Dong Zuobin

Dong Zuobin the Chinese epigrapher and archaeologist (1895-1963) who was the first scholar to recognise and date the divination inscriptions on the oracle bones from Anyang, and who helped to establish the study of the Shang dynasty's written records on a firm chronological basis. His field notebooks and scholarly papers are a foundation of modern research on the earliest Chinese writing.

Early Life and Education

Dong Zuobin was born on 18 December 1895 in Nanyang, Henan Province. He received a traditional classical education and also studied at a modern school, acquiring a command of the ancient script and of the historical literature that would serve him throughout his career. He was among the first students of the new archaeology at Anyang.

His background in the classics gave him an intimate knowledge of the historical texts, while his training in the field taught him to read material evidence. This combination of textual and archaeological skills was rare and made him uniquely qualified to work on the inscribed bones.

He joined the Anyang excavations in their early seasons and quickly became indispensable for his ability to read the ancient characters and to understand the divination system that lay behind them. He devoted himself to the study of the inscriptions for the rest of his life.

His classical education allowed him to connect the names and events recorded on the bones with the traditional histories of the Shang kings, while his fieldwork gave him a sense of the physical setting in which the records had been buried. This double perspective made him particularly effective in a study that demanded both textual and material evidence.

Deciphering the Oracle Bones

The oracle bones are the shoulder blades of oxen and the shells of turtles on which the Shang kings had questions carved before applying heat to produce cracks whose meaning was interpreted by diviners. The inscriptions record the questions asked and sometimes the answers and outcomes, and they are the oldest substantial corpus of Chinese writing.

Dong Zuobin made a decisive advance when he recognised that the inscriptions could be arranged in groups by the diviners who produced them and that these groups belonged to different reigns. He identified the names and signatures of individual diviners and used them to assign the bones to a sequence of royal periods, laying the foundation for a chronological framework.

His dating of the inscriptions gave historians a secure division of the Shang period and allowed them to read the divination records as evidence for the political, military, religious and agricultural life of the dynasty. The system of periodisation he began was refined by later scholars but its principles remained in use.

Fieldwork and Recording

Dong Zuobin took part in several seasons at Anyang and spent long hours in the trenches, recording the positions in which inscribed bones were found and the layers that contained them. He understood that the value of an inscription depended on its archaeological context, and he recorded that context with a care unusual for the time.

He also examined and catalogued large numbers of bones that had entered collections through the antiquities trade, working to establish their authenticity and to recover their provenances. His catalogue of finds and his field diaries became fundamental tools for the study of the material.

The Second World War interrupted his work and scattered the collections, but Dong Zuobin preserved and later published much of the evidence he had gathered. His determination to document everything, even under adverse conditions, saved records that would otherwise have been lost.

Scholarship and Writings

Dong Zuobin produced a long series of studies, monographs and catalogues devoted to the oracle-bone inscriptions and to the reconstruction of the Shang royal genealogy. He correlated the diviner groups with the king lists and used the inscriptions to test and correct the traditional accounts of the dynasty's rulers.

He wrote on the script itself, analysing the forms of the characters and the ways in which they changed over time, and contributed to the understanding of the grammar and vocabulary of the earliest Chinese. His editions of the bones, with transcriptions and commentary, made the material accessible to other scholars.

His work extended to the broader setting of these records, including the religious and calendrical systems of the Shang, and to the study of the bronze inscriptions of the following Zhou period. He saw the inscriptions as a window onto the institutions of an early state rather than as isolated curiosities.

Influence and Legacy

Dong Zuobin's periodisation of the oracle bones transformed the study of Shang history, converting a mass of fragmentary records into a usable historical archive. Scholars in China and abroad built upon his classification and his editorial work, and the chronology of the dynasty was reconstructed from the foundations he laid.

He was also a teacher and organiser who helped to establish the institutional study of epigraphy and to train younger researchers in the difficult art of reading ancient characters. His published catalogues remain reference works consulted by every student of the inscriptions.

He died on 23 November 1963 in Taiwan. He is remembered as a scholar of extraordinary patience and erudition, whose ability to find order in fragments of bone and shell gave the world a vivid picture of one of its oldest literate civilisations. His name is inseparable from the study of the oracle bones.

See also

• Oracle bone script
• Anyang
• Shang dynasty
• Chinese epigraphy