Digging to discover the nation’s roots
Reporters from domestic and foreign media enjoy a deeper insight into China’s origin story through its archaeological findings, Fang Aiqing reports.
Archaeological endeavors to trace the origins of Chinese civilization are helping people learn more about the country’s history and culture, and to see how civilization evolved and in what direction it is heading, archaeologist Wang Wei says.
“It’s natural that the country’s glorious past makes Chinese people proud and confident. Archaeological finds have truly boosted cultural confidence. It’s an existing phenomenon, although not the original intention of our work,” he says.
The 70-year-old director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Academic Division of History was answering questions from a group of domestic and foreign media representatives in Beijing on Feb 27 after giving a lecture on the origins and early development of Chinese civilization.
Invited by the State Council Information Office, 33 journalists from 25 foreign media institutions including The Associated Press, The New York Times, Reuters and Bloomberg attended the event, alongside 13 reporters from domestic outlets.
They also had a guided tour of the Chinese Archaeological Museum, which opened to the public in September and is home to more than 6,000 cultural relics from across the country that have been excavated over the past seven decades.
It is based on these relics that the museum has been able to piece together a continuous history from the Paleolithic Age to modern times, says Liu Guoxiang, deputy director of the Chinese Academy of History, which oversees the museum.
The guided tour for the journalists focused mainly on exhibits reflecting social evolution from the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods to the Xia (c. 21st century-16th century BC), Shang (c. 16th century-11th century BC) and Zhou (c. 11th century-256 BC) dynasties.
Liu expounded on some of the relics on display.
He says that the questions and concerns of the foreign journalists indicated their interest in the characteristics of Chinese civilization and its connection with other world civilizations, which coincides with the museum’s goal of presenting the history of Chinese civilization based on physical evidence discovered through archaeological excavations.
Wang served as a chief expert from 2004 to 2016 on the project to trace the origins of Chinese civilization, which has proved that China’s history includes a million years of hominin activity, 10,000 years of culture and more than 5,000 years of civilization.
The project, formally launched in 2004 and currently in its fifth phase, is dedicated to studying the development of Chinese civilization, its characteristics and causes, interactions between early regional cultures and how they were integrated into a diverse and unified Chinese civilization.
Upon beginning his lecture, Wang clarified his understanding of civilization.
“Civilization originates from social differentiation and its formation is marked by the emergence of a state,” he says.
In particular, Wang argued that the three elements that Western scholars often take as the criteria for entry into a civilized society — metallurgy, writing and urbanization — are not universally applicable, as is seen in the cases of the Mayan and Incan civilizations — the Mayan people lacked metallurgy and the Incas didn’t have a writing system.
“Different regions may have exhibited unique characteristics in their transition to a civilized society. Based on the archaeological evidence found in China, we can conclude a Chinese approach to identifying the crucial point of entry to a civilized society,” Wang adds.
To put it simply, he says that entering civilization means the development of production, the increase in population, the emergence of cities, the intensified division of labor and social differentiation that leads to the emergence of social classes, the concentration of power and the emergence of kingship and states.
Specifically in archaeology, the formation of a state is usually embodied in remains of capital cities, palaces, high-level tombs, ritual items, and traces of war and violence, therefore these features can be taken as critical criteria for the birth of a civilization, Wang adds.
In his lecture after the museum tour, Wang summarized the social development of early Chinese civilization in chronological order, and introduced the key regional cultures of different periods and what they produced, their lifestyles, distribution of power, aesthetics, beliefs and representative legacies.
Exploring the exchange and mutual learning between civilizations is also one crucial aspect of the project to trace the origins of Chinese civilization, according to Wang, who, in the past decade, has been participating in joint archaeological excavations between China and countries including Uzbekistan, Honduras and Egypt.
It’s clear that ancient Chinese people learned to grow wheat, keep sheep and produce bronze from other cultures — vivid proof that interaction between civilizations is an important driving force in progress, he says.
He adds that these days, Chinese archaeologists are paying increasing attention to remains found in southeastern coastal areas such as Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan provinces, which have maintained significant local characteristics, as well as to clues pointing to potential migration to islands in the South Pacific Ocean.
“It’s not our intention to prove Chinese civilization is the oldest. Rather, we face up to our authentic history and are longing to explore what we have created and contributed to humankind and what we have learned from others. We want to tell the truth.”
Wang stressed the importance of a global vision in archaeology, noting that China is a part of the world and that the scholars cannot develop an understanding of the characteristics of Chinese civilization without a comprehensive knowledge of other world civilizations.
Backed by archaeological techniques that have improved tremendously over the past two decades, this concern has led to more international collaboration. According to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, over the past decade, China has conducted 44 joint archaeological projects with 24 countries, and has carried out 11 international historical monument conservation programs in six.
“It’s an important aspect in building a community with a shared future for mankind, because for us Chinese archaeologists, down the ages, world civilization has been a diverse and interrelated whole. We really need to enhance dialogue and learn from each other,” Wang says.
From his perspective, many of the world’s major ancient civilizations developed simultaneously, following similar paths of development, but cultivating distinctive features — for example, the Chinese valued jade while the Egyptians were fond of gold, the Chinese emphasized kinship while the Mediterranean merchants preferred social communities.
“Our future task includes studying and comparing the characteristics, similarities and differences of various world civilizations. Only on that basis can we find the causes of these characteristics,” Wang says.