Who ruled Anyang?

Anyang is a city in the far north of Henan province in China, where the foothills of the Taihang Mountains drop to the North China Plain. Just outside it, on the Huan River, lie the ruins of Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, where the oldest known Chinese writing was found. Counted among the traditional ancient capitals of China, Anyang is today an industrial prefecture-level city of about 5.5 million people.

People lived in caves at Xiaonanhai, on the western edge of the modern city, during the Stone Age. Later traditions place the capitals of the legendary sage-kings Zhuanxu and Ku in this area around 2000 BCE, but these stories belong to legend rather than to the historical record.

According to the ancient texts known as the Book of Documents and the Bamboo Annals, the Shang king Pan Geng moved his court to a place called Yin, though the Records of the Grand Historian gives a different account and the date of the move is disputed. In the oracle bones themselves the city appears as Dayi Shang, the "Great Settlement Shang"; the name Yin seems to have come into use only under the later Zhou. Archaeology shows that the site was a modest settlement at first, and that palaces, inscriptions, chariot burials and large-scale human sacrifice appear from around the reign of Wu Ding. The late Shang capital is usually dated to roughly 1250–1046 BCE, a span of twelve kings, and Wu Ding's campaigns from here carried the dynasty to the height of its power.

The ruins cover some 30 square kilometres, making Yinxu, the "Ruins of Yin", the largest archaeological site in China. Excavators have found more than 80 rammed-earth foundations for palaces, shrines and workshops, along with royal cemeteries and bronze foundries. The best preserved tomb belonged to Fu Hao, a wife of Wu Ding and a military commander, found unlooted in 1976.

Traditional histories blame the fall of the Shang on its last king, Di Xin, whose cruelty is said to have turned the nobility against him. King Wu of the Zhou dynasty overthrew the Shang in 1046 BCE and governed from a new capital far to the west, and Yin was left to decay until it was remembered only in old books.

In the centuries after the Shang the political centre of the region was Ye, a city about 18 kilometres to the north. The warlord Cao Cao took it in 204 CE and rebuilt it as a capital, and it later served several northern dynasties until 580, when Yang Jian, founder of the Sui dynasty, razed it after crushing a revolt there. Its people were moved to Anyang, which inherited Ye's role as the leading city of the region. Anyang became a county seat around 607 and has kept that status ever since.

Cao Cao himself was buried in the area. In 2009 archaeologists announced that a tomb at Xigaoxue village in Anyang County was his mausoleum. The claim set off an unusually loud public debate, with sceptics arguing that the finds were misidentified or even faked, and some questions, including who the women buried with him were, remain open.

Under the Song dynasty Anyang's district of Tangyin produced the general Yue Fei, whose temple still stands there.

For centuries the city was called Zhangde; it took the name Anyang in 1912, after the founding of the Republic of China. Yin itself came back to light through the trade in "dragon bones", ancient bones ground up as medicine. In 1899 the scholar Wang Yirong recognised writing on some of them, and the source was traced to the village of Xiaotun outside Anyang. In 1917 Wang Guowei reconstructed the Shang royal line from the inscriptions and found that it closely matched the list given by the historian Sima Qian, confirming that the dynasty was real.

Formal excavations led by Li Ji began in 1928 and continued until 1937, and digging has gone on since 1950. Some 150,000 oracle bones have now come from the site. From 1949 to 1953 Anyang belonged to the short-lived province of Pingyuan before returning to Henan. Yinxu was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006, and the city's economy today rests on steel, coal coking and clothing.