Ancient Chinese Warfare (20 page)

If these traditional accounts hold any validity, the Shang’s strategy was complex, its incubation lengthy, and its final measures brilliantly executed as they consciously exploited a newly created tactical imbalance of power and Chieh’s psychological weakness through covertly gathered intelligence. King T’ang can therefore be seen as having exemplified Sun-tzu’s subsequent concept of first creating the circumstances in which one cannot be defeated (by neutralizing potential enemies, especially the Eastern Yi, who could have easily exploited the power vacuum created by the conflict) and then those for achieving victory (by forming alliances, including with the Yüeh-shih, and acquiring true knowledge of the enemy), thereby gaining victory essentially unopposed over a crumbling foe. Even though this is a somewhat romanticized portrait, one remarkably and no doubt deliberately similar to the Chou’s conquest of the Shang centuries later, to the extent that Chieh was flawed and terrified and King T’ang had to confront certain military realities to gain victory, it may contain some degree of truth.

7.

DEFINITIVE EVIDENCE FOR the Shang’s military and economic power may be seen in several important archaeological sites, including Yen-shih, Cheng-chou, Anyang, and P’an-lung-ch’eng. (The first two are critical for understanding the early history of the Shang, the last for its projection of power southward, while Anyang was the capital over the final two centuries.) Although much of Yen-shih and Cheng-chou still remains buried despite several probing excavations, enough has been uncovered to identify them both as major sites dating back to the Shang’s initial period. However, their relative sequence and importance have become matters of acrimonious contention. Proponents argue over whether Yen-shih was the initial capital of Po or at least a secondary or western capital known as Hsi Po, or Cheng-chou was Hsi Po or perhaps Ao, the site to which Chung Ting moved the Shang administrative headquarters in the middle period, as well as other possibilities.
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The most reasonable explanation—which will be argued below after examining their basic features but need not be accepted to understand the military character and significance of Yen-shih—is that the multilayered site at Cheng-chou, with its vast dimensions and numerous, impressive artifacts, was a fully developed royal capital constructed at a continuously occupied Shang site, but from the outset Yen-shih was a military bastion. It was probably erected shortly after the conquest in the heart of enemy territory to serve as a fortress even though Erh-li-t’ou itself had been occupied because, contrary to traditional accounts,
many Hsia groups remained unsubmissive, as might be expected if the Shang campaign had focused on eliminating the ruling clan.

In addition to these critical cities, several hundred Shang era sites have now been located, suggesting that the total number of substantial fortified towns or cities, including those of other peoples, may have numbered about seventy. In consonance with the historical materials furnished by the oracle bones from Anyang, a few such as Wu-ch’eng and Tung-hsia-feng have greatly contributed to a much revised understanding of the dynasty’s power, extent, and dynamics.

All the Shang cities bear witness to increasingly sharp class distinctions and the evolution of royal groups with immense power, including life and death, over the general populace; the development of massive, sophisticated buildings; segmented inner quarters for the highly privileged; the slow emergence of burgeoning economies based on increased agricultural yields, animal husbandry, handicraft production, conspicuous consumption, and limited trade; the further perfection of bronze technology, resulting in large workshops capable of casting massive cauldrons, fine symbolic items, and weapons, the latter in multiple molds; and clear differentiation in the dwellings within these citadels and across their expanded sites.
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The Shang was also capable of mobilizing the large labor forces required to undertake ever greater fortification work, vast communal projects, and deeper, more complex tombs. Although Yen-shih and Cheng-chou embody important Lungshan characteristics, including expansive wall systems, they are undoubtedly early Shang fortified capitals. However, just as at Erh-li-t’ou, no defensive fortifications apart from a single moat have yet been discovered amid the opulent remains at Anyang, immediately raising the question of whether those rulers were too immersed in the pursuit of pleasure to undertake them or simply felt that surpassing military power rendered them unnecessary. If so, the absence of defensive walls proved a fatal conceit, because the last emperor lacked a defensible refuge after his forces were vanquished at Mu-yeh.

