll next briefly examine the Three Kingdoms period and a bit of literature.
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