Shang society may not have been a model of social justice, but its areas of achievement were many and ranged from agriculture to the written word. As one might expect in such a rigidly structured society, even farming was organized accord-
Ing to hierarchy, with the king controlling the best lands, where his overseers put prisoners of war to work.
Crops grown on Shang farms included rice, soybeans, and millet, the latter a type of grain that they used in making everything from cereals to wines. It appears that Shang farmers employed crop rotation, an important agricultural advancement. Certain crops are particularly hard on soil, requiring a high amount of nutrients, and the land needs to be given periods of “rest” by growing other, less demanding crops.
Mulberry trees on farms in Shang China yielded a product for which China would become famous: silk. This extremely elegant, smooth fabric appeared in China around 1750 B. C., and after Europeans learned about it more than 2,800 years later, during the Middle Ages, it became a highly prized item in the West. Another plant grown on Chinese farms was hemp (hemp is a tall herb with tough fibers used in ropes and marijuana). The Shang made use of its narcotic qualities in medical treatments, much as cancer patients in twentieth-century America are allowed legal use of marijuana to ease the painful side effects associated with treatments for the disease.
Among the many vegetables grown on the farms of Shang China were cabbages, radishes, turnips, and scallions (green onions). Fruit farms abounded with melons, jujubes (JOO-joo-beez, similar to figs), peaches, apricots, and persimmons. The Shang also cultivated chestnuts and hazelnuts and raised a variety of farm animals.
Cows in Shang China provided a key ingredient in one of the world's favorite desserts, which made its first appearance in China about 2000 b. c.: ice cream. It is ironic that a famous milk product should emerge from China, because Chinese cuisine (KWI-zeen) makes little use of milk or by-products such as cheese or butter. In America, people consider it offensive if someone smells like garlic or onions, whereas the Chinese feel the same way about someone who smells like cheese or milk. Yet theirs was one of the first civilizations to practice milking of cows on a regular basis. Ice cream was made by mixing milk with soft rice, and then chilling this mixture in snow from the high mountains.
These many achievements in agriculture and food production helped fuel a healthy economy. Though the Lydians
Would become the first nation to actually coin money much later, the Shang used cowries (KOW-reez), bright shells from a type of ocean creature, as a form of coin.
Of course such an advanced society would hardly be possible without the development of written communication. The Shang had a system of writing that involved not only pictograms and phonograms but ideograms (ID-ee-oh-gramz). Whereas pic-tograms represent an object and phonograms a sound, an ideogram stands for an idea or a name. Examples of ideograms in everyday life include the dollar sign ($) or the percent sign (%), as well as corporate logos such as the “golden arches” of McDonald's or the three-pointed star of Mercedes-Benz.
From the beginning, Chinese writing was far more complex than that of other ancient societies: instead of a few dozen characters, as in the alphabets of Phoenicia and later Greece and Rome, or a few hundred symbols, as in the alphabets of Egypt or Sumer, the Shang used some 2,000 characters. These characters formed the basis for the Chinese written language, which remains in use today.
Another “language” developed by the Chinese of the Shang Dynasty was music. It appears that as early as 2700 b. c., Chinese musicians understood the concept of the octave (AHK-tev), a system of eight notes that forms the basis of a musical scale. (Many students of music in the Western world learn an octave through the familiar pattern do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do.)
As with ice cream, there is a certain irony to this fact, because most Chinese music uses scales that give it an unusual, twangy sound to Western ears. This sound results not from the instruments themselves—one could almost as easily play “Chinese-sounding” music on a guitar or violin—but from the choice of notes that make up a given scale. As for Chinese instruments, several of these developed under the Shang Dynasty as well, including flutes, various other reed instruments, and a bronze bell.
World History
