The narrative of early times is very hard to recover, but can be outlined with some confidence. It has been agreed that the story of continuous civilization in China begins under rulers from a dynasty called Shang, the first name with independent evidence to support it in the traditional list of dynasties which was for a long time the basis of Chinese chronology. (From the late eighth century BC we have better dates, but we still have no chronology for early Chinese history as well founded as, say, that of Egypt.) It is more certain that somewhere about 1700 BC (and a century each way is an acceptable margin of approximation) the Shang, which enjoyed the military advantage of the chariot, imposed themselves on their neighbours over a sizeable stretch of the Yellow River valley. Eventually, the Shang domain was a matter of about 40,000 square miles around northern Henan: this made it somewhat smaller than modern England, though its cultural influences reached far beyond its periphery, as evidence from as far away as south China and the north-eastern coast shows.
Shang kings lived and died in some state; slaves and human sacrificial victims were buried with them in deep and lavish tombs. Their courts had archivists and scribes, for this was the first truly literate culture east of Mesopotamia. This is one reason for distinguishing between Shang civilization and Shang dynastic paramountcy; this people showed a cultural influence which certainly extended far beyond any area they could have dominated politically. The political arrangements of the Shang domains themselves seem to have depended on the uniting of landholding with obligations to a king; the warrior landlords who were the key figures were the leading members of aristocratic lineages with semi-mythical origins. Yet Shang government was advanced enough to use scribes and had a standardized currency. What it could do when at full stretch is shown in its ability to mobilize large amounts of labour for the building of fortifications and cities.
The Shang also contributed much in other fields, although it is uncertain how much of these advances originated with the Shang or was simply imported from other Chinese communities. It developed a rather exact calendar, which was the basis for all Chinese calendars up to the modern period. It organized a form of religion around Di, the high god, who during the late dynasty was only referred to as Heaven. It set rituals for sacrifice to Heaven or to ancestors, and made imposing bronze vessels to help with such rites. It organized labour in sophisticated manners, including the collective clearing of new land. But first and foremost it developed a centralized monarchy based on the person of the king, ‘the one man’ as he was called, who commanded its military forces and to whom surrounding states paid tribute. The Shang was an expansionist state, but also one that was attractive to others because of its advanced culture and technological capabilities.
The Shang age, we know today, saw many independent communities in the larger region, including as far away from the Shang core as Sichuan in the west. Most of them were found in the belt between the great rivers in the north, and it is likely that some of these had arrived at a level of development that was the equal of that of the Shang, though on a smaller scale and with less organized power than it possessed. It is probably right to think of the Chinese centre as a unit that gradually grew together, in part through conquest and in part through cultural diffusion or migration, starting sometime in the middle part of the second millennium BC and lasting all the way up to our own time. There was of course nothing given about this process and the size of China has waxed and waned with the power of the centre and with its degree of unity. But in cultural terms there is a degree of relentlessness about the expansion: distinct, but related cultures grew together, then incorporated nearby regions, then grew outside the original core until an exceptionally large number of people felt that they shared one culture and one heritage. For this to happen, the cultural elements that came to be shared had to be attractive as well as represented by the mighty and powerful.