Social Memory and State Formation in Early China 1107141451, 9781107141452

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SOCIAL MEMORY AND STATE FORMATION IN EARLY CHINA

In this book, Li Min proposes a new paradigm for the foundation and emergence of the classical tradition in early China, from the late Neolithic through the Zhou period. Using a wide range of historical and archaeological data, he explains the development of ritual authority and particular concepts of kingship over time in relation to social memory, weaving together the major benchmarks in the emergence of the classical tradition, particularly how legacies of prehistoric interregional interactions, state formation, urban florescence and collapse during the late third and the second millennium bce laid the critical foundation for the Sandai notion of history among Zhou elite. Moreover, the literary-historical accounts of the legendary Xia dynasty in early China reveal a cultural construction involving social memories of the past and subsequent political elaborations in various phases of history. This volume enables a new understanding of the long-term processes that enabled a classical civilization to take shape in China. Li Min is Associate Professor of East Asian Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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SOCIAL MEMORY AND STATE FORMATION IN EARLY CHINA LI MIN  University of California, Los Angeles

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107141452 DOI: 10.1017/9781316493618 © Li Min 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-107-14145-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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I dedicate this book to Henry Wright, a great mentor and an inspiring mind

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CONTENTS

Foreword Acknowledgments 1

Wen Ding : Gaging the Weight of Political Power

The Primary Symbols of Kingship in Early China The Ritualization of Power Structure of the Book 2

Frames of Reference: Multiple Classifications of Space

The Classification of Physical Landscape The Cultural Historical Classification of Space Archaeological Classifications: Multiregional Paradigm and Interaction Sphere Conclusion 3

Before the Central Plains: The Pinnacle of Neolithic Development

The Rise of the Liangzhu Society Lowland Society in the Huai River Basin and the Middle Yangzi The Divergence of Highland Society Conclusion 4

The Longshan Transition: Political Experimentation and Expanding Horizons

The Changing Frame of the Longshan World The Convergence of Three Interaction Spheres in Highland Longshan Society Political Experimentation in Highland Longshan Society Growth and Decline in the Lowlands Conclusion 5

The Rise of the Luoyang Basin and the Production of the First Bronze Ding Vessels

The Collapse of Longshan Society and the Rise of Erlitou Forging a New Cultural Tradition

page ix xiii 1 1 4 19 22 22 25 29 41 42 43 59 69 78 82 83 95 115 152 172 175 176 193

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CONTEN T S

Becoming the Central Plains: A Luoyang-Centered Political Landscape Conclusion 6

The Rise of the Henei Basin and the Limit of Shang Hegemony

The Rise of a Highland Confederation in Henei Political Change in the Luoyang Basin and the Early Shang Expansion The Return to Henei and the Anyang-Centered Political Landscape Religious Communication and the Ritual Significance of Bronze Ding Vessels The Limit of Shang Hegemony Conclusion 7

The Rise of the Guanzhong Basin and the Birth of History

A Highland Confederation in the Guanzhong Basin Sandai Historical Landscape in the Zhou State Formation Process Social Memory and the Ritualization of the Past The Central Domain under Siege: Challenging the Zhou Political Order Conclusion 8

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215 225 230 231 237 257 274 291 309 312 313 322 365 382 394

The World of Yu’s Tracks: A Blueprint for Political Experimentation 396

The Imagined World of Yu’s Tracks and its Nonary Division Religious Responses to Climatic Change Divergent Legacies of the Ritual Tradition The Wen Ding Narrative as a Palimpsest of World Orders Conclusion

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Conclusion: The Emergence of the Classical Tradition

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Emergence and Transformation The Wen Ding Legacy in Warring States and Early Imperial China Methodological Reflections Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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FOREWORD

Paraphrasing Clausewitz, archaeology may be characterized as “merely the continuation of history with other means.” In other words (with apologies to Binford):  “Archaeology is history or it is nothing.” This has always been emphasized in China. But archaeologists – in China and everywhere else – proceed differently from textual historians when they string together their historical narratives from material remains; and modern anthropological archaeology has generated a set of methods with which they can do so responsibly and reliably. Archaeological arguments are strongest when they are reached independently of text-based reasoning; in the words of Clausewitz’s erstwhile student Helmuth von Moltke, archaeology and textual history ought to “march separately and strike jointly.” When this is done, material evidence – as shown throughout this book – can throw important new light on textual records. As a subdiscipline of anthropology, archaeology is a social science in the same sense that history, too, is a social science; and as an extension of history, it simultaneously belongs to the humanities to the same degree that history does. As a successful piece of archaeological writing, the present book strikes a fine balance between these dual dimensions of the discipline. Its author, Li Min, was trained at the University of Michigan in one of America’s foremost anthropology PhD programs, and in this book he boldly sets out to investigate early Chinese civilization from an anthropological perspective. His main topic – the development of sociopolitical complexity and the origins of the state – has been for many years the main focus of recent anthropological theory-building in archaeology, and it is a subject of central importance to textual historians of China as well. Atypically, although Social Memory and State Formation in Early China is Li Min’s first book, it has no relation to his doctoral dissertation. Instead, Li Min took the considerable risk of undertaking a completely new and very ambitious research effort early in his academic career. The result is a mature, stand-alone work of grand synthesis. In it Li Min has harnessed some of the most advanced modern methods of spatial analysis to show how different parts of Asia interacted with one another during the third and second millennia bce. In China, this period is for the most part prehistorical; only during its final centuries is there a small amount of contemporary textual ix

