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China and the Barbarians
By FRANTZ
Citations are from "Cultural Frontiers in Ancient East Asia" by Watson Edinburgh ISBN 0852242034
# Isolation and Contact in the High Bronze Age
## Jade
Bronze age China imports jade from Baikalia, Lake Baikal region (Ibid. 59)
Shang burial customs imported from Longshan culture i.e. the far northeast (Ibid.)
Baikalia jade-cutting involved long thin sheet with a flint graver, similar to Chinese quartzite ring manufacturing in 1st Millenium B.C. except Chinese used a bamboo borer. (Ibid.)
## Knives
"This Northern Zone was the home of pastoralists perhaps already semi-nomadic in Shang times, where the power of the central Chinese state was felt only intermittently, where bronze was cast near the camp fire and not in skilled workshops, a client subregion of the Chinese sphere where metro-politan tools and weapons were rarely imported, but regularly copied. Bronze forms were varied for reasons of local tradition and taste, or the shortcomings of the bronze-smiths. In the late Shang period onwards, it was from this Northern Zone, and with the modifications applied to them in this zone, that Chinese forms of weapons and tools passwed beyond to inner Asia; and ideas reaching China from without went through a corresponding transformation on the northern frontier." (Ibid. 60)
"The bronze knives with ram-head terminals found at Anyang and in the Northern Zone have analogues in the Ordos, in Mongolia, and in the Upper Yenisei valley of South Siberia, all of which must be dated to the Karasuk period; they may be as early as the closing centuries of Shang in China, and cannot be later than about 800 BC." (Ibid. 61)
## The Chariot
"There is a tradition that in his campaigns against barbarians in the northwest, the 9th century Chou king, Hsüan, used a team of four horses in each chariot. An example of this harness -- all four horses under one yoke beam -- was excavated at Chang-chia-p'o in Shensi, at a site of western Chou date; but two horses were the rule" (Ibid. 65)
## The Chou Conquest
"In the development of the bronze age of China proper, in central China, the great turning-point was the defeat of Shang by the Chou confederacy in 1027 BC. In the branch of bronze production which has been most intensively studied... a sudden change is seen... with the beginning of Chou rule... it can only be accounted for on the assumption that an independent tradition of bronze-founding had been forming on the territory neighboring Shang to the west... no later than the Anyang period of Shang. This is no more than is claimed for the rise of an independent tradition in the Northern Zone; but in the north there is no reason to suppose more than temporary foundry sites, where tools and weapons were cast as need arose. The switch... is only satisfactorily explained by assuming that comparable bronze-work was already executed in the Chou territory before the advance of the Chou rulers into the central plain. The Shang oracle sentences... give hints that these people were pastoralists." (Ibid. 66)
# China and the Nomad Heritage
## China and the Barbarians
"Nomads [of the pastoral type] may have lived in Mongolia and the Chinese Northern Zone by the 8th century BC. It was in this century that the inroads of barbarians into the territories of the northern Chinese states became a serious trouble, and thereafter the coalitions of the steppe tribes were a force to be reckoned with" (Ibid. 101) The evidence cited for barbarian disturbance is "Das Tocharerproblem und die Pontische Wanderung" by R. Heine-Geldern 1951
"In spite of these hostile contacts of the Chinese with northern tribes from the 8th to the 6th centuries BC, the exchange of goods between them must have continued. The distribution of the earliest forms of Chinese currency in the northern area must indicate a measure of trade" (Ibid. 102)
Distinction between China and Mongolia crystallizes into a "well-defined frontier dividing taxable peasantry from elusive nomads" (Ibid.) w/ the construction of walls (Chou, Chao, and Yen) in 4th Century BC. Notably after the Shang dynasty.