The Penguin History of the World

This predominance is displayed in its art, which is what now remains of ancient China that is most immediately appealing and accessible. Of the architecture of the Shang and Zhou, not much survives; their building was often in wood, and the tombs do not reveal very much. Excavation of cities, on the other hand, reveals a capacity for massive construction; the wall of one Zhou capital was made of pounded earth 30 feet high and 40 feet thick. Smaller objects survive much more plentifully and they reveal a civilization which even in Shang times was capable of exquisite work, above all in its ceramics, unsurpassed in the ancient world. A tradition going back to Neolithic times lay behind them. Pride of place must be given none the less to the great series of bronzes which begin in early Shang times and continue thereafter uninterruptedly. The skill of casting sacrificial containers, pots, wine-jars, weapons and tripods was already at its peak as early as 1600 BC. And it is argued by some scholars that the ‘lost-wax’ method, which made new triumphs possible, was also known in the Shang era. Bronze-casting appears so suddenly and at such a high level of achievement that people long sought to explain it by transmission of the technique from outside. But there is no evidence for this and the most likely origin of Chinese metallurgy is from locally evolved techniques in several centres in the late Neolithic.

None of the bronzes reached the outside world in early times, or at least there has been no discovery of them elsewhere which can be dated before the middle of the first millennium BC. Nor are there many discoveries outside China at earlier dates of the other things to which Chinese artists turned their attention, the carving of stone or the appallingly hard jade, for example, into beautiful and intricate designs. Apart from what she absorbed from her barbaric nomadic neighbours, China not only had little to learn from the outside until well into the historical era, it seems, but had no reason to think that the outside world – if she knew of it – wanted to learn much from her.

The Zhou era in political terms was more or less over by the 770s BC; the dynasty continued as the ‘Eastern Zhou’, revered, but increasingly politically irrelevant. Its Fenghao capital was destroyed by barbarian forces. The ‘Spring and Autumn’ era, which lasted up to the 480s BC, saw the gradual development of a multi-state system, which included states set up by groups that had never been under Zhou predominance but which had by now accepted Zhou government forms and rituals. At the core of this system stood the Zhou successor entities which referred to themselves as the ‘central states’ or Zhongguo, which – over time – became the Chinese name for China. These were the states where the élites felt a particular responsibility for upholding, as an ideal, the system of government established by the Zhou when the going was good. Although they were rarely strong in military terms, these élites insisted that the continuation of rectitude within the borders of each Chinese state was a collective responsibility. In so doing, they probably did more to uphold a lasting concept of a cultural China through troubled times than did the states that gained prominence on the periphery.

Although China had to learn to live with contending states for more than 500 years after the collapse of the Zhou, the concept of a form of unity was preserved, at least for a while, through regular inter-state meetings and the concept of Ba or a senior ruler. This mid-first millennium BC United Nations obviously came about as a result of the wish to avoid war, which would have been seen as war among brothers. In spite of regular armed conflict, a sense of balance was extended to other parts of China, which – at least for 200 years or so – helped keep a state of more peace than war. Most striking of all, even if the region was disunited, economic and cultural advances flowered and spread much wider than they had before.