Shang & Early Zhou China

A great river, fertile soil, settled agriculture, and the slow accumulation of complexity that turns villages into cities and cities into states. The pattern by now is familiar. China's version begins along the Yellow River (Huang He), a turbulent, silt-laden waterway that winds across northern China for over 3,000 miles before reaching the Bohai Sea.

The river gets its name from the vast quantities of fine, yellowish loess soil it carries, the same soil that made the North China Plain exceptionally fertile. But the Yellow River was far more dangerous than the Nile. It flooded catastrophically, unpredictably, and sometimes shifted its entire course by hundreds of miles. The Chinese called it "China's Sorrow." The name stuck because it kept earning it.

The Shang dynasty (c. 1600-1046 BCE) is the earliest Chinese dynasty confirmed by both archaeological evidence and written records. Earlier traditions speak of the Xia dynasty, but archaeological verification remains debated. The Shang left behind unmistakable proof, and it surfaced in one of history's stranger episodes.