24-05-2025
Boning up on the past's futures
A Chinese oracle bone. Photo: supplied
In 1899 Wang Yi-yung was feeling unwell. The chief tutor of the Imperial Household, he ventured from the Forbidden City in Beijing to a chemist's shop, where he noted some fragments of bone destined to be powdered for traditional medicine. Picking one up, he was taken back by faint scratch marks. It was the oldest known Chinese writing.
The source of the chemist's supply was traced to Anyang, the capital city of the Shang Dynasty. A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures at the Palace Museum in Taipei. After one of these, I was introduced to Shi Zhangru, a, legendary scholar of the Shang who was then aged 101. We had a fascinating conversation during which he told me that as a young man, he participated in the excavations at Anyang from 1928 and on the last day of one season, he unearthed a piece of thin bone. This was not an ordinary discovery, for as he dug down further, he revealed an archive of what are known as oracle bones. He was still working on translating them 70 years later, and I accepted his invitation to his laboratory the following day without hesitation.
He arrived sharp at 9am with a bevy of young women assistants and he delved into his archives to show me these remarkable historic documents.
The Shang rulers worshipped their royal ancestors and constantly sought their advice through the medium of diviners. Thin bones, principally cattle shoulder bones and turtle shells, were prepared by boring depressions on the underside of the bone. The King's issue of the day would then be asked of the oracle. Should he go to war? Would his concubine bear him a son? Was it propitious to go hunting? This question was then incised on the top surface of the bone, before a red hot poker was pressed into the depression, causing the bone to crack. The crack would then be interpreted and the diviner would incise the answer.
And so, we can share the concerns of King Wu Ding 3300 years ago when he asked "We shall hunt at Hwei. Can we make captures?". The oracle foretold success. He went hunting and bagged a tiger, deer, 164 foxes and 159 deer.
The Shang script is the direct ancestor of Chinese writing. After 3000 years of evolution, translating the oracle bones is not easy. So far, about 1300 of the 3000 different characters have been deciphered. One of the commonest is the graph for silk.