Although traditional scholars have long acrimoniously but futilely argued over the identity and location of the preconquest capitals, recent discoveries showing the preconquest forcible displacement of Hsia cultural
elements apparently confirm that the incipient Shang seized terrain early on and erected citadels to block its nemesis at peripheral points of confrontation. In particular, the remnant structures at Chiao-tsuo in Fu-ch’eng, Henan, appear to comprise a preconquest bastion that was constructed in a crucial area where the Hsia had been exerting, possibly even expanding, its influence and thus clashed with the Shang, then an increasingly dynamic post-tribal entity intent upon projecting power and broadening its domain.
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Abutting the T’ai-hang Mountains in the Shen River area, Chiao-tsuo’s roughly 300- by 310-meter-long walls form a virtually perfect square that encompassed somewhat more than 90,000 square meters, impressive but too limited for the site to have served as anything more than a detached city or secondary bastion despite suggestions that it might have been the predynastic capital of Yung. Based on remnants, the original walls apparently averaged 15 meters in width and stood at least several meters high. Although marked by the usual 8- to 12-centimeter-thick layered construction typical of the period—nineteen layers being required for the 2.1-meter-high eastern wall—a somewhat unusual method of pounding with bundles of fifteen to twenty comparatively small sticks was employed. All the walls were erected on ample excavated foundations, ensuring their stability.
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Several major structures have been discovered, and the citadel’s interior was divided into two compounds.

Apparently maintained as a militarized city until somewhat after Cheng-chou was abandoned, postconquest Chiao-tsuo presumably continued to function as a control point over the Hsia populace and then a bulwark against the Eastern Yi. By the middle of the dynastic Shang period, after the Yi had been defeated and Hsia opposition had evaporated, it may have become an unnecessary expenditure
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or a casualty of the internal turmoil supposedly responsible for Cheng-chou’s demise.

Another obvious military bastion, the Shang-fortified city at Yen-shih is located some ten kilometers east of Luoyang in the Luo River watershed just above the present-day river, close on a marsh that encroaches from the southeast. First discovered and excavated in 1983, it continues to be the subject of ongoing investigations in the quest to determine its historical identity.
⁶
Several possibilities continue to be argued
despite the findings of the Xia-Shang-Zhou dynastic project: Chen Hsün, the last Hsia capital; Hsi Po, the first Shang capital; an early Shang secondary capital, perhaps paired with Po (which is then said to be Cheng-chou); an early Shang military bastion; T’ai Wu’s new capital of Hsi; T’ai Chia’s T’ung Palace;
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or even P’an Keng’s new capital, known as Po Yin.

As the diagram shows, the city eventually assumed the shape of a contorted rectangle that tapers slightly downward in the upper northeast corner and is severely squashed by the marsh in the lower southeast. With a remnant circumference of 5,330 meters, the outer walls span some 1,700 meters from north to south and 1,215 meters from east to west, although the southernmost portion extends only 740 meters before turning upward. A total of seven gates have been identified; eleven large roads oriented along the cardinal directions crisscross the interior; and a formidable ditch some 20 meters wide and 6 meters deep encircles the walls at a distance of approximately 12 meters. Clearly functional in intent, its near side gradually slopes downward, facilitating archery fire while precluding protective concealment, but the far side is a daunting, nearly vertical, 19 feet. When filled with water and functioning as a moat, its 20-meter expanse, although easily negotiated by swimmers, would have required rafts or boats to convey any sort of siege or assault equipment.

