Xi'an (Sian) Shaanxi (Shensi) China

Neolithic agricultural communities appear in China's cool and temperate Huang He Basin, the earliest circa 6080.

Banpo, near present Xi'an in central China, located in a fertile, alluvial lowland at the foot of the Qing Ling Shan along the Wei, a tributary of the Huang He, is settled about this time.

The major switch from hunting-gathering methods of food collection to an agricultural way of life in the north of China, especially the fertile region watered by the Huang He, and also along the southeastern coast, is apparently independent of the Near Eastern Neolithic revolution.

The Yangshao people of the cool and temperate Huang He valley grow millet as their principal grain.

Yangshao farmers employ primitive techniques of cultivation, moving their villages as the soils become exhausted.

Banpo (Pan-p'o) near present Xi'an (Sian) in central China, the type site associated with the Yangshao Culture, is located about five hundred and seventy-two miles (nine hundred and twenty kilometers) southwest of present Beijing (Peking) in a fertile, alluvial lowland at the foot of the Qing Ling Shan (Tsinling Shan) along the Wei, a tributary of the Huang He (Hwang Ho, or Yellow River).

Archaeological sites with similarities to the first phase at Banpo are considered part of the Banpo phase (5000 BCE to 4000 BCE) of the Yangshao culture.

Banpo was excavated from 1954 to 1957 and covers an area of around 50,000 square meters.

It contains the remains of several well-organized Neolithic settlements dating from approximately 4500 BCE.

It is a large area of five to six hectares and surrounded by a ditch, probably a defensive moat, five or six meters wide.

The houses were circular, built of mud and wood, supported by timber poles and and roofed with overhanging steeply pitched thatch.

They sat on low foundations; many of the houses were semisubterranean with the floor typically a meter below the ground surface.

There appears to be communal burial areas, with the graves and pottery kilns located outside of the moat perimeter.

More than one hundred dwellings surrounding a community center, a cemetery and a kiln are built around 4000 in Jiangzhai, a Banpo phase Yangshao culture village site to the east of Xi'an, where modern archaeologists have excavated the earliest copper artifacts in China.

Chinese tradition honors the legendary culture hero Da Yu as the shaper of the country's waterways and the originator of bronze technology.

As Da Yu (Yu the Great) he supposedly inaugurates China's Xia dynasty, named for the Si clan from which Yu springs, in about 2205, One of many legends about Da Yu recounts his extraordinary birth.

A man called Kun is placed in charge of controlling a great inundation, accompanied by unusual terrestrial events.

To dam the water, he steals from heaven what is apparently a piece of magic soil.

Angered by the theft, the Lord on High issues a decree for his execution.

After three years, Kun's miraculously preserved body is slit open and a son brought forth.

This is Yu, who resorts to natural methods, dredging outlets to the sea after years of mighty effort, (perhaps aided in this endeavor by dragons).

By another account, Yu employs hidden channels in the earth to successfully drain away the waters, thus making the world suitable for human habitation.

The Zhou Dynasty begins to emerge in the Yellow River valley, overrunning the territory of the ShangB by the end of the second millennium BCE.

The Zhou, a semi-nomadic people who live west of the Shang, appear to have begun their rule under a semi-feudal system, with the Zhou leader having been appointed "Western Protector" by the Shang.

The ruler of the Zhou, King Wu, with the assistance of his brother, the Duke of Zhou, as regent, manages to defeat the Shang at the Battle of Muye.

The king of Zhou at this time invokes the concept of the Mandate of Heaven to legitimize his rule, a concept that will be influential for almost every succeeding Chinese dynasty.

The Zhou initially move their capital west to an area near modern Xi'an, on the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River, but they are to preside over a series of expansions into the Yangtze River valley.

This is the first of many population migrations from north to south in Chinese history.

China’s Shang dynasty consists of thirty kings in fraternal succession.

The bronze vessels produced by Shang artisans in a variety of distinctive forms are artistic masterpieces.

The production and use of these ritual objects used for the offering of food (especially grains) and wine during the most sacred Shang ceremonies continues into the Zhou (Chou) dynasty.

Beginning in the eleventh century BCE, Chinese artisans manufacture large, barrel-shaped brass bells with ornate designs cast on their outer surfaces.

