North China Plain

The North China Plain is the flood plain of the Yellow River, and it holds the earliest Chinese religion that can be read rather than inferred.

At Anyang, the late Shang capital, tens of thousands of inscribed ox scapulae and turtle plastrons have been recovered. They were used for divination: a question was put, heat was applied to prepared hollows until the bone cracked, the crack was read, and in many cases the question, the reading and sometimes the outcome were then carved onto the bone. The subjects are the concerns of a royal house, harvests, rain, illness, childbirth, hunting, campaigns, and the correct sacrifices to particular ancestors on particular days.

What they show is a religion built around the royal ancestors and around a high power called Di, with a calendar of offerings so elaborate that the ancestral cult amounts to an administrative system. David Keightley's study of the corpus established how much of Chinese religious vocabulary and practice is already present there.

The Zhou conquest around 1045 BCE brought the idea that carried furthest. The mandate of heaven holds that heaven confers the right to rule on a virtuous house and withdraws it from an unworthy one, which explains both the conquest and any future conquest. It made political legitimacy a moral and religious question in a way that governed Chinese political thought for three thousand years, including the arguments of Confucius in the state of Lu on the same plain.

The plain is also where Chinese state religion took the shape it kept, and its structure is worth stating plainly because it does not resemble a church.

Every level of administration maintained altars. The altars of soil and grain stood beside the ancestral temple in each capital, and the pair together stood for the state itself, so much so that the phrase became a synonym for the dynasty. Officials sacrificed on schedule to the powers of their jurisdiction: mountains, rivers, the wind, the harvest, and the previous holders of their own offices. Failure to perform the sacrifices was a dereliction of duty rather than a private lapse.

The Zhouli, an idealised handbook of offices, describes this apparatus in systematic detail, listing the officials responsible for each category of sacrifice, the music, the vessels and the timing. It is a blueprint rather than a record of any actual government, and its influence lies in the fact that later dynasties repeatedly used it as one.

Confucius belongs inside this system rather than outside it. His concern with ritual propriety is a concern with the correct performance of exactly these observances, understood as the framework that makes social order possible, and his reported reticence about spirits is a reticence about speculation rather than a rejection of the rites.

The imperial cult ended with the dynasty in 1911, but the altars and temples of the northern capitals survive as monuments, and the ritual calendar they served is documented in exhaustive detail.