Current Articles about Ancient China

China 'had express postal service' in 221 BC August 2002 - CNN

  • China - Fossil of a two-million-year-old ancestor of the elephant August 2002 - Ananova
    Include a pair of 8 foot long tusks

    Great Wall Crumbles Beneath China's Growing Wealth July 2002 - Yahoo

    2,000-year-old corpse found intact in mystery fluid - China July 2002

    China Scientists to Probe 'ET' Launch Tower June 2002 - Lycos News

    1000-year-old Well Still Gives out Clear Water June 2002 - China.org

    Tombs of Ancient Eunuchs Discovered in Beijing June 2002

    Much of China's treasures are underground June 2002
    The world's oldest continuous civilization


    Oldest map in China found - 2,200 years old Pravada News - May 2002

    A find of Bashkir scientists contraries to traditional notions of human history: stone stabs which is 120 million years covered with the relief map of Ural Region. The map contains civil engineering works: a system of channels with a length of about 12,000 km, weirs, powerful dams. Not far from the channels, diamond-shaped grounds are shown, whose destination is unknown. The map also contains some inscriptions. Even numerous inscriptions. Originally scientists thought it was an Old Chinese language. Later it was discovered that the subscriptions were done in a hieroglyphic-syllabic language of unknown origin.


    Study finds Chinese civilization older than thought

    November 9, 2000 - Reuters

    China's ancient civilization has just gotten a little older -- officially at least.

    A government-funded study released Thursday pushed back the dates of China's earliest dynasties, shedding light on the origins of Chinese civilization and adding fuel to a controversy over the influence of politics on scholarship.

    The fruit of the biggest research project China has conducted into its early civilization, the findings could be significant, if they are accepted.

    They document the emergence of early Chinese kingdoms from the prehistoric New Stone Age and edge China's verifiable history to more than 4,000 years ago - a 1,200-year jump.

    "The results solve a batch of knotty questions long left uncertain in our country's historical chronology and fill in the blank spaces in our country's ancient annals," project director Li Xueqin said, unveiling the report at a news conference.

    But the project's origins immediately raised questions about its likely findings among scholars in China and abroad - even before the research began.

    Dubbed the "history project," the study was commissioned in 1995 by Cabinet member Song Jian, a physicist by training. The government made it a national priority in its five-year plan that ends this year.

    The project's stated mission was to fix dates for three dynasties: the half-documented Zhou, the shadowy Shang and the myth-shrouded Xia.

    But critics said Song pressured the researchers to prove China has a 5,000-year history, to equal claims made by other ancient civilizations.

    "There are factors of national prestige involved," said David Nivison, a retired Stanford University scholar who has made dating China's early dynasties a 30-year preoccupation. "Establishing the Xia as history, not legend, gives China a validated, authenticated history that rivals Babylonia or Egypt."

    Still, "I think they're all wrong," said Nivison, in a telephone interview.

    "I've seen their chronology and maybe they've got two dates right," said Nivison, who has his calculated his own set of dates for events in ancient Chinese history dating to 2026 B.C.

    History has long been an instrument of pride and power in China.

    Dynastic historians rewrote records to glorify patrons and demonize enemies.

    In the last 51 years, the communists have cited peasant uprisings against corrupt rulers to justify their revolution.

    More recently, they have urged scientists to prove early humans developed in China, not in Africa as commonly held.

    Politics aside, the history project focused serious science on questions debated for 2,000 years.

    It brought together 200 Chinese historians, archaeologists, astronomers and specialists in seven other fields -- an unprecedented marriage of the natural and social sciences for China, project director Li said.

    They used fast-spinning electrical fields to shave atoms off tortoise shells and ox shoulder blades -- ancient tools for divination -- to date them more accurately.

    They used computers to calculate the dates of eclipses mentioned in inscriptions on 3,000-year-old bones and bronzes and in texts disputed for centuries.

    In the end, Li said, the project pushed past the last accepted definite date in Chinese history - the death of a Zhou king in 841 B.C.

    It fixed the dates for earlier Zhou kings and the last Shang rulers going back to 1300 B.C. and broadly outlined the earlier period, setting the Xia's origins to 2070 B.C. -- the middle of the well-excavated prehistoric Longshan culture.

    "This work not only furthers a good foundation for accurately dating the Xia, Shang and Zhou. It more importantly gives a basic point of origin for tracing back the origins of Chinese civilization," said Li, an expert on early Chinese history with the government's Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

    But Nivison said the project's attempts to put a definite dates to events still unknowable could further cloud the debate.