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FOREWO R D

documentation in the form of the famous oracle bone inscriptions, and later textual records are few in number and biased in their contents. Through an anthropological approach, as pioneered in Chinese archaeology by the late K. C. Chang (1931–2001), the investigation of pre- and protohistoric materials from China is linked to worldwide, diachronic efforts at cross-cultural comparison, thereby bringing out the specifics of the Chinese case in the concert of state-level civilizations of the Ancient World. In adopting such an approach, the present study is by no means unprecedented. But Li Min adds a special twist: employing sophisticated models of how historical memory is formed, he revisits textually recorded legends about remote antiquity in light of recent archaeological evidence. He attempts – as far as I know, for the first time – to situate different traditions of historical memory within specific regions of protohistoric China, and he is able to show how they encapsulate regionally different models of, or trajectories toward, kingship and state-level government that can in turn be independently traced in the archaeological record. This reflective turn places the book at the very cutting edge of both the archaeological and the historical disciplines. More broadly speaking, Li Min contributes in a highly original manner to the current debate about memory among scholars across the humanities and the social sciences. Li Min has painstakingly distilled his broad-stroked, wide-ranging, and many-stranded narrative from a huge body of archaeological data that was not originally generated with a view to facilitating a systematic, quantitative, and social-science minded analysis. This is a universal predicament:  all over the world, archaeologists must face the fact that the materials at their disposal rarely speak directly to the research questions they are interested in answering. Li Min deals with this problem creatively, and his handling of the data reminds one of the tremendous untapped potential of the published archaeological record. Whereas Chinese scholarship tends to emphasize the connections between archaeological materials and written texts, this book provides a more balanced treatment, foregrounding new and often unexpected discoveries and linking them, first and foremost, to other material evidence. This is a forward-looking book, exhibiting great intellectual courage. It is completely sui generis. Unlike many other books similar topics, it is not descriptive and enumerative, nor is it a mechanical application of shopworn theories of social evolution. Instead, it has its own clearly stated point of view – a point of view the reader is welcome and invited to argue with.The principal value of this book does not lie in establishing solutions of inshakeable validity, but in formulating new ideas for discussion, thereby encouraging the next generation of scholars to go further. Readers should keep in mind that this is an archaeological inquiry, and it would be unfair to demand from the author the philological and linguistic skills necessary to bring out all the nuances of meaning in the written sources adduced. Archaeologists rarely have these skills.

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The self-reflective and often tentative approach to textual sources espoused in this book is commendable, but it cannot replace further in-depth philological work by qualified specialists. I predict that Social Memory and State Formation in Early China will be one of those seminal books that everyone must read and engage with; for it establishes a new frame of discourse, forcing readers to rethink what they thought they knew. Such rethinking is altogether healthy and may be expected eventually to lead to new intellectual breakthroughs. I hope that this book will serve as a source of inspiration especially to younger colleagues – as an encouragement to explore new methods and to be creative in the way they approach both material and textual data. As the unforgotten K. C. Chang used to say: “The future is very bright.” Lothar von Falkenhausen Los Angeles

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CHAPTER ONE

WEN DING : GAGING THE WEIGHT OF POLITICAL POWER

THE PRIMARY SYMBOLS OF KINGSHIP IN EARLY CHINA

Civilization represents the “overarching social order in which state governance exists and is legitimized” (Baines and Yoffee 1998:254). In early states and civilizations, the transmission of aristocratic knowledge of their core symbols and exclusive access to them were the primary concerns of the elite class and elite culture. Core symbols, along with the knowledge and narratives associated with them, not only resonate with a coherent synthesis of meaning, but also embody social order itself. This book links the concept of social memory to physical landscape and political power, using a broad perspective to analyze how the manipulation of symbols created the foundation for legitimacy in early China (Connerton 1989; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Alcock 2002; Ricoeur 2004; Davis 2007; Yoffee 2007; Mills and Walker 2008). By examining the emergence of exclusive symbols that represented political and ritual authority in early China, I will analyze the state formation process and the development of the overarching social orders that defined the early Sandai civilization. This investigation into the cultural and symbolic representations of kingship and statecraft involves a syncretic approach which aims to address the “originality of China” in the anthropological study of states and civilizations (Berr 1930). The aim is “not to spot something essentially Chinese in its earliest manifestations, but to show

