The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art and Cosmos in Early China (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) [Paperback]

"The Shape of the Turtle" was a follow-up study, continuing Sarah Allan's 1981 book "The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legend in Early China." The older book was a well-received effort to make sense of variations in succession-stories recounted in ancient Chinese texts, mainly regarding the Five Sages (primeval culture-heroes / rulers) and the Three Dynasties (Hsia, Shang and Chou -- known as Xia, Shang and Zhou in Pinyin transliteration). It argued that these reflected, not random variations drawn from storyteller's preferences, but ideological positions, as shown by the way specific sets of variants could be grouped according to the authors who cited them, and their known political and philosophical leanings.

This effort, being based on narratives, although often brief and allusive ones, was controlled by textual evidence, which in practice means the Chou Dynasty and Warring States material preserved in the Confucian Canon and a few other Daoist, Mohist, and Legalist sources, and early Han Dynasty texts. The ideas of the preceding Shang Dynasty (also known as Yin; traditionally dated 18th through 12th centuries BCE), were excluded, although the Hsia-Shang and Shang-Chou transitions are a major focus of some of the stories, since the Shang are not directly represented in the literature, but are found only as filtered by a rival dynasty and later philosophical schools. (They are supposedly represented by texts of debated age and authenticity in the "Shu Ching," or "Book of Documents," and by ritual poems preserved by their descendants and included in the "Shih Ching," the "Book of Songs.")

If the Shang Dynasty was still under suspicion of being entirely mythical, as it was in the late nineteenth century, this wouldn't be a big gap. But in fact the Shang are now attested archeologically and epigraphically, ruled by kings of the right names, at about the right time, and at what seem to be the right places. They were using an early version of the Chinese script, making beautiful objects in characteristically Chinese forms, and generally acting like the founders of Chinese civilization. They ought to have place in the history of Chinese ideas. And Sarah Allan attempts to give them one.

"The Shape of the Turtle" from 1991 is an attempt to decipher the missing Shang concepts of political order and its relationship to the world. It is based on a mixture of references in the same texts, a rather large body of enigmatic art, and the brief inscriptions on "oracle bones" excavated from Shang sites in the twentieth century. "Oracle Bones," for those unacquainted with the concept, are the shoulder-blades of cattle and the plastrons (lower shells) of turtles and tortoises, carefully shaped to ritual requirements, and, after the posing of questions, cracked by the application of heat.

The resulting patterns were "read" as signifying the answers of royal ancestors, nature spirits, and gods -- not clearly distinct categories in early Chinese thought anyway. In a minority of cases, brief inscriptions concerning the question, the questioner, the ritualist officiating, and the nature of the answer, were included on the Oracle Bones. (I would have called them Divination Bones myself, but no one was asking me....)

This was an expensive process, what with consumption of sacrificial cattle, and specially imported reptiles (so much more mystical than the local yokels!) supplied by tribute-paying vassals, and served among other things as a demonstration of royal wealth and power. The practice was ultimately replaced during the Chou Dynasty with re-usable milfoil stalks and the texts of the "I Ching" ("Book of Changes," also known as the "Chou I," "Changes of Chou" -- in Pinyin, Yijing and Zhouyi). But the idea of reading divine revelations in patterns discovered on a turtle shell persisted in legends of the origins of Chinese institutions, including the "I Ching" itself. (There is a interesting attempt to reconstruct and relate the practices in Edward L. Shaughnessy's 1996 volume, "I Ching: The Classic of Changes," an edition and translation of the second-century BCE Mawangdui manuscript excavated in the 1970s.)

These inscribed examples of consultations of the supernatural have turned out to be the main source for several centuries of early Chinese history, represented in later writings by king-lists and a handful of admonitory stories about good and bad rulers, and speeches and decrees offered as ancient documents in the "Shu Ching" (Classic of History). We have kings cited by name, asking questions concerning the sacrifices to be offered to named ancestors, or about war, hunting expeditions, harvests, and how to interpret unsolicited omens -- never long, frustrating in detail, but overall allowing a lot of information to be gleaned, and the existing literary sources to be checked against contemporary, or at least much older, evidence.

As Allan emphasizes, this evidence shows that the Shang culture was literate, but so far as we know it wasn't actually literary. Their successors, the Chou, seem positively chatty by comparison, since they covered portions of bronze ritual vessels with texts mentioning the king who gave the metal, the vassal who had it cast, the occasion for it, and the purpose it was to serve, and so on.

