Yinxu Ruins Museum: Reviving the Shang Dynasty

In the first installment of what will be a two-part feature, we’ll talk about the new Yinxu Ruins Museum that displays more cultural relics and embodies the reflections of a new generation of scholars over the past 20 years.

Transcript

Yinxu Ruins Museum: Reviving the Shang Dynasty 

In the first installment of what will be a two-part feature, we’ll talk about the new Yinxu Ruins Museum that displays more cultural relics and embodies the reflections of a new generation of scholars over the past 20 years.

“In the Shang Dynasty, with caution and care, it reached the corners of the earth. A thousand miles within the realm, where the people settled, it marked the beginning of the land extending to the four seas.” This Shang Song in the classic Book of Songs once depicted the splendid and prosperous city civilization of the Yin and Shang capitals. Yin, which covered today’s Xiaotun Village and its surrounding area of Anyang City in central China’s Henan Province, served as the last Shang capital for some 270 years during the dynasty’s height. The Shang is also known as the Yin Dynasty. 

A hundred years ago, archaeologist Dong Zuobin, in the northwest outskirts of Anyang, broke ground in Xiaotun Village, turning this dynasty shrouded in legend and myth into historical fact. Across three millennia, the sudden emergence of massive cities and vast but mysterious storage facilities once puzzled archaeologists. What kind of lives did the merchants lead? With each passing generation, more artifacts were unearthed, and the image of the Shang Dynasty gradually became clearer.

On February 26 of this year, the new building of the Yinxu Ruins Museum, covering an area of 22,000 square meters, opened to the public. As a museum dedicated to archaeological sites, the exhibitions in the new building no longer focus solely on individual artifacts but instead offer a comprehensive portrayal of artifact groups. Whether it’s a pottery jar filled with grains from an ordinary household, 500 bone hairpins belonging to the queen Fu Hao, a family tomb where multiple individuals were buried together, or a magnificent city site, each represents the joys and sorrows of countless lives buried beneath the earth. 

Compared to the old museum, which was built in 2005 and had an exhibition area of 1,500 square meters, the new museum not only showcases more artifacts but also expresses a deeper understanding of the Shang civilization from a new generation of scholars over the past 20 years.

He Yuling, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has been working at Anyang for 25 years, has gone through the entire process of planning and building both museums, old and new, at the Yin Ruins. In his view, whether it’s the constant demand for the display of unearthed cultural relics, the new interactive modes between modern-day young people and museums, or the updating of archaeological understanding of the Shang civilization, the old museum appears somewhat outdated.

In 2006, when the old Yin Ruins Museum opened to the public, it was located in the northeastern part of the Yin Ruins Protection Area, which slightly overlapped with the Huanbei Shang City archeological site, which had just been included as part of the Yin Ruins. Before this, the prevailing view in the academic community at home and abroad was that the Shang Dynasty was divided into early and late periods. The discovery of Huanbei Shang City filled in the time gap between the early Shang culture represented by Erligang in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province and the late Shang culture represented by the Yin Ruins.

Progress in the excavation and research of the Huanbei site quickly ensued. In 2007, remnants of the palace walls of Huanbei Shang City were discovered. From 2015 to 2022, large-scale workshops for casting bronze, making bone tools, and crafting pottery were unearthed in Huanbei Shang City, filling in the gaps in the mid-Shang archaeological research.

Early urban centers of the Shang Dynasty, such as the Zhengzhou Shang City with its towering walls and the relatively clear walls of the Yanshi Shang City, are known. However, so far, no walls similar to those of other capital cities have been discovered in the Yin Ruins. The 36-square-kilometer area of the Yin Ruins is still only a conservative estimate. So, does Huanbei Shang City have walls?

Starting from 2023, the Anyang excavation team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences resumed excavations at the Huanbei site, focusing on the archaeological excavations of the eastern and western “Guo cities”, that is the outer cities, of Huanbei Shang City. It was essentially confirmed that these “Guo cities” were encircled by moats, and the previously inferred rammed earth city wall foundation slots were actually moats. 