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how a notion of a distinct and lasting cultural identity gained momentum in a certain place and time” (Schaberg 2001:505). Although not explicitly defined, the notion of core symbols for representing kingship and legitimacy runs throughout the historical narratives of early China in the first millennium bce. The most famous rhetorical connection between symbols and political authority is attributed to a 606 bce exchange recorded in Zuozhuan between a Zhou noble and a Chu king in the suburb of Luoyang, the center of the Zhou world: The Master of Chu attacked the Rong of Luhun, and consequently reached the Luo River. He drilled his troops at the border of Zhou. King Ding sent Wangsun Man to honor the exertions of the Master of Chu. The latter asked about the size and weight of the bronze ding vessels [in Zhou royal palace]. Wangsun Man replied, “Size and weight depend on virtue, not on the ding vessels. In the past, just when Xia possessed virtue, men from afar depicted various creatures, and the nine superintendents submitted metal, so that the ding vessels were cast with images of various creatures. The hundred things were therewith completely set forth, and the people thus knew the spirits and the evil things … Thus, [the Xia people] were able to harmonize with those above and below them and to receive Heaven’s blessings. The last Xia king, Jie, possessed dimmed virtue, and the ding vessels were moved to the house of Shang, there to remain for six hundred years. The last Shang king, Zhòu, was violent and tyrannical, and the ding vessels were moved to the house of Zhou. When virtue is bright and resplendent, the bronze ding vessels, though small, are heavy. When virtue is distorted, dimmed, and confused, the ding vessels, though large, are light. Heaven blesses those of bright virtue, giving them the place for realizing and maintaining it.When King Cheng put the ding vessels in place at Jiaru, he divined about the number of generations and got thirty; he divined about the number of years and got seven hundred. This is what Heaven has commanded. Although Zhou virtue is in decline, the heavenly command has not yet changed. The question of whether the ding vessels are light or heavy may not be asked yet. (adapted from translation by Durrant et al. 2016: Lord Xuan 3.3)

In his rebuttal against the Chu challenges to the Zhou royal power, the Zhou storyteller articulated the dynastic historiography in its most condensed form, seamlessly merging together food, ritual, technology, and historical conceptions of time and space in the biography of the legendary ding vessels. These bronze vessels permeated all aspects of civilization as presented in the classical tradition and the Zhou possession of them marks its exclusive claim to kingship and legitimacy (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The Chu’s expression of covetousness for these legendary vessels was perceived as an ultimate challenge to the Zhou’s claim to the Mandate of Heaven.

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1.1. The bronze ding vessel sponsored by Prince Zi Wu. Also known as Zi Geng (d. 552 bce), Zi Wu was a son of King Zhuang – the Chu king featured in the Wen Ding story. Measuring 76 cm high and 66 cm in diameter, this vessel is the largest of a set of seven ding vessels excavated from the elite tomb m2 at Xiasi, Xichuan, a Chu cemetery of the middle to late Spring and Autumn period. (Image courtesy of National Museum of China.)

1.2. A set of nine bronze ding vessels excavated from a ritual dedication pit (t602k15) sponsored by the rulers of the Zheng state during the Spring and Autumn period (after Henansheng 2006, vol. iii, Color Plate 5).

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This famous story in Zuozhuan gave rise to the phrase wen ding (問鼎), an inquiry on the tripod vessels. The concept of wen (asking) was endowed with multiple layers of meaning  – inquiry, divinity, and contest, which concerns the exclusive access to the pathway toward political authority. At the same time, understanding wen ding as an inquiry addressed in the form of divination to these bronze tripod vessels identifies them as sources for political wisdom and mediums of religious communication (Chang 1983). For the next two millennia, the phrase wen ding was used as a verb in the Chinese language, epitomizing the ultimate challenge to legitimacy by characterizing both the pursuit of and contention with political authority. The symbolic significance of this story for early China resembles that of the Palette of King Narmer in Egyptology, which serves as an ideal point of entry for investigating the rise of kingship (Chang 1983; Wu 1995). As we approach the cultural assumptions of these stories, “it was the invention and manipulation of those stories,” Pines et al. (2014b:13) argue, “rather than their historic ‘truth,’ which mattered most.” These questions thus summarize this book’s central concern: What made the wen ding story such a compelling representation of power to the learned elite of classical and imperial China? Why did possession of these core symbols and use of this rhetoric collectively define the ideology of kingship? How did social memory and state formation contribute to the emergence of these primary symbols? Using the wen ding narrative as a lens to observe the diverse aspects of early China’s political evolution, this book aims to explore the process through which diverse manifestations of political authority were forged together into a single, coherent narrative of the historiography of power. To borrow a term from Foucault (1972), I hope to offer an archaeology of knowledge on the emergence and transformation of these legendary bronze vessels, from culinary wares to symbols of kingship, within the contexts of changing techniques, technologies, and political structures. THE RITUALIZATION OF POWER

