The Shang state had its centre in northern Honan, north of the Yellow river.  At various times, different towns were made into the capital city; Yin-ch’ue, their last capital and the only one which has been excavated, was their sixth capital.  We do not know why the capitals were removed to new locations; it is possible that floods were one of the main reasons.  The area under more or less organized Shang control comprised towards the end of the dynasty the present provinces of Honan, western Shantung, southern Hopei, central and south Shansi, east Shensi, parts of Kiangsu and Anhui.  We can only roughly estimate the size of the population of the Shang state.  Late texts say that at the time of the annihilation of the dynasty, some 3.1 million free men and 1.1 million serfs were captured by the conquerors; this would indicate a population of at least some 4-5 millions.  This seems a possible number, if we consider that an inscription of the tenth century B.C. which reports about an ordinary war against a small and unimportant western neighbour, speaks of 13,081 free men and 4,812 serfs taken as prisoners.

Inscriptions mention many neighbours of the Shang with whom they were in more or less continuous state of war.  Many of these neighbours can now be identified.  We know that Shansi at that time was inhabited by Ch’iang tribes, belonging to the Tibetan culture, as well as by Ti tribes, belonging to the northern culture, and by Hsien-yuen and other tribes, belonging to the north-western culture; the centre of the Ch’iang tribes was more in the south-west of Shansi and in Shensi.  Some of these tribes definitely once formed a part of the earlier Hsia state.  The identification of the eastern neighbours of the Shang presents more difficulties.  We might regard them as representatives of the Tai and Yao cultures.

2 Writing and Religion

Not only the material but also the intellectual level attained in the Shang period was very high.  We meet for the first time with writing—­much later than in the Middle East and in India.  Chinese scholars have succeeded in deciphering some of the documents discovered, so that we are able to learn a great deal from them.  The writing is a rudimentary form of the present-day Chinese script, and like it a pictorial writing, but also makes use, as today, of many phonetic signs.  There were, however, a good many characters that no longer exist, and many now used are absent.  There were already more than 3,000 characters in use of which some 1,000 can now be read. (Today newspapers use some 3,000 characters; scholars have command of up to 8,000; the whole of Chinese literature, ancient and modern, comprises some 50,000 characters.) With these 3,000 characters the Chinese of the Shang period were able to express themselves well.