How good is your Chinese history?
This week, it’s half-term in the town where my two granddaughters live and I’ve agreed to entertain each of them for a day. Today was the turn of the younger who is seven. I asked her what she’d learned at school recently and she told me that they had been studying the Shang Dynasty.
Now it’s 70 years since I was at primary school, but I’m sure that we never studied anything as remotely interesting as the Shang Dynasty. Did you? Indeed I would guess that most adults in the Western world know nothing at all about the Shang Dynasty, so allow me to enlighten you.
The Shang dynasty was a Chinese royal dynasty that ruled in the Yellow River valley during the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Western Zhou dynasty. The classic account of the Shang comes from texts such as the Book of Documents, Bamboo Annals and Records of the Grand Historian.
Modern scholarship dates the dynasty between the 16th to 11th centuries BC, with more agreement surrounding the end date than beginning date. I cannot imagine what was going on then in what we now call Britain, but I guess not so much.
So now you know …