In the wen ding story, the Zhou storyteller skillfully manipulated a historical lore that wove together the notions of power in its temporal, spatial, and technological manifestations. While it is a retroactive narrative about what the core symbols should be (Wu 1995:10), Zuozhuan and its intended readers operate within an overarching cultural order shared by the cultured elite of Zhou society. Within this classical tradition, the place of the wen ding story closely resembles Mauss’s notion of total social phenomenon (or social facts), which pervaded every sector of culture in early China, simultaneously expressing a great many institutions, and at once “juridical, economic, religious, and even aesthetic and morphological” (Mauss 1990:79). Using the wen ding story as my

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archaeological trowel, I will examine the cultural, political, and technological assumptions that made the story so compelling in the cultural milieu of Zhou society, hoping to unravel the complex entanglement of power and knowledge in early China. The wen ding narrative assumes a tripod form, much like that of the ding vessel itself:  the practice of bronze metallurgy, a historical concept of civilization, and a Central Plains-centric ideology of political landscape. These notions of form, materiality, time, and space become integral parts of the ding symbol through the process of ritualization – the transformation from a common utensil to an exclusive “ritual vessel,” the recognition of certain raw materials as sacred, or the identification of a specific place in the landscape as the axis mundi (Bell 1992, 1997; Wu 1995). Ritualization, kingship, and power are intricately connected. As Bell (1992:140–41) put it:  “Ritualizing schemes invoke a series of privileged oppositions that, when acted in space and time through a series of movements, gestures, and sounds, effectively structure and nuance an environment … Ritualization always aligns one within a series of relationship linked to the ultimate sources of power.” In the wen ding narrative, each ritualization process was framed in a distinct temporal, geographical, and technological history, converging within the larger framework of prehistoric social interactions that led toward the rise of the classical tradition in which works like Zuozhuan were produced and transmitted. This discussion on diverse aspects of ritualization will serve as the roadmap for my archaeological inquiry on the emergence and changing configuration of this knowledge leading up to Zhou society.

The Ritualization of Food and Culinary Vessels The bronze ding vessels were the primary meat-cooking vessels of the classical tradition; together with the cattle-based domestic animal set, they constituted defining attributes of the culinary tradition in classical China. Ranking high on the list of ritual institutions in early China, this culinary tradition included food techniques, ritual bronze vessels, feasting, ritual offerings of animals, cereal food, and alcoholic beverages (Chang 1977, 1983; Sterckx 2005). Serving protocols and the symbolism attached to the vessels are as important as the food contained within; thus all three constitute important attributes of the classical tradition (Chang 1977). In the classical narratives, e.g. Zuozhuan and Shiji, the extent to which the bronze ding vessels possess the aura of wealth and kingship delimits classical civilization:  those who did not adopt the symbolism – either by deliberate refusal or through simple lack of awareness – resided beyond the geographic extent of civilization. The ritualization of food vessels must be approached as part of a study of food techniques, which involves meals, cooking, utensils, food ideologies,

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condiments, and drinks (Mauss 2006:115). Many ritual protocols described in early Chinese texts deal with food techniques – the preparation of food, the fermentation of alcohol, the arrangement of the dishes, the instruments of consumption, and formalized seating – that left abundant archaeological imprints in mortuary contexts through food remains and culinary assemblages (Chang 1977;Yu and Gao 1978–79; Appadurai 1986; Okamura 2005; Falkenhausen 2006). Important to the process of socialization was an awareness of an embodied cultural order and protocols involving food vessels and culinary techniques. These techniques manipulated “materiality, artificiality, the appropriation of nature, the production of goods and the application of knowledge, usually augmented with references to society, culture or civilization” (Schlanger 2006:2).Techniques are socially produced and always embedded in a symbolic system (Lemonnier 1993:22). They played a meaningful role in the social transmission of knowledge and in shaping the world’s everyday experience.1 Techniques connect individuals with cultures and society by reproducing the cultural milieu and social relationships in the context of storytelling: The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been a traveling journeyman before he settled down in his hometown or somewhere else. If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place. (Benjamin 1968:85)

Techniques imbued objects with cultural memory, crafting a biography of things and a history of techniques that bridges archaeological remains and social history. Symbols of authority embedded in and elaborated from food techniques and daily practices are deeply penetrating – they make the social order associated with them appear as a natural extension of human experience. While exclusive association with the production and maintenance of high culture like the bronze ding vessels made inner elites the focus and repository of civilizational meaning, food symbols derive part of their power from their capacity to evoke a collective response in everyday practice. They are rooted in and respond to the basic structural principles embedded in practices and bodily techniques: The use of oral symbols is but one case of the use of symbols: any traditional practice, endowed with a form and transmitted through that form, can in some measure be regarded as symbolic. When one generation hands down to the next the technical knowledge of its manual and bodily actions, as much authority and social tradition is involved as when transmission occurs through language. In this there is truly tradition, and continuity. (Mauss 2006:76)