Archaeological exploration also revealed traces of roads from different periods crossing through the moats, which helped further understand the urban layout of Huanbei Shang City. Large sacrificial pits from the Yin Ruins period were found to be superimposed on the moats of Huanbei Shang City, indicating a change in function in this area during the late Shang period, and serving as vivid evidence of the evolution of settlement functions during the mid to late Shang period.

If, at the time of the initial discovery of Huanbei Shang City, there was still controversy in the academic community regarding the existence of the mid-Shang period, there’s little room for debate any more. After over 20 years of excavation and research, a large amount of physical evidence and stratigraphic relationships have become conclusive evidence, confirming the existence of a mid-Shang capital city between the early and late Shang periods. Now, the chronological framework of the Shang Dynasty is divided into early Shang, mid-Shang, and late Shang periods, and this has become the basic consensus.

Looking at the current evidence, the urban layout of the Yin Ruins has become even clearer. In 2016, about 10 kilometers in a straight line from the palace area of the Yin Ruins, the Xinzhai site was discovered, covering an area of one million square meters. An ancient clan named “Ge” lived here, mainly engaged in bronze casting, and were buried here after death. This could be described as the “heavy industrial base” of the Shang Dynasty.

He Yuling told The Context that the layout of handicraft workshops is a core element of urban layout. Through comprehensive analysis of workshops discovered in the Yin Ruins over the years, such as those for bronze casting, bone tool making, jade carving, and pottery making, it was found that these workshops were relatively concentrated in certain areas. They could be broadly divided into four “industrial park zones”: east, west, south, and north. The concentrated distribution of these workshops is conducive to the inheritance and management of technology.

In 2021, the Taojiaying site was discovered, located about 4 kilometers north of Huanbei Shang City, covering an area of nearly 200,000 square meters. Sites like Taojiaying and Xindian act as different levels of “satellite cities” guarding the Yin Ruins. Their discovery greatly surpassed the traditional understanding of the extent of the Yin Ruins. This larger area of the Yin Ruins, containing numerous “satellite cities,” might be the “Dàyì Shāng” mentioned in oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions. The term “Dàyì Shāng” specifically denotes the Shang capital that was located at the site.

Tang Jigen, former director of the Anyang Workstation of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and guest professor at Southern University of Science and Technology, told The Context that “In the late Shang Dynasty, the capital city was connected by at least three east-west avenues, each 15-20 meters wide, and two north-south avenues, each 20 meters wide. The Shang king also organized labor to dig a large canal over two kilometers long, running northwest to southeast, to bring water from the Huan River into the heart of the city. The canal branched into multiple tributaries downstream, and workshops such as bronze casting, pottery making, and bone tool making were built along these waterways. Residential areas within the city were scattered among the workshops and organized by family units.”

Over the years, archaeologists have gradually identified all of these areas, from the grand water and road networks of the city to the large ponds and gardens in the palace and temple areas, and from the distribution of residential houses in villages to the sewage systems and even the smaller roads within residential areas.

In 2021, in order to find the road from the palace area of the Yin Ruins to the royal tombs and to understand the layout of the tombs, the Anyang excavation team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences conducted new explorations around the royal tombs of the Yin Ruins. Their diligence paid off as they discovered two encircling ditches and more than 460 sacrificial pits, thus changing the understanding of the layout of the royal tombs of the Shang Dynasty. As these findings were rated as one of the top 10 archaeological discoveries in China for the year 2022, they will also promote research on the tomb system of the Shang Dynasty as well as Shang culture and history. 

Tang Jigen expressed his sentiment, stating that it is the continuous discovery of new data in archaeology that deepens the study of the Yin Ruins by archaeologists. Nowadays, in the new museum, many new storytelling formats can be used to bring to life many figures from over 3,000 years ago.

Well, that’s the end of our first podcast on the new Yinxu Ruins Museum, and we’ll present the second half next time. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Li Jing, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.