Competing Visions of China’s Distant Past

WHEN CHINESE HISTORY makes the news in the United States, the focus is often on the role of nationalism in contemporary narratives about the modern past: overcoming the “Century of Humiliation,” victory in the War of Resistance against Japan, or even the reemergence of anti-Manchu nationalism more than 110 years after the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). But ancient history, too, has been newsworthy of late, both because of its role as a renewed touchstone for nationalism in the 21st century and for the extraordinary materials that archaeologists have relatively recently brought to light. China’s early period also has inspired a flight of new books aimed to inspire the curious and tantalize readers and students alike. In addition to recent volumes such as Brian Lander’s The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (2021) and Jessica Rawson’s Life and Afterlife in Ancient China (2023), there is also Andrew Seth Meyer’s To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor (2025), a vivid account of the political intrigues that marked the Warring States period (ca. 475–221 BCE).

Archaeology has for some years driven paradigm-changing scholarship, tourism, and patriotic enthusiasm. Unexpected finds, many of them retrieval operations occasioned by construction projects, have challenged conventional wisdom and reopened questions of Indigenous origins and foreign influences. Where (and when) should we locate the beginnings of Chinese civilization? How should we account for alternative versions of classical texts? What is (or should be) the relationship between ancient archaeological sites and contemporary national identities? How old is “China” and what attributes make a past society “Chinese”? What roles have imported technologies and migrant populations played in “Chinese” history, not just recently but also millennia ago?

Within China, these questions have taken on fresh importance insofar as they align with the government’s current desire to locate ancient antecedents for the territorially expansive, internally harmonious, multiethnic, internationally celebrated, and prosperous society envisioned for the future. That past recedes to ever more distant horizons: three decades ago, we heard about 5,000 years of Chinese civilization; now exhibitions and state media more often proclaim 7,000 years of continuous Chinese achievements. Official outlets also emphasize the role played by far-flung locales and diverse peoples within the current boundaries of the People’s Republic in the ancient making of the modern nation. The enthusiasm for modern China’s ancient pedigree is itself relatively new as Mao-era (1949–76) rhetoric treated much of this as feudal baggage to be eliminated.

Today, though, new museums and grand reconstructions celebrate national and local pasts either discovered archaeologically or long attested in canonical texts. These not only provide fodder for patriotic education and local boosterism but also serve China’s rapidly expanded domestic tourist industry, providing a nifty backdrop for photogenic cosplay and elaborate sound and light shows. Confucian rituals have been revived both in the ancient sage’s hometown of Qufu and in specialized ceremonies for costumed kindergarten students. A gargantuan bronze tripod, an ancient signifier of rulership and unity, was installed in the main square of Guang’an in Sichuan to honor native son Deng Xiaoping.

The two books under review use archaeological evidence to provide Anglophone readers with illuminating and readable accounts of China’s distant past. The authors take very different approaches, however, to questions of origins. While drawing heavily on the research of Chinese archaeologists, neither author conforms to the official vision of diverse ancient strands harmoniously integrated within present-day boundaries.

In The King’s Harvest, Lander argues that China’s early trajectory was no exception to universal patterns of state formation and environmental degradation. He uses the case of the Guanzhong region in northern China to illustrate how state formation here as elsewhere came at the expense of natural environments. By contrast, Rawson’s Life and Afterlife in Ancient China describes a distinctive civilization that emerged from the synthesis of elements drawn from across what is now Chinese space and beyond. Through close, intuitive readings of objects, Rawson argues that imported technologies and peoples played a transformative role in that process, producing a civilization quite unlike any in the West.

The King’s Harvest provides a new and universalizing interpretive framework through which to read the Chinese archaeological and textual record. In it, the author examines the relationship between agriculture, state formation, and ecological degradation over the longue durée from the very beginnings of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago through the end of the Qin dynasty (221–06 BCE). Lander, who is the Stanley J. Bernstein Associate Professor of Environment and Society & History at Brown University, describes his project as one of “political ecology,” which he defines as “the study of how the form and organization of states affect the distribution and abundance of organisms.” He thus considers what people grew and ate, how they interacted with the animals who shared their environments or who were driven out by human activity, and the impact of consolidated settlements and eventually bureaucratic empire on the environment. Lander concludes that developments good for the state in the aggregate were often harmful to both the environment and to human health and furthermore led to the exacerbation of social and gender inequality. The increased complexity of human society correlated with the simplification of the ecosystems that people inhabited and consumed.

