and an extraordinary 755 of jade, the largest such collection ever found. ‘If the [bigger] tombs were richer than this, their contents are beyond imagining,’ says Bagley.10
Sixteen skeletons were also found in the tomb. They were distributed within, around and above the coffin. The Shang elite did not like its members to leave this world alone; relatives, retainers, guards, servants and pets accompanied them as part of the grave offering. Ritual demanded, and spectacle no doubt encouraged, human sacrifice on a grand scale. In the larger tombs the victims have been counted in their hundreds. Some skeletons are complete, others dismembered or decapitated, the cranium often having been sawn off, perhaps for bone carving. Some of the mutilated victims may have been convicts or captives taken in war. The killing of prisoners is thought to have been common practice, and the skeletons include different racial types. The quality of Shang mercy, if such a thing existed, was ever strained and made no clear distinction between friend and foe. Men (and occasionally women and children) were as conspicuously expended in the cause of ritual as were bronze and jade.
How all this extravagance was funded is unclear. No great agricultural revolution occurred at the time, no major irrigation effort is known, and no significant introduction – the ox-drawn plough once had its champions – has been generally accepted. Nor do trade or conquest seem to have been important contributory factors. The Shang apparently just used existing resources of land and labour to greater effect. ‘This leads to the inevitable conclusion’, writes Kwang-chih Chang of the Academia Sinica, ‘that the Shang period witnessed the beginning in this part of the world of organised large-scale exploitation of one group of people by another within the same society’; it also witnessed ‘the beginning of an oppressive governmental system to make such exploitation possible’.11
While members of the ruling clans frequented the great buildings whose pounded earth foundations testify to ambitious architecture and gracious living, the ‘black-haired commoners’ lived in covered pits, used crude clay utensils, and laboured in the fields with Stone Age tools of wood and flint. Malnutrition has been noted in many skeletons. Leisure must have been rare, insubordination fatal. Cultural excellence came at a price in Bronze Age China; the bright burnish of civilisation was down to the hard rub of despotic power.
FINDING FAMILY
This somewhat harsh picture of second-millennium BC China may be tempered by further research at those sites that have lately come to light in more distant parts of the country. The Qijia culture of Gansu and Qinghai provinces, for instance, besides providing examples of pre-Erlitou bronze working, was reported in 2005 to have yielded evidence of another abiding ingredient in Chinese civilisation, namely ‘the oldest intact noodles yet discovered’. Dated to about 2000 BC, they were found at a site called Lajia and had been made from millet flour.12
More elaborate artefacts, including several enormous bronze bells, from sites in Hubei and Hunan provide early testimony of the more vibrant art and culture of the Yangzi region; but they have been eclipsed by finds from further upriver in Sichuan. There two recent discoveries made in and around Chengdu, today a megalopolis of about 12 million, have confounded art historians and left any notion of a single bronze tradition teetering on the edge of the melting pot. Sacrificial pits accidentally discovered at Sanxingdui in 1986, and the site at Jinsha uncovered during road construction in 2001, produced large quantities of animal bones and elephant tusks but not one human skeleton. More sensationally, they yielded an array of bronze busts and figures, gold masks and jades quite unlike anything discovered elsewhere in China. A bronze statue, 2.6 metres (8.5 feet) tall (including its pedestal) and dated to about 1200 BC, is of an elongated and gesticulating figure with stylised features more Aztec than Chinese. Likewise some disassembled bronze fruit trees, like gigantic table decorations complete with foliage, peach-like fruit and frugivorous birds, all of bronze, have no known counterpart.
Also uncovered at Sanxingdui were the hangtu (pounded earth) foundations of a large city. This method of construction has suggested some contact with either Erlitou or Erligang. On the other hand, the temptation to link Sichuan’s sites, however weird and wonderful, with later kingdoms in the same region known in the texts as Shu and Ba has proved irresistible. A similar connection has been proposed between the Hubei/Hunan bronze sites and the Yangzi region’s later kingdom of Chu. Inconvenient data is thus yoked to the orthodoxies of textual tradition, and unaccountable art forms accommodated within the framework of existing research.
No such accommodation, however, has yet been extended to the most controversial discovery of all. In 1978 the Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua unearthed a large collection of graves at Hami in the deserts of eastern Xinjiang province. It was not where one would expect to find an ancient culture of any relevance to the more favoured parts of China; if Chengdu is as far from Beijing as Denver from New York, Hami might be likened to some place in remotest Idaho.
Similar graves had been noted thereabouts by European travellers earlier in the twentieth century, though without exciting their interest. The new graves were dated to about 1200 BC, but of their contents little was heard until ten years after Wang’s discovery. It was then, in 1988, that Victor Mair, an American academic who was guiding a tour for the Smithsonian Institute, wandered into a new section of the provincial museum in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital. Parting the hanging curtains that served as a door, he pushed inside and thus famously ‘entered another world’.
The room was full of mummies! Life-like mummies! These were not the wizened and eviscerated pharaohs wrappped in yards of dusty gauze that one normally pictures when mummies are mentioned. Instead they were everyday people dressed in their everyday clothes. Each one of the half dozen bodies in the room, whether man, woman or child, looked as if it had merely gone to sleep for a while and might sit up at any moment and begin to talk to whomever happened to be standing next to its glass case.13
Mair was transfixed; as a scholar of early Eastern linguistics and literature, he might actually have understood any rasped utterances coming from the desiccated corpses. He gave them all names and called one after his brother; the resemblance was uncanny. This ‘Ur-David’ (‘the first David’), or ‘Charchan Man’, lay with his head on a pillow and ‘his expressive hands placed gently upon his abdomen’. His woollen shirt and trousers were in a fetching shade of maroon ‘trimmed with fine red piping’. Inside his white thigh-length boots he wore felt socks ‘as brightly coloured as a rainbow’.
With further such imaginative licence the well-preserved female corpse discovered at a neighbouring site became ‘the Beauty of Kroran’ (or ‘the Beauty of Loulan’). She had gone to her grave in tartan plaid of Celtic weave, and when a copy of her head was re-fleshed by a plastic surgeon for a TV documentary, she looked almost presentable. Personalising the mummies in this way was irresistible; for to Mair they were not only ‘life-like’ but decidedly Mair-like. It was a case of instant recognition, then ardent adoption. The American had found family.
And therein, for the Chinese, lay the problem. ‘The Tarim Mummies’ (Tarim being the name of the river that once drained the now waterless Tarim basin of eastern Xinjiang) are mostly not of Mongoloid race but of now DNA-certified Caucasoid or Europoid descent. Some had brown hair; at least one stood 2 metres (6.5 feet) tall. They are similar to the Cro-Magnon peoples of eastern Europe. So are their clothes and so probably was their language. It is thought to have been ‘proto-Tocharian’, an early branch of the great Indo-European language family that includes the Celtic, Germanic, Greek and Latin tongues as well as Sanskrit and Early Iranian.
But Mair and his disciples would not be content to stop there. Several hundred mummies have now been discovered, their preservation being the result of the region’s extreme aridity and the high alkaline content