    "Once the dates get into museums and textbooks throughout the world, it will be a mess," he said.


    Chinese unearth world's oldest toilet

    July 26, 2000 - UPI

    Chinese academics already lay claim to golf. Rumor suggests footballs first took flight in China. And this week, China took on another sacred British invention: the flush toilet. Archaeologists in Shangqiu, central Henan province, have unearthed a 2,000 year-old water closet, entombed with a king of the Western Han Dynasty to ensure he sat on the finest throne even in the afterlife.

    "This top-grade stool is the earliest of its kind ever discovered in the world, meaning that the Chinese used the world's earliest water closet," the archaeological team told state news agency Xinhua. The stone latrine, boasting flush water piping and an armrest for added comfort, was a "great invention and a symbol of social civilization of that time."

    The Chinese revelation is sure to stir up a steaming debate in the murky world of lavatorial history. British claims to the flush toilet rest on the efforts of Thomas Crapper (1836-1910), royal sanitary engineer, but historians have long questioned Crapper's legacy.

    He may not even be responsible for adding "crap" to the language. A definitive answer may lie deep in an Indiana Jones style underground palace near Xian in Shaanxi province, where the tomb of China's First Emperor, overthrown by the Western Han (206 BC to 8 AD), still awaits excavation. Besides a fabled treasure trove, his terracotta army may be guarding the ultimate toilet of the ancient world.

    There has been some decline since those days. Foreigners "cry, smile, scream and jump" when they encounter public toilets on the mainland today, according to expert Lou Xiaoqi. They cry because the smell brings tears to the eyes, smile to hide the embarrassment of squatting among strangers, usually without partitions, scream at the rats that inhabit the lavatories, and jump to avoid the waste of previous visitors. Lou has launched a "toilet revolution" to clean up China's festering facilities.

    If China's claims are authenticated, the publicity could prove a boon for local firm Henan Shangqiu Steel Factory, which manufactures deluxe superloos designed with traditional Chinese rooves. Its main rival, American Standard, is one of the few foreign companies in China growing flush with cash.


    Another brick in the Great Wall

    China plans to have older stretches of the wall open to the public

    May 6, 2000 - BBC

    China is planning to rebuild parts of the oldest section of the Great Wall - its most famous landmark dating back more than 2,000 years.

    Centuries of rain, wind and vandalism have taken their toll, and much of the wall is in urgent need of repair.

    Now China's Bureau of Cultural Relics has announced plans to restore a five-kilometre stretch in the mountains of Inner Mongolia.

    The bureau has allocated 600,000 yuan ($72,290) to make the repairs and says that the project is the first effort to renovate larger portions of the Great Wall.

    Work is expected to take at least five years, after which the ancient monument will be open to tourists. It is planned that 1,000 metres of the wall will be repaired each year.

    The wall will be restored to its original appearance using rocks from mountains.

    However, limited funds and lack of equipment means that many sections will not be renovated.

    The Great Wall is said to be the only manmade object visible from space.

    From its starting point on the coast north of Beijing, the wall rolls an astonishing 6,500 km across mountains and deserts until it finally peters out in the country's arid far west.

    When first built more than 2,000 years ago, it stood more than 3.5 metres high, 4.1 metres wide on the bottom and 1.5 metres wide at the top.

    It required hundreds of thousands of workers and took 10 years to complete.

    Most of the famous stretches of the wall visited by tourists were actually built much later, during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

    Many stretches of the wall were extensively repaired under the Ming and Quing, and are in better condition.

    The older wall was built by the Qin dynasty, after it united China in 221 BC. It runs further north across the wild mountains that form the southern edge of the Mongolian step.

    Originally launched last year, the project stalled because of lack of funds. Only 300 metres of the section have been renovated so far.


    Oldest Chinese Characters Ever Found

    April 28, 2000 - Xinhua News Agency - Jinan, China,

    After years of arduous effort, Chinese archaeologists have confirmed that the inscriptions on a 4, 800-year-old piece of pottery unearthed in Juxian County in east China's Shandong Province are the earliest form of Chinese characters ever found.

    These hieroglyphs, called Dawenkou Pottery Inscriptions by the archaeologists, predate the inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells unearthed in the Yin Ruins and the remains of the late Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 B.C.) in Anyang in central China's Henan Province, which have long been considered the oldest Chinese characters.

