Erligang: the Shang Bronze Age spreads across China

Around 1500 BCE, on the site of present-day Zhengzhou, stands a city with an earthen wall some seven kilometres long—in the view of most archaeologists one of the early capitals of Shang. In workshops outside the wall ritual vessels are cast in bronze: tripods, goblets and cauldrons patterned with masks and dragons. Vessels of the same kind and the same school turn up far to the south, on the Yangzi, at Panlongcheng: within two centuries Shang bronze spreads across the whole Central Plain. No writing of this age has yet been read—the inscribed oracle bones come later, at Anyang. Of these centuries the Records of the Grand Historian know only the kings’ names; the city and its workshops were revealed by excavations from the 1950s onward.