The great and the gruesome in ancient city ruins

Looking at someone’s personal blog, I was so intrigued by photos of piles of human bones at one of China’s oldest archeological sites that I decided I wanted to see the ruins of the ancient culture with my own eyes.

So I traveled to the small city of Anyang in central China’s Henan Province, the nearest town to a site with the remnants of a culture dating back 3,300 years to the Shang Dynasty. The dynasty died in about 1046 BC, and its ruins weren’t unearthed until the last century.

The piles of human bones that had so piqued my interest were recovered from the crypts of royal tombs and from under the foundations of buildings.

The Shang era, which left traces of both its wisdom and barbarism at the site, is credited with creating the earliest written characters in China and with taking bronzeware forging to a new peak.

Yinxu (Ruins of Yin) is divided into two sections: the Ancestral Shrine and the Royal Palace. The ruins were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2006.

Unlike other World Heritage Sites in Henan that are so often jam-packed with tourists, Yinxu was relatively quiet and empty when I visited in May. The Ancestral Shrine site includes a museum, an oracle inscription pit, a chariot gallery and several remnants of building foundations.

According to the oracle inscriptions, the Shang Dynasty moved its capital multiple times, until around 1300 BC, when King Pan Geng chose what is today Anyang as the new imperial seat and called it Yin.

Farms were set up and houses were built in an area of about 2,400 hectares, or about double the size of downtown Shanghai’s Huangpu District.

In that time, people were in constant fear of two things: starvation and invasion by hostile tribes. So farming and defense were paramount concerns. The ancients turned to supernatural forces to predict the future.

For fortune-telling, they used tortoise shells and the bones of animals. They would drill holes in the shells and bones, then grill them over fires to see where cracks ran. Depending on the fractures, the future boded either good or ill.

These ancients also carved or wrote the oracles on the shells, with pictographics. They are known today as “oracle inscriptions.”

The archeological site of YH127 Pit is a landmark in Yinxu. In 1936, archeologists found more than 17,000 pieces of shells in one pit, by far the largest discovery of oracle inscriptions.

Although the bones and shells have since been transferred, the original pit is still there for visitors to view. Replicas were made to restore the original look.

In addition to shells and animal bones, human skulls were also visible in the pit.

Even gazing at the vivid replicas gave me goosebumps. But this was just the beginning of the discoveries.