By this logic, China is not (and was never) exceptional, and the ecological and sociopolitical lessons learned there apply everywhere. State formation and, by extension, human civilization always and inevitably contribute to the diminishment of diverse natural ecosystems and their replacement with taxable and more homogeneous “anthropogenic ones like farmland or pasture.” His central message: The rise of states and their expansion caused our current environmental crisis; therefore, states should be part of the solution. Lander’s book thus offers a thought-provoking, if pessimistic, reflection on the origins and environmental effects of human social and political transformations in the distant past for our consideration in a period of catastrophic habitat loss, mass extinction, industrial farming, and climate disaster.

Lander argues both implicitly and explicitly that Guanzhong, home of important Neolithic and early dynastic settlements in what is now Shaanxi province, was at the center of early Chinese history. Other areas, he argues, became “Chinese” by conquest and colonization. By Lander’s account, even places now considered quintessentially Chinese, like the southern region currently administered as Guangdong province or the Yangtze River Delta near modern Shanghai, were only very gradually assimilated by an expansionist north. This North China–centered narrative aligns Lander with early 20th-century scholarly accounts, both Chinese and foreign, that emphasized the Yellow River Valley as the “cradle of Chinese civilization.” By contrast, more recent scholarship has emphasized convergence from multiple origin sites to account for the diversity and dynamism of China’s becoming.

Lander’s book is organized roughly chronologically: from the first domestication of plants and animals through the formation of loosely integrated early states to the rise of centralized bureaucratic ones. He attends closely to the emergence of new technologies and the new political and social relationships that those technologies made possible. First, in the Neolithic period, humans successfully domesticated dogs, pigs, rice, and millet. Very gradually, agriculture overtook foraging and hunting as the primary livelihood. Societies became increasingly complex, specialized, and stratified. As Lander observes, wild ecosystems do not generally serve state interests. Thus, early states promoted agriculture militarily by extending territory and ideologically by elevating rulers and celebrating farmers.

In the early chapters, Lander leans into paleobiology and other forms of scientific evidence, synthesizing the work of (mainly) Chinese researchers over the past several decades to provide a lively narrative of the agricultural revolution and the introduction of new domesticated species and tools from central Asia. Ironically, he provides more evidence about Neolithic farmers than he does for their early dynastic counterparts. Archaeologists studying the Shang (1600–1046 BCE), Zhou (1046–256 BCE, and Qin-Han (221 BCE–220 CE) have focused their attention on high-prestige excavations such as palaces, ritual sites, and tombs, leaving Lander with relatively less agricultural and ecological material to draw on for these later periods.

Lander argues that in the early dynastic period, states and rulers effectively domesticated human populations, capturing their labor and agricultural surplus for state ends in exchange for the ruler’s provision of infrastructure to mitigate risk of flood and famine. War intensified the processes of state formation: states and their rulers required more labor, more agricultural surplus, and new technologies to fund conquests and pay for infrastructure to produce and transport even more agricultural surplus. The Warring States period thus served as an incubator for intensified construction of infrastructure, administration, and standardization with dramatic ecological effects as farmland replaced wilderness at an accelerated pace. The Qin state’s rise from regional power in Guanzhong to universal rule over a period of six centuries resulted from its success at these same strategies of state consolidation and resource extraction, with corresponding effects on the environment.

Economic growth under dynastic rule had an environmental cost. Indeed, Lander concludes that “peace was the most environmentally destructive achievement of the Chinese empires” because people multiplied and placed a burden on the environment by expanding agriculture. The emergence of agrarian states in East Asia contributed to social inequality, conquest, and environmental degradation. While in the aggregate, human populations flourished, individual humans suffered from increasingly oppressive social arrangements and less healthful diets. Lander presents the Chinese case as but one variation in a still ongoing global story: armed states extract resources to fuel competition and, in the process, degrade the environment. Ironically, he argues, the states whose growth caused our environmental crisis are also essential to any transition toward more sustainable societies. Perhaps China will again lead the way?

In Life and Afterlife in Ancient China, Rawson relies on the close reading of sites and objects to tell the story of “Chinese civilisation.” Like Lander, she focuses on the period from roughly 3000 BCE through the fall of the Qin dynasty. Unlike Lander, though, she navigates a broad landscape by homing in on individuals and ideas through the careful examination of burials. She posits that the cultural affinities, ideologies, and social connections of the entombed can be read out of the objects with which they were buried. As a former keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum; the author of numerous books and articles about Chinese art and archaeology; and a professor and administrator at Oxford, recognized with the Charles Lang Freer Medal for excellence in Asian art scholarship, the Tang Prize for Sinology and the title of dame commander of the British Empire, Rawson is unusually well qualified to read and comment on these materials. In her previous work, she has also cultivated significant expertise on interactions between China and the Eurasian Steppe. This, too, is amply reflected in Life and Afterlife, which shows in her attention to frontier connections, imported technologies like horse-drawn chariots, and the role of mobile peoples in shaping what became “Chinese” material culture.

