But if we look forward rather than back, the view is
unimpeded. Unlike
the Near East and India, China never had occasion to rub out its
earliest civilization and start again. Instead, we confront a
remarkable case of cultural continuity: this civilization is the only
one in the world that has existed continuously since the second
millennium B.C. This does not mean that the Chinese of a later
millennium would have felt particularly at home in the world of the
Shang; cultural continuity, like memory, is selective. But the script
of China at the beginning of the third millennium A.D. is a descendant
of that used in the Shang capital at the end of the second millennium
B.C., and the same relationship holds with regard to the language. This
continuity is crucial to such ability as we have to make sense of the
written remains of late Shang culture. It means that characters and the
words they represent can often be identified with those of later and
better- known periods. It also means that the later literary sources
preserve at the very least a skeleton of Shang history that can be put
to work in interpreting the Shang texts. For much as in ancient Egypt
and Mesopotamia, one use of literary continuity was to preserve a
historical memory centered on the succession of dynasties that ruled
the country—except that by modern times the length of that memory in
China substantially exceeded what either the Egyptians or the
Mesopotamians had achieved.
The dynastic backbone of subsequent Chinese history
can be conveyed in
bold outline as a series of alternating periods of unity and disunity.
The first period of unity was under the early Chou (or Zhou, from
around 1050 to 771 B.C.); then followed a long period of disunity (771-
221 B.C.), during most of which the nominal rule of the Chou lingered
on. The second period of unity was initiated by the Ch'in (or Qin, 221-
206 B.C.) and continued by the Han (206 B.C.-
A.D. 220); then came
several centuries of unadorned disunity (220-581). The third period of
unity was started by the Sui (581- 618) and maintained by the T'ang (or
Tang, 618-907); then followed a few decades of disunity (907- 60). The
fourth period of unity (960-1127) was the work of the Sung (or Song),
but the later part of their rule (1127-1279) was again a period of
disunity. The final period of unity lasted through to the end of the
history of traditional China, under the Yuan (or Yuan, 1260-1368), the
Ming (1368-1644), and the Ch'ing (or Qing, 1644-1912).