    "This pushes back the history of the Chinese script by some 2,000 years," Wang Shuming, a research fellow with the Shandong Institute of Relics and Archeology in charge of the excavation, told Xinhua Thursday.

    The pottery inscriptions first came to light in the early 1960s when an ancient pottery wine vessel bearing several strange drawings was discovered by farmers in Juxian, the center of the ancient Ju culture in southeastern Shandong Province.

    Tang Lan, a well-known Chinese paleographer, at that time regarded the drawings as pictographs, though his view was neglected because there was a lack of supporting evidence.

    In the 1980s, more than 30 tombs belonging to the late period of the Neolithic Dawenkou Culture (4500-2500 B.C.) were excavated in Juxian, where pottery wine vessels with 20 stylized pictures of some physical objects were unearthed, providing more clues to an earlier form of Chinese characters.

    Archaeologists and paleographers have since recognized 14 of the more than 20 drawings as pictographs and deciphered them as seven characters, including "fan" (ordinary), "nan" (south), and "xiang" (enjoy).

    "A script must have regular forms and given pronunciations and express certain meanings," Wang said. "The pottery hieroglyphs evidently satisfy this criteria."

    Many archaeologists agree that the pottery inscriptions were created by Taihao people, a legendary tribe inhabiting Juxian which worshipped the wine god and the god of the land.

    The pottery inscriptions, they said, reflect sacrificial rites at that time, just as other ancient writings did. For example, the pictograph "nan" looks like people forming an altar to worship a young tree, signifying the rite of praying to the god of the land for good harvests.

    Similar pottery wine vessels with inscriptions were also discovered in Anhui and Zhejiang provinces, both in east China, in the 1990s.

    Jiao Zhiqin, an associate research fellow with the Anyang Museum, said this was the result of the tribe's migrations, adding that such migrations are recorded in Chinese histories.

    "This demonstrates that the writing was used over a large area, with Juxian at the center," said Jiao at a forum on Ju Culture held here recently.

    CRADLE OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION

    Yin Junke, a research fellow with the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said the creation of the writing was not sudden, because this area was one of the cradles of Chinese civilization.

    Archaeologists have also found some similarities between these pottery inscriptions and those on bones and tortoise shells, in terms of both form and meaning.

    They said this indicates that the latter had evolved from the former.

    Chinese archaeologists have long held that the inscriptions found at the Yin Ruins were not the oldest, and there must have been a previous period of origin and development of the language.

    The first bones and tortoise shells with character inscriptions were discovered in 1899 in a village in Henan Province, where the capital of the Shang Dynasty was located. Since then, more than 160,000 pieces of inscribed bones and tortoise shells with about 10,000 characters have been unearthed, some 1,000 of which have been deciphered.

    These inscriptions, like the cuneiform writing of the ancient Near East and the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, are one of the world's oldest scripts. Their descendants, the "han zi" (modern Chinese characters) are still in use by one-fourth of the world's population.


    Oldest Edition Of Confucian Classic Discovered

    Xinhua News Agency - May 25, 1999

    SHIJIAZHUANG (May 24) XINHUA - Chinese scholars have identified a collection of bamboo slips unearthed in a 2,000-year- old tomb as the earliest edition of the Confucian Analects.

    The bamboo version was found in a tomb in Hebei Province, which archeologists say belongs to an emperor of the Han Dynasty (206 BC -- 220 AD) and dates back possibly to 55 BC.

    The tomb was first discovered in the early 1990s by local farmers who were digging water control facilities. A great number of bamboo slips have been unearthed, but most of the characters on them were illegible and archeologists had to use modern techniques to reveal their true nature. Ultimately they reached the conclusion that some of them were from the Analects, a collection of major doctrines and sayings of the educator and philosopher Confucius (551 -- 479 BC).

    The book is more than 2,000 years old and is the earliest edition of a Confucian work ever found, according to Xie Fei, the director of the Hebei Cultural Relics Research Institute, who examined the slips along with scholars from the State Cultural Relics Bureau and Beijing's Palace Museum.

    The collection consists of more than 620 bamboo slips, which were used by the ancient Chinese before the use of paper was popularized. They measure 16.2 centimeters by 0.7 centimeters and contain as many as 20 characters each. There are also traces of the silk strings that were used to connect them.

    
    
    
    

    CHINA INDEX

    ANCIENT AND LOST CIVILIZATIONS ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ALL FILES CRYSTALINKS MAIN PAGE