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From these daily rituals and their associated material manifestations, the emerging political authority took up its elementary forms and designs for elaboration. These food vessels were the foci of social life and the carriers of social memory, thereby connecting the everyday culinary practice with the ultimate symbol of power (Henansheng 2013). Food is an important means of engaging with the ancestors and deities in ancestral rituals (Ahern 1981). Food also binds people to their faiths through powerful links between food and memory (Feeley-Harnik 1994, 1995).Through its association with supernatural beings and processes, food can be sacred. The storyteller’s statement about a vessel’s ritual qualities echoes the nearly universal property of food vessels as observed by Mauss (2006:110): “Almost all pots have symbolic values … Very often the pot has a soul, the pot is a person. Pots are kept in a specific place, and they can often constitute objects of considerable religious importance.” Defying a strict opposition of the symbolic versus utilitarian, every pot, no matter how modest in construction and material, could potentially serve as a “ritual vessel,” or at least the focus of ritual attention. Whereas textual and verbal discourse was lost to the passage of time, the deeply engrained realms of food techniques and culinary vessels offer a window on to past cultural choices and their power relations. These culinary traditions concerning forms, aesthetics, techniques, ritual order, and gift transactions did not directly engage political authority; yet, they constitute cultural realms in which political authority could act. Through ritual use, the bronze ding vessels became the focus of the ritual economy – “the material, the shape, the decoration, and the inscriptions of these bronzes were meant to attest to something entirely beyond the range of ordinary experience, to demonstrate that the vessels, as liqi or ritual paraphernalia, were sacred and unworldly” (Wu 1995:70). Within this tradition, bronze ding vessels represent the legitimate forms for engaging with ancestral ritual and “embodying and consolidating the web of social relationships” (Wu 1995:71). The display of these vessels lends weight to the social reproduction and negotiation at work in the community’s major gatherings, e.g. ancestral veneration, rites of passage, weddings, and alliancemaking (Rawson 1999a; Childs-Johnson 2012, 2014). Their use for divination in the wen ding narrative further attests to these potent vessels’ religious efficacy. While eating “embodies desirability within an historical food tradition” (Hastorf 2017:10), the culinary vessels chosen for the occasion were also historically contextualized.The ritualization of ding vessels as the symbol of kingship must be approached within the full culinary assemblage in use at the time, particularly their relation to their conventional counterparts – the pottery li tripod vessels, which were reserved for mundane household cooking in Shang and Zhou society. Although the code of conduct is more politically situated for elite feasting or ritual sacrifices involving the use of bronze ding vessels, social demarcation and identification are often present in simple and unconscious

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matters, because even the most mundane episodes of daily consumption are deeply laden with cultural meanings and classification schemes. The parallel history of the ding and li vessels throughout Shang and Zhou society attests to the cultural and political choices entailed in ritualization. Both the Shang and Zhou culinary traditions, for example, prepared the daily meal with the pottery li vessels. The choice of the ding vessel as the ritual vessel, therefore, did not necessarily arise from an elaboration of the utilitarian li pottery ware used by mainstream society. If the ritual vessels preserved social memory, whose memory was commemorated in this choice of ritual vessel form? How did the ding vessel form, among a variety of vessel forms used in early China, come to symbolize wealth, kingship, and the center of the known world, while others like the li tripod vessel did not? These questions underscore the plurality of prehistoric traditions, wherein the rise of the classical tradition embraced competition among multiple histories and narratives. In this historic process, the symbols associated with different networks of power rose and fell with changing political fortunes.The emergence of a set of core symbols out of these complex interactions amounts to a tectonic shift in the political and cultural landscape, which could not have materialized without some repercussions.Tracing the biography of these vessel forms through time and space helps reveal the historic process that gave the hegemonic discourse its distinct shape.

The Ritualization of Metallurgy Technology encompasses the objects’ production processes, including shared (or secret) human knowledge (Miller 2007:4). In the wen ding narrative, metallurgy marks a new epoch and delineates political space. In early imperial works like Yue jue shu, authors on the evolution of early Chinese technologies attribute the beginning of its Bronze Age to the onset of the Xia dynasty (Chang 1983). In the wen ding story, the Xia dynastic founder used metallurgy to transform the political landscape into bronze vessels at the close of the third millennium bce. Thus, their legendary production was celebrated as one of the most momentous events in early China, commemorating the end of the legendary era and the beginning of the dynastic regimes (Wu 1995:5). The supernatural properties associated with bronze provided the ideological foundation for the ritualization of metallurgy.These vessels became part of the ritual apparatus for the performance of religious ceremonies directed at royal lineage ancestors and natural deities. K. C. Chang (1983:97) identifies ritual bronze vessels as mediums for religious communication and the path to political authority in early China: [T]he possession of such sacred bronze vessels served to legitimize the king’s rule. These vessels were clear and powerful symbols:  they were

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symbols of wealth because they were wealth and possessed the aura of wealth; they were symbols of the all-important ritual that gave their owners access to the ancestors; and they were symbols of the control of metal, which meant control of exclusive access to the ancestors and to political authority.

