Oracle bone in the context of "Early Imperial China"

The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife. Chinese civilization first emerged in the Yellow River valley, which along with the Yangtze basin constitutes the geographic core of the Chinese cultural sphere. China maintains a rich diversity of ethnic and linguistic people groups. The traditional lens for viewing Chinese history is the dynastic cycle: imperial dynasties rise and fall, and are ascribed certain achievements. This lens also tends to assume Chinese civilization can be traced as an unbroken thread many thousands of years into the past, making it one of the cradles of civilization. At various times, states representative of a dominant Chinese culture have directly controlled areas stretching as far west as the Tian Shan, the Tarim Basin, and the Himalayas, as far north as the Sayan Mountains, and as far south as the delta of the Red River.

The Neolithic period saw increasingly complex polities begin to emerge along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The Erlitou culture in the central plains of China is sometimes identified with the Xia dynasty (3rd millennium BC) of traditional Chinese historiography. The earliest surviving written Chinese dates to roughly 1250 BC, consisting of divinations inscribed on oracle bones. Chinese bronze inscriptions, ritual texts dedicated to ancestors, form another large corpus of early Chinese writing. The earliest strata of received literature in Chinese include poetry, divination, and records of official speeches. China is believed to be one of a very few loci of independent invention of writing, and the earliest surviving records display an already-mature written language. The culture remembered by the earliest extant literature is that of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 – 256 BC), China's Axial Age, during which the Mandate of Heaven was introduced, and foundations laid for philosophies such as Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and Wuxing.

The Xia dynasty (/ʃiɑː/; Chinese: 夏朝, romanized: Xià cháo) is the first dynasty in traditional Chinese historiography. According to tradition, it was established by the likely legendary figure Yu the Great, after Shun, the last of the Five Emperors, gave the throne to him. In traditional historiography, the Xia dynasty was succeeded by the Shang dynasty.

There are no contemporaneous records of the Xia, and they are not mentioned in the oldest Chinese texts, the earliest oracle bone inscriptions dating from the Late Shang period (13th century BC). The earliest mentions occur in the oldest chapters of the Book of Documents, which report speeches from the early Western Zhou period and are accepted by most scholars as dating from that time. The speeches justify the Zhou conquest of the Shang as the passing of the Mandate of Heaven and liken it to the succession of the Xia by the Shang. That political philosophy was promoted by the Confucian school in the Eastern Zhou period. The succession of dynasties was incorporated into the Bamboo Annals and Shiji and became the official position of imperial historiography and ideology. Some scholars consider the Xia dynasty legendary or at least unsubstantiated. Others identify it with the archaeological Erlitou culture (c. 1900–1700 BC), although there is no firm evidence, such as surviving written records, to support such a linkage.

Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC. Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones, usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastrons of turtles. The writings themselves mainly record the results of official divinations carried out on behalf of the Late Shang royal family. These divinations took the form of scapulimancy where the oracle bones were exposed to flames, creating patterns of cracks that were then subjected to interpretation. Both the prompt and interpretation were inscribed on the same piece of bone that had been used for the divination itself.

Out of an estimated 150,000 inscriptions that have been uncovered, the vast majority were unearthed at Yinxu, the site of the final Shang capital (modern-day Anyang, Henan). The most recent major discovery was the Huayuanzhuang cache found near the site in 1993. Of the 1,608 Huayuanzhang pieces, 579 bear inscriptions. Each of the last nine Shang kings are named in the inscriptions beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is variously dated between 1250 and 1200 BC. Oracle bone inscriptions corresponding to Wu Ding's reign have been radiocarbon dated to 1254–1197 BC (±10 years). Following the overthrow of the Shang by the Zhou dynasty in c. 1046 BC, divination using milfoil became more common; far fewer oracle bone inscriptions are dated to the Western Zhou. No Zhou-era sites with a comparable cache of inscriptions to Yinxu have been found; however, examples from this period appear to be more widespread, having been found near most major population centers. New sites have continued to be discovered since 2000.

The Late Shang, also known as the Anyang period, is the earliest known literate civilization in China, spanning the reigns of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding in the second half of the 13th century BC and ending with the conquest of the Shang by the Zhou in the mid-11th century BC. The state is known from artifacts recovered from its capital at a site near Anyang now known as Yinxu and other sites across the North China Plain. One of the richest finds was the Tomb of Fu Hao at Yinxu, thought to belong to a consort of Wu Ding mentioned in Shang inscriptions.

Most Shang writing takes the form of inscriptions on oracle bones used for divinations on behalf of the king. Shang ritual focused on offerings to ancestors, enabling modern investigators to deduce a king list that largely matches that of the traditional histories of Sima Qian and the Bamboo Annals. The inscriptions also give insight into royal concerns such as weather, the harvest, warfare with neighbouring polities, and mobilizing workers for warfare or agricultural work.

Zhang Binglin (January 12, 1869 – June 14, 1936), also known by his art name Zhang Taiyan, was a Chinese philologist, textual critic, philosopher, and revolutionary.

His philological works include Wen Shi (文始 "The Origin of Writing"), the first systematic work of Chinese etymology. He also made contributions to historical Chinese phonology, proposing that "the niang (娘) and ri (日) initials [in Middle Chinese] come from the ni (泥) initial [in Old Chinese]" (known as niang ri gui ni 娘日歸泥). He developed a system of shorthand based on the seal script, called jiyin zimu (記音字母), later adopted as the basis of zhuyin. Though innovative in many ways, he was skeptical of new archaeological findings, regarding the oracle bones as forgery.