The Shang Dynasty declines in the twelfth century through internal unrest.

The Zhou dynasty adheres to a code of conduct called li, a collection of complex rules of social etiquette and personal deportment; a related chivalric code applies to royal relations, to nobles and conduct in battle.

Those who practice li are civilized; those who do not, such as those outside the Zhou domains, are barbarians.

Under King Wu, the Zhou Dynasty initiates construction of a series of northern frontier walls to keep the barbarians from the kingdom.

In the Chinese historical tradition, the Zhou defeated the Shang and oriented the Shang system of ancestor worship toward a universalized worship away from the worship of Di, the Supreme Being, and to that of Tian, which can either mean the physical sky or the presiding God of Heaven.

They legitimize their rule by invoking the Mandate of Heaven, the notion that the ruler (the "Son of Heaven") governed by divine right but that his dethronement would prove that he had lost the mandate.

Such things that proved the ruling family had lost the Mandate were natural disasters and rebellions.

The doctrine explains and justifies the demise of the Xia and Shang Dynasties and at the same time supports the legitimacy of present and future rulers.

After the Zhou conquest, the Shang practices of bronze casting, writing, and pyromancy—a kind of divination involving the application of heat or fire—continue.

China’s new dynasty (called by historians the Early, or Western, Zhou) is structured similarly to the Shang, operating as a centralized bureaucracy with vassals ruling the peripheral areas.

Consolidation of the Zhou Empire proceeds rapidly.

Shang influence by the thirteenth century BCE reached what is now Gansu Province, a region occupied by a people known as the Zhou.

King Wen of Zhou (Ji Chang), the ruler of the Zhou, who is a Shang vassal, had been given the title "Count of the West" by King Di Xin of Shang (King Zhou), who used Duke Wen to guard his rear while he was involved in a southeastern campaign.

Eventually, Di Xin, fearing Duke Wen's growing power, had imprisoned him.

Although Wen had later been released, the tension between Shang and Zhou has continued to grow.

Wen prepared his army, and has conquered a few smaller loyal states to Shang, slowly weakening Shang's allies.

However, Duke Wen dies in 1050 BCE before Zhou's actual offense against Shang.

King Zhou of Shang conquers the state of Su in 1047 BCE and takes as his trophy Daji, who, according to historical record, is the beautiful daughter of a noble family named Su in the state of Yousu.

By now, the king is in his sixties and has been on his throne for forty years, known as strong and heroic, well-versed in oratory and in music.

Under his reign, Shang has become a powerful and prosperous state.

After Zhou takes Daji as his concubine, however, things take a rapid turn for the worse, at least according to Chinese legend.

He tries every means to ingratiate himself with her.

As Daji likes animals, he builds her a zoological garden with a large collection of rare birds and animals.

As she likes dancing and singing, he orders artists to compose lewd music and choreograph bawdy dances.

Ignoring state affairs, King Zhou begins to spend all his time with Daji, reportedly gathering three thousand guests at one party to enjoy his “pond of wine” and “forest of meat,” which is cooked meat strips hanging from a wood of trees.

Fior Daji’s amusement, King Zhou has the guests play a cat and mouse game in the nude among the trees.

When a young women of the court, daughter of Lord Jiu, protests against such debauchery, King Zhou has her slain, her father ground up, and his flesh fed to his vassals.

Daji soon becomes a brute herself.

It is said that her greatest joy is to hear people cry in physical sufferings.

Once, as she saw a farmer walking barefoot on the ice, she ordered his feet be cut off so that she could study it and figure out the cause of its resistance to cold temperature.

In another occasion, she had a pregnant woman’s belly cut open so that she could satisfy her curiosity of finding out what happened therein.

To verify the old saying that “a good man’s heart had seven openings,” she had the heart of Bi Gan, an honest minister, cut out and subjected it to her fertile scrutiny.

Daji is best known for her invention of a device of torture called Paolao: a bronze cylinder heated like a furnace with charcoal until the sides are extremely hot.

The victim is then bound on the cylinder and baked to death.

Daji reportedly takes great delight in the painful cries of the condemned.

Many call for the end of the Shang Dynasty but Di Xin pays very little attention to any of this, as he views himself as the rightful ruler of China, a position appointed by the heavens.