The major preoccupation of statecraft, therefore, was to guard these vessels in the royal capitals of the early states and to secure the raw materials for their manufacture (Chang 1983; Wu 1995; Liu and Chen 2003, 2012). The elite’s obsession with bronze ritual vessels became the defining attribute of the political ideology (Liu and Chen 2012:296). Before identifying control strategies, we must understand that the ritualization of metal first involves changes in the regime of value and technological knowledge for prospecting and production. Cross-culturally, bronze was neither a hallmark of states and civilizations, nor a universal medium for ancestral ritual and religious communication. Metalworking traditions in the Near East, Europe, and the New World, for example, predate state formation, sometimes by millennia (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005; Pernicka and Anthony 2010; Renfrew 2011; Roberts and Thornton 2014). In early China, the rise of political authority in large settlement centers with marked social differentiation predated metallurgy’s introduction in the late third millennium bce (Chapters 2 and 3). The close association of metallurgy, religious communication, and political authority in early China, therefore, needs to be investigated as the product of a ritualization process. Values, aesthetics, and experience associated with metal were intricately intertwined in the bronze ding symbolism. The cultural perception of materiality played a significant role in the ritualization of bronze (Sherratt 2006). The transformation from stone to liquid to resonating, shiny, solid, and durable vessels during the metalworking process would seem magical to prehistoric communities, providing considerable prestige to those capable of harnessing such power (Wu 1995:5–6). Metallurgy, therefore, was nothing short of a spectacle in the cultural world of early China. A study of changing configurations of technologies and the shifting historical and cultural values that surround them offers critical insights into the ritualization of metallurgy (Doonan et al. 2014). The preexisting technological logic, such as the fragility of coastal fine wares, provides the important conceptual basis for bronze vessels to acquire their distinctive values in China. Despite the critical importance of bronze in religious communication and political representation, neither Chang (1983) nor Wu (1995) addressed the source of metallurgy, which provides the critical link between early China and its world. The unresolved question for the ritualization of metallurgy regards the cultural responses to the new technology: How did a millenniaold Eurasian technology become the medium of religious communication in

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early China? In the course of this transformation, how was the perception of bronze vessels related to the existing mediums of religious communication and representations of power? The expanding Eurasian metallurgical network during the third millennium bce bears critical clues for understanding the cultural transformations that turned metal vessels into political and religious symbols of early China. Archaeological evidence for the first introduction of bronze vessels in early China can reveal the potential convergence and divergence between textual narrative and technological history. As recent archaeological research on early metal prospecting, mining, and metalworking reveals uneven access to metallurgic knowledge as well as uneven mineral distribution across early China, the rise of bronze vessels as primary symbols of political authority for early states implies a significant shift in the technology of power. This unevenness in metalworking knowledge and raw material transformed the ways in which the political landscape was envisioned and controlled (Chang 1983; Liu and Chen 2003, 2012). Since the production of the first bronze vessels allegedly used metal ore from various parts of the political landscape in the wen ding narrative, spatiality and metallurgy were integrally connected in the ritualization of bronze vessels.

The Ritualization of Time, Place, and Space The symbolic significance of the legendary bronze vessels cannot be understood outside of the spatiality and temporality of the political landscape they allegedly represent. Instead of approaching time as a continuum, authors of Zuozhuan framed time in terms of the Sandai historical tradition, from the legendary creation of these tripod vessels at the onset of the first dynasty at the end of the third millennium bce to the waning of Zhou royal power in the mid-first millennium bce. The emic concept of Sandai describes the broad patterns of political authority in Bronze Age China, as remembered and described in early textual traditions from the first millennium bce. Literally meaning the “Three Dynasties,” Sandai refers to the three dynastic regimes, namely Xia (c. 2100–1600 bce), Shang (c.1600–1046 bce), and Zhou (cc. 1046–256 bce). This historical epoch started in the period of extraordinary drought and flooding of the late third millennium bce, when “exceptional circumstances of major historical disruptions and social transformations” broke the “cosmological continuity” (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005:316). These dynastic powers allegedly claimed hegemony in the Central Plains through the second and first millennia bce.As a time period, Sandai also includes contenders during interregnums that failed to be recognized as legitimate lines, or were erased from the historical memory.