The book celebrates and reflects the golden age of Chinese archaeological discovery that spans from the mid-20th century to the present. The book is divided into 12 chapters across four roughly chronological sections, plus an introduction and an epilogue. Each chapter focuses on a tomb of greater or lesser fame—except for chapter four, which features the spectacular and mysterious find at Sanxingdui near Chengdu in Sichuan. The sites selected for inclusion range from the renowned and therefore obvious, like the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin, to the relatively unknown tomb of Ya Chang, a Shang warrior posthumously provided with a small bronze prosthetic hand. The book is attractively illustrated with line drawings, maps, tomb diagrams, and 37 color plates.

A foregone conclusion undergirds this rich, thickly described, amply illustrated account: the period from Neolithic to Qin represents the prologue to “Chinese civilisation” as it exists in China today. This long narrative arc inspires vivid descriptions of China’s current landscape in every chapter, as well as the insertion of historical and literary references from various moments between then and now. It also assumes that the attributes of Chinese civilization can be identified and cataloged. She enumerates them as family ritual, the challenging physical environment, a shared written language and cosmology, the large labor pool and gifted artisans, millet/rice agriculture—and a set of associated materials that encode Chineseness, such as bronze, clay, silk, rammed earth, and jade. Hers is an optimistic and exotic story culminating in China’s rise to wealth and power. This contrasts sharply with Lander, whose narrative covers the same period but instead points toward the sins of all states and the origins of today’s climate crisis.

For Rawson, Chinese civilization originated and operated in three main settings: the Yellow and Wei River system in North China, the Loess Plateau in the northwest, and the Yangtze River region, the latter two of which gradually were “drawn into” the cultural practices of the central states. Because she puts tombs at the center, she also focuses on elites almost exclusively (she references attendants, women, and a surprising number of animals, but only insofar as they accompanied elites in death). And, because her imagined audience consists of nonexperts outside of China, the book hinges on the China-West binary and is larded with statements about knowledge that “we in the West” do and do not possess, and reminders that China and its unparalleled ancient past are deserving of “our” attention. She sets up frequent contrasts: the Chinese valued jade, whereas “our treasures” are typically gold; “our rulers” wore crowns, while theirs collected bronze vessels. Rawson foregrounds continuity between then and now, contrast between here and there, and the role of material objects as bridges between life and afterlife.

The dramatic recovery of objects and tombs, many now framed in ambitious new site museums, reveals both how ancient elites lived and how they imagined the afterlife. To Rawson, the tombs illuminate the creativity and diversity of ancient China and a radical continuity linking the past to the present. The chapters follow a pattern wherein first she describes the present-day landscape and provides a few historical details from intervening centuries before moving on to the architecture and contents of the tomb itself. In every instance she enumerates how many of what kind of objects and what might have been lost to time due to tomb raiding or the fragility of the original materials.

Rawson seems especially keen to identify frontier connections through tomb architecture, material culture, or the position of the entombed corpse. She thus consistently emphasizes the role of “foreign” technologies and peoples as a motive force in Chinese history even in very early periods when notions of “Chinese” and “foreign” seem particularly elusive. She transparently identifies, throughout the book, much that cannot be known, and thus impels us to imagine with her based on assiduous scrutiny and thick description of the objects and their material settings. The book thus emphasizes what we can sense, see, touch and intuit. In chapter three, for example, Rawson describes how Ya Chang, a warrior buried at the Shang capital of Anyang, was given a tiny bronze prosthetic hand to “restor[e] him to wholeness for the afterlife.” Rawson traces his prone burial position to steppe customs and proposes that he may have been an outsider absorbed into Shang society, while conceding that this cannot be definitively known. Well-suited for an educated foreign traveler, Life and Afterlife provides a descriptive, celebratory, and fascinating, even if structurally repetitive, account of China’s ancient material culture in its contemporary setting.

Both The King’s Harvest and Life and Afterlife are deeply informed by the work of Chinese archaeologists and make ample use of recent discoveries. And yet, these two books about China’s ancient past offer readers very different perspectives on China’s place in the world today: one familiarizes the history of ancient China by linking it to current ecological anxieties; the other taps into and amplifies an enduring fascination with the exotically long ago and far away.