Origins: from the Neolithic to the Xia

Long before any dynasty, farming villages were spreading across China. Archaeologists group them into "cultures", usually named after the place where they were first identified.

The Yangshao culture (仰韶文化) occupied the middle reaches of the Yellow River, mainly in Henan, Shaanxi and Shanxi, from about 5000 to 3000 BCE (dates vary between authors). It takes its name from the village of Yangshao in Henan, where the Swede Johan Gunnar Andersson excavated in 1921. Its people grew mainly millet, kept pigs and dogs, and made pottery painted with geometric patterns, animals or human faces: it was once called the "painted pottery culture" (彩陶文化). The village of Banpo, east of modern Xi'an, represents its first phase.

The Longshan culture (龙山文化), from about 3000 to 1900 BCE, spread over the middle and lower Yellow River. Its first site, Chengziya (城子崖) in Shandong, was found in 1928. Its potters used the wheel and made polished black pottery with very thin walls, known as "eggshell" ware. In the 3rd millennium BCE the population grew sharply and many villages built walls of rammed earth. Around 2000 BCE most large settlements were abandoned, except in the central area, where the Erlitou culture, discussed below, developed.

The Yellow River was not the only centre. In the north-east, the Hongshan culture (红山文化), from about 4700 to 2900 BCE, occupied the West Liao river basin, from today's Inner Mongolia to Liaoning. It is named after Hongshanhou, near Chifeng, a site found in 1908 by the Japanese archaeologist Torii Ryūzō and excavated in 1935. It is known for its carved jades, among the earliest known examples of jade working, including "pig dragons". At Niuheliang (牛河梁), a ritual complex includes a "Goddess Temple", named after a clay female head with inlaid jade eyes.

In the south-east, the Liangzhu culture (良渚文化), from about 3300 to 2300 BCE, was the last Neolithic jade culture of the Yangtze delta. Its farmers grew rice in irrigated paddies and often built houses on stilts. Society was highly stratified: jade, silk, ivory and lacquer are found only in elite tombs. Its centre, in what is now north-western Hangzhou, was a walled city with palaces, ceremonial areas and an intricate hydraulic system. The culture disappeared around 2300 BCE, possibly because of floods.

On 6 July 2019 UNESCO added the archaeological ruins of Liangzhu City to the World Heritage List. They are seen as an example of a rice-growing urban society and an early state in the Yangtze basin.

Before the Xia, Chinese tradition places legendary rulers, the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors (三皇五帝). They are culture heroes, credited with fire, houses, farming, medicine, the calendar or writing. The lists vary from text to text: the Three Sovereigns are, for instance, Fuxi (伏羲), Nüwa (女娲) and Shennong (神农), but other texts name others.

In Sima Qian's Shiji, the first of the Five Emperors is the Yellow Emperor (黄帝, Huangdi), personal name Xuanyuan (轩辕). He is said to have defeated the Yan Emperor (炎帝) at Banquan, then the rebel Chiyou (蚩尤) at Zhuolu. To this day, Chinese people sometimes call themselves "descendants of Yan and Huang" (炎黄子孙). Tradition also makes his historian Cangjie (仓颉) the inventor of Chinese characters.

Next come Zhuanxu (颛顼), Ku (喾), then Yao (尧) and Shun (舜). According to the Shiji, Yao judged his own son unworthy and handed power to Shun, known for his filial piety; Shun did the same with Yu, the founder of the Xia. This handing of power to the worthiest, shanrang (禅让), fed political debate for centuries, but whether it happened is disputed, and the Bamboo Annals give another version in which Shun overthrows Yao.

For most of Chinese history these rulers were taken as historical. Yet Sima Qian noted that the Classic of Documents began only with Yao and that the accounts of the Yellow Emperor were unreliable. In the 1920s the historian Gu Jiegang (顾颉刚) argued that they were ancient gods later turned into men in the stories; most scholars today agree that the Yellow Emperor began as a god. Some Chinese archaeologists nevertheless identify the site of Taosi (陶寺) in Shanxi (Longshan culture, c. 2300–1900 BCE) as Yao's capital, but this remains a hypothesis.

In Chinese tradition, the first dynasty is the Xia (夏). According to legend, its founder was Yu (禹), credited with draining away the waters of a great flood. Yu is then said to have made rulership hereditary in his family: in the traditional account, that is what makes him the founder of a dynasty. Tradition, followed by the Shiji, gives the names of seventeen successive rulers, from Yu down to the last one, Jie (桀).

The Shiji (史记, "Records of the Grand Historian") is the work of the historian Sima Qian (司马迁), written in the 1st century BCE. This vast history in 130 chapters runs from the legendary Yellow Emperor down to its author's own time.

The problem is easy to state. This account was written roughly fifteen centuries after the date usually given for the end of the Xia, around 1600 BCE. It passes on what tradition said about that distant age; it is not a contemporary witness. Britannica itself describes the Xia as a dynasty known from legend. That is why this site presents it first of all as a tradition, whose historical value is still debated.

In 1996 the People's Republic of China launched the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project (夏商周断代工程). This five-year, multidisciplinary programme set out to date the first three dynasties precisely and to locate their territories. It was directed by the historian Li Xueqin (李学勤) and brought together about two hundred experts.

Its provisional report, published in 2000, placed the Xia between 2070 and 1600 BCE. Britannica gives the same dates for the dynasty, each preceded by "c.".

The results were not universally accepted. Some scholars disputed several of the project's methods and conclusions. Outside China, press coverage focused on the tension between nationalism and scholarship. And some specialists complained that the project belongs to a tradition that reduces archaeology to confirming the traditional histories.

For the Xia, the difficulty runs deeper than for the dynasties that followed: no written document from the period mentions them. Their dates can therefore only be worked out indirectly, and they should be read as rough markers, not as established facts.

In 1959 Xu Xusheng (徐旭生) led a team in search of the Xia capitals, using the ancient texts as a guide. Near Yanshi, in Henan, it found a large Bronze Age site: Erlitou (二里头), which gave its name to a whole archaeological culture.

Erlitou is the largest site of that culture. Excavations have revealed palace buildings, bronze workshops and the earliest known ritual bronze vessels from China, including the first ding (鼎), three-legged cauldrons. Early estimates placed the Erlitou culture at roughly 1900–1500 BCE; radiocarbon dating carried out since the mid-2000s narrows it to about 1750–1500 BCE.

These dates partly overlap with those the Chronology Project assigns to the Xia. According to Britannica, many scholars now see the first two phases of Erlitou as a pre-Shang, and so perhaps Xia, horizon. But ever since its discovery, scholars have argued over whether the site belongs to the Xia or to the Shang. And no inscription found there names the Xia or their kings.

The Xia question is easiest to see next to the Shang. The list of Shang kings given by Sima Qian closely matches the names read on the oracle bones, which were written at the time. For the Xia there is nothing comparable: no contemporary document has been found, either at excavated sites or in the Shang inscriptions, which do not mention the Xia. Some scholars do suggest that certain polities named in those inscriptions might be remnants of the Xia.

So two readings stand side by side:

• a majority of Chinese archaeologists regard the Xia as historical and identify it with the Erlitou culture;

• some scholars, especially Western historians and sinologists, consider the dynasty legendary, or at least unproven.

The argument is not new: depending on the author, each of Erlitou's four phases has been assigned to the Xia or to the Shang. Without writing from the period, attaching archaeological remains to a dynasty's name remains a matter of interpretation.

This site therefore presents the Xia as the first dynasty of Chinese tradition, possibly linked to Erlitou, and starts history attested in writing with the Shang.