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The importance of the Sandai civilization lies in its perceived role as the fountainhead of cultural and political institutions for historical China (Chang 1976, 1983). Even though the Sandai tradition comprises disparate elements of three eras, the rituals embodied in bronze culinary assemblage unite them as a multifaceted civilization. As an epoch, a cultural milieu, and a cultural hegemony in Chinese historiography, the Sandai narrative holds such significant sway in conceptualizing early China that it is often taken to represent early Chinese civilization itself, drawing an implicit connection between state formation and the Sandai dynastic narrative:  “the origins of early states in China involve four intertwined issues: the formation of the state, the development of urbanism, the emergence of civilization, and the beginning of dynastic history” (Liu and Chen 2012:253). From an archaeological perspective, however, the Sandai civilization was one among numerous early East Asian civilizations whose developmental trajectories frequently intersected. The rise of the Sandai civilization represents neither the first nor necessarily the only episode of state formation in early China. Instead, it was part of the “networks of jostling states, sharing some beliefs, practices, and cultural forms, while differing in others” (Morris 2010:215). Since the Sandai narrative became the central component in the ideology of kingship represented by the Zuozhuan story, it is important to observe from an archaeological perspective the political process that this historical discourse evolved and how the defining features of Sandai tradition came into place. This book’s aim is not to verify the historicity of the dynastic narratives, but to understand why the Sandai narrative mattered so much to the Zhou historical discourse. Why was the end of the third millennium bce regarded as a major watershed in Zhou historical knowledge? What made the notion of Three Dynasties a prevailing historical discourse in the Zhou textual tradition? To address these questions, I take a deep history approach to investigating the interconnectedness of the temporal and spatial representations of political history in early China (Shryock and Smail 2011). As part of a symbolic system, places and spaces have history, social memory, and power. A mastery of cosmography and cultural landscape, real or mythological, as well as genealogies of great personages and places, represents important components of elite knowledge in ancient China (Strassberg 2002). As an important aspect of world-making, places are value-laden; place-making is fundamentally a process of incorporating spaces into larger systems of value (Graeber 2001; Papadopoulos and Urton 2012). With the Shang in the east, Xia in the middle, and Zhou in the west, the Sandai tradition could also be seen as three geographically defined cultural historical traditions bound to the areas these societies inhabited, where Bronze Age states rise and decline (Chang 1986). The textual narrative about the

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historical transfer of these legendary bronze vessels through the three dynastic regimes highlights the “temporality of the landscape” (Ingold 1993). This underlines the importance of space in the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of political authority at multiple scales. Besides the Sandai notion of landscape, the incorporation of physical and metaphorical place and space into the wen ding narrative involves three nested spatial concepts: the Luoyang Basin as the event place, the Central Plains as the heartland of the Zhou political landscape, and, as the geographic extent of civilization, the world of Yu’s tracks – places visited and drained for human habitation by the Great Yu in his legendary flood control odyssey during the late third millennium bce. Together, these three spatial concepts of different scales defined the spatiality of power in the Zuozhuan story. They were not necessarily created together as a central point surrounded by two concentric circles; rather, the loci and the perimeter of these spatial concepts were historically defined, each associated with its own genealogy of power. First, the Luoyang Basin as the event place for the Zuozhuan story was closely tied to the Zhou notion of political order and legitimacy. The wen ding story was set against the backdrop of declining Zhou royal power.The Luoyang Basin means more to the Zhou political order than being the only royal center that the dynastic house clung to after it lost its homeland in the Guanzhong Basin to highland invasion in 771  bce. As I will elaborate later in this book, the choice of Luoyang as the center of the Zhou political order by its dynastic founders at the end of the second millennium bce hinged upon its historical definition of axis mundi. The establishment of a central place is a common pursuit of human communities:  “Every microcosm, every inhabited region, has a centre; that is to say, a place that is sacred above all” (Eliade 1991:39). The spatial order defined by the center is replicated at various scales from body to landscape, which was never fully removed from the overall scheme of order (Wheatley 1971). The notion of a center evolved in tandem with the development of political authority. The choice and recognition of a spot on the landscape as the axis mundi, to the exclusion of competing claims, was laden with political appeals to tradition and authority. The siting of the axis mundi as the spatial definition of legitimacy, therefore, is historically defined and could shift with changing notions of political hegemony. In historical China, the notion of axis mundi is represented by the concept of zhong, center or middle, and the term Zhongguo, the central domain or central place and later the historical designation for the country of China (Stumpfeldt 1970; Wang Aihe 2000). The religious communication that took place at these loci highlights their special place in the overall schemes of ritual and liminality. The determination