The remnant walls of the greater enclosure presently stand 2.9 meters over the outside terrain and 1.5 to 1.8 meters above the interior, but were certainly higher when first erected. They are 17 to 18 meters wide at the base and taper to just under 14 meters at the top and have a perpendicular outer face to preclude easy ascension. Constructed by the usual pounded earth technique that produced layer thicknesses varying between 8 and 13
centimeters, they were underpinned by a similarly compressed, multilayer foundation excavated down between 1.3 and 1.7 meters, with an expanse slightly narrower than the ground-level wall base.
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However, the consistent use of a single soil type rather than intermixed layers of distinctively different soil is interpreted as evidence of either less sophisticated engineering practices or haste in constructing the defenses. Nevertheless, the layers are described as hard and dense, as they must have been for the walls to have still protruded some 2 meters above the terrain as late as the Han and Wei periods,
⁹
with the outer walls being erected upon a carefully leveled and formed inner core.

More recent excavations have uncovered the interior enclosure shown on the diagram as well as a self-contained palace area slightly south of its midpoint and two other segregated areas. The royal quarters were set off in a roughly square enclosure measuring about 210 meters east to west and 230 meters north to south, creating a segmented area of somewhat over 40,000 square meters that contains evidence of palace foundations.
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As the wall averages only 3 meters in width, it clearly was more symbolic than functional in intent.

The royal quarters were initially surrounded by fortifications that assumed a fundamentally rectangular shape that extended 1,100 meters from north to south and 740 meters from east to west. Far narrower than the walls of the greater enclosure, they average 6 to 7 meters in width and were erected upon a shallow, meter-deep foundation. The freestanding portions retain a remnant height of only 0.2 to 0.6 meter, but they were certainly higher in antiquity. Constructed before the outer fortifications subsumed them, they demark the approximately 800,000 square meters that constituted the first Shang enclave at this site. However, within decades the highly dynamic Shang more than doubled the city’s bounded area to 1,900,000 square meters, even building right out over their bronze workshops. The final configuration thus assumed the palace, inner city (
ch’eng
), and outer confines or suburbs (
kuo
) widely discussed in late Chou and later literature as the highly idealized form of traditional Chinese capitals. As a result of this evolutionary expansion, Yen-shih is sometimes said to be the first to manifest it.
¹¹

Two walled enclosures, each with dimensions somewhat more than half the royal city, have also been discovered within the greater
fortifications. Evidence suggests they may have been military barracks or storage areas for weapons and provisions. An 800-meter-long underground ditch roughly 2 meters wide, ingeniously constructed from wood and stone and linked to all the buildings in the palace compound, runs from the royal quarters out below the city’s walls. Originally characterized as a drainage ditch, its connection to a large artificial pool some 128 meters in length, 20 meters wide, and 2 meters deep suggests it was designed to provide water rather than simply drain it away. (This pool is the earliest artificially constructed urban reservoir yet discovered in China.)
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The inner walls, roads, gates, and artificial pond, being highly regularized and expertly constructed out of tamped earth, clearly show the systematic execution of a well-crafted strategic design that emphasized structural organization and active defense. Additional features such as two gatehouses that could control access to the entire settlement and the interior quarters, coupled with the narrowness of the gates, emphasize Yen-shih’s martial character, one highly appropriate for a new power center that had to be forcefully imposed in the enemy’s very core.

The citadel’s outer walls, which were erected within a few decades of the inner enclosure, and most of its functional remains are said to date to the fourth Erh-li-t’ou and lower Erh-li-kang phases, evidence that Yen-shih was not an ordinary site that gradually evolved over time, but was deliberately erected.
¹³
Conversely, although austere, the site is too palatial to have simply been a military bastion, suggesting it must have been employed for some decades as the first capital (known as Hsi Po) before royal power was shifted back to the new capital at Cheng-chou.
¹⁴
Key radiocarbon dates for artifacts from the site fall just about the time traditionally claimed for the Shang’s ascension of 1600 and the astronomically derived year of 1588.
¹⁵
Late geographical and eclectic writings such as the
Lü-shih Ch’un-ch’iu
and
Ch’un-ch’iu Fan-lu
preserve abundant, albeit much later, textual evidence that suggests King T’ang established his first capital of Hsi Po in this area, perhaps even roughly at this site.
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