The Shang, would, in contrast, sometimes include a few words at most on their bronzes, -- but not for lack of technical skill, as the few longer texts on very late vessels show. Their bronze casting was a marvel, and they often covered objects with complex designs, the meaning of which has teased traditional Chinese antiquarians and modern archeologists alike.

Allan's ambitious enterprise in "The Shape of the Turtle" is to "read" both the mute bronzes (and other art) and the enigmatically concise oracle texts in conjunction with Chou and later accounts of the Shang, and the bits and pieces of mythology that seems to be associated with them.

The well-established idea in later Chinese cosmologies that the Earth is not only flat, but a Square, while Heaven is a Circle, suggests that the turtle (with domed carapace and rectangular plastron) already may have been seen by the Shang as a microcosm, an accessible (and "interactive") model of the world. More obviously, turtles seem to have been connected with the earthy and watery Yellow Springs, the underground Realm of the Dead. That association may also explain an archeologically-noted preference for Water Buffalo shoulder blades among the Oracle Bone scapulas.

Allen extends the parallel, suggesting that the plastrons were seen as cruciforms of five rectangles, a shape used in the Shang Royal Tombs, and possibly surviving in the preference for five in later later Chinese cosmology (Five Flavors, Five Elements, etc.).

Allan pays particular attention to some other odd statements about the physical world, especially the sun, which provoked annoyed comments from Confucians and others, and seem to be alien to the Chou vision of the cosmos (and so possibly an uncomfortable inheritance with lingering prestige). The result is striking, interesting, and has not met with universal acceptance.

Anne Birrell, in her impressive "Chinese Mythology: An Introduction," has refused to accept Allan's reconstruction of a Shang myth of the Ten Suns as the ancestors of the Shang aristocracy, although admitting that the existing accounts of how Archer Yi shot them down when they appeared in the sky at the same time seems to have had some political or social implications. The concept certainly doesn't seem to belong to the Chou consensus of "One Sun in Heaven, One King over the People," which Mencius insisted was self-evident.

Nor does Birrell agree with Allan that the "Black Bird" that was regarded as somehow ancestral to the Shang rulers had anything to do with why the Sun was later portrayed as a three-legged Raven (not most people's choice of an obviously solar bird!), and that such ideas explain why the names of days (= suns?) in the ten-day Chinese "week" are incorporated in the ritual titles of deceased Shang royalty.

Birrell is likewise not very receptive to Allan's conclusion that the accounts of the Hsia Dynasty preserved in the texts are really Shang mythical projections of their own opposites, a Lunar and terrestrial dynasty as opposed to their own Solar and celestial one, with no necessary connection to the actual past.

I am only too familiar with over-ambitious efforts to reconstruct whole mythical systems from scraps of evidence, and very aware of how a single textual discovery can overturn the most closely-argued case. But I think Allan was, at a minimum, asking the right questions, and unless there turn out to be valid technical objections (such as linguistic problems I couldn't guess at, and haven't seen cited), I regard this book as a valuable contribution, although ultimately inconclusive.

There doesn't seem to be available an up-to-date English-language source on Shang culture that is suitable for ordinary readers -- I would be delighted to learn of one. The late Kwang-Chih Chang (K.C. Chang) of Harvard University wrote extensively about the archeological and other evidence in "Shang Civilization" (Yale University Press, "Early Chinese Civilization" series, 1981), and this remains valuable, if rather dense. It offers his reconstruction of Shang kinship structures (Chang was Professor of Anthropology, so this was probably inevitable!), which Allan relies on. It should be consulted in this connection, even if other sources are found more inviting. Chang's brief "Art, Myth and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China" (Harvard University Press, 1983) provides one of Allan's models in her endeavor, and is easier, but it assumes a fair amount of knowledge about China in the reader. Still, it is probably required reading for getting the most out of "Shape of the Turtle," too, even if Allan's book is more gracefully written.

This book is packed with wonderful illustrations and wisdom about the myths and archeology of Shang China. A splendid book for people wondering where concepts of yin and yang, stems and branches, and even the orientation of tombs in later China originate. Although a common-enough book in collegiate circles, this deserves a much wider appreciation among the public.

An anonymous attack, spiked with slurs, and hinting at a prestigious affiliation, does very little for readers looking for insight into ancient Chinese thought. In this case, nothing could be farther from the truth than to claim that the author's work is derivative of mainland Chinese scholarship. Published translations of Prof. Allan's books would indicate rather that Chinese scholars find issues to ponder in her work. In fact, she presents more recent results in connective interpretations, linking her understanding to the readings of some of the major thinkers in Sinology. She thus provides a service to both scholarship and education. This reader appreciates the opportunity to examine a line of intelligent interpretations conducive to further thought and scholarship.