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of this distinctive place in the landscape was an important exercise of political and ritual authority.2 Since the center is where the gnomon is set, the choice of axis mundi also maps the middle point of the calendric cycle, effectively combining spatial and temporal definitions of legitimacy in an all-encompassing cosmological order (Loewe 1999: 993–94). After the Zhou conquest of the Late Shang capital in Anyang, the alleged relocation of the nine vessels to the new royal center at Luoyang comprised part of the Zhou political effort to establish a new order with reference to the pre-Shang legacy. The association of these bronze vessels with divination and religious communication attests to the sacred properties of these vessels as well as of the place. Given its symbolic and logistical significance in the Zhou political order, it was here that the presence of Chu troops and a hostile inquiry into the bronze vessels came to be perceived as a grave threat to the Zhou kingship. The event place, therefore, was critical in understanding the Zhou notion of legitimacy in the wen ding narrative. Based on this archaeological investigation, I argue that the Zhou definition of axis mundi tapped into the legacy of political experimentation and state formation of the early second millennium bce. Second, the Central Plains represented Sandai civilization’s core region. In historical China, the phrase wen ding is frequently followed by a spatial specification, Zhongyuan, the Central Plains, which was the main political theater for claiming hegemony. The notion of the Central Plains is closely related to the geographic definition of the axis mundi in Mt. Song along the southern edge of the Luoyang Basin. The geographical concept of the Central Plains was already used in many sources in pre-imperial China, and remained central in contemporary cultural and archaeological discourse. Its influence on political geography was so prominent that the Central Plains was once considered the cradle of civilization, from which the defining attributes of the Chinese civilizations evolved and spread (Ho 1975). Straddling the highlands and lowlands, the Central Plains includes the western half of the Huai River Basin, the middle Yellow River Valley, and the Jinnan Basin (Figure  1.3).3 With its diverse terrain types, the Central Plains area was anything but an open plain. To imagine the Central Plains as a well-integrated and expansive human terrain around the central peak of Mt. Song, the early rulers had to secure those strategic passes and river valleys that connected the pockets of river basins separated by mountain ranges. Failure to keep these routes open could result in the political fragmentation. To make Central Plains central, therefore, implies the political means for maintaining social integration across diverse terrains, which are the subject of this inquiry:  When did the area historically known as the Central Plains come to be imagined as a unified cultural and political space by its inhabitants? How did the society of the Central Plains rise to

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1.3. A schematic map of the diverse terrain types and the geographic extent of the area historically known as the Central Plains (represented by the dashed line) (illustrated by Li Min).

prominence in a world of multiregional development? The emergence of Zhongyuan as the central area of early China’s political landscape, therefore, should be interrogated as a question and process, rather than viewed as a given (Yan Wenming 1987; Zhao Hui 2000, 2006; Liu Li 2004). This development parallels the rise of Sandai civilization and its Central Plains-centric ideology of political landscape. Third, the imagined world of Yu’s Tracks represents the Sandai civilization’s geographic extent. The full extent of the political domain represented by the wen ding narrative is defined by the legendary landscape known as the world of the Yu’s tracks or traces of the Great Yu, Yuji (Wu 2010; Strassberg 2002) (Figure 1.4). The legendary Great Yu allegedly surveyed this landscape, making it habitable by draining floodwater, and legible by classifying it into nine regions, each represented by a bronze ding vessel (Granet 1926; Xu 1960; Lewis 2006a, 2006b; Dorofeeva-Lichtmann 1995, 2009). Beyond this imagined world of civilization, the world slips into an unknown or undefined realm, characterized by chaos and inhabited by cultural others, exotic objects, and esoteric knowledge (Strassberg 2002:10). As J. B. Harley (1990:99) puts it, “to map the land was to own it and make that ownership legitimate.” As the story goes, this extraordinary knowledge of landscape provided the basis for claiming kingship for the first dynasty at the

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1.4. A historical map of the world of Yu’s tracks printed in 1209 ce (open source image, Beijing Library).

close of the third millennium bce. The metallic conception of the legendary landscape, represented by the casting of metal ore from diverse regions into nine bronze vessels, assimilated those tribute-providing communities into a single unit (Wu 1995:5–6). The legendary narratives about the contributions of metal ores and the actual procurement of metals for producing bronze vessels in the Sandai ritual economy probably reinforced one another. The same logic also underlies the iconographic representation of the bronze vessels belonging to the natural and supernatural beings encountered in Great Yu’s legendary journey. The iconography of these vessels, therefore, was integral to the representation of space in the wen ding story. The geographic extent of the world of Yu’s tracks spans from the Ordos in the north to the middle Yangzi in the south (approximately 2,000 kilometers), and from the Hexi Corridor in the west to the coast in the east (approximately 3,000 kilometers). The archaeological evidence presented in this book reveals that the interregional interactions involved in the making of the Sandai civilization extended far beyond the geographic extent of the Yu’s tracks. How did

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the spatial notions of Yu’s tracks evolve out of an infinite network of Eurasian interactions? Thi