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35-522: Gonghe may refer to: Gonghe Regency , a regency that ruled the Chinese Zhou dynasty from 841 to 828 BC Gonghe County (共和县), of Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China Abbreviation of 工業合作社 (pinyin: Gōngyè Hézuòshè ), meaning Chinese Industrial Cooperatives Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with

70-478: A precise chronology back past Sima Qian's date of 841 BC. Many elements of the traditional account, especially the early parts, were clearly mythical. In the 1920s, Gu Jiegang and other scholars of the Doubting Antiquity School noted that the earliest figures appeared latest in the literature, and suggested that the traditional history had accreted layers of myth. Noting parallels between

105-498: A site (now called Yinxu ) near Anyang , north of the Yellow River in modern Henan province. The inscriptions on the bones were found to be divination records from the reigns of the last nine Shang kings, from the reign of Wu Ding . Moreover, from the sacrificial schedule recorded on the bones it was possible to reconstruct a sequence of Shang kings that closely matched the list given by Sima Qian. Archaeologists focused on

140-400: Is 20 January 1046 BC. This date had previously been proposed by David Pankenier, who had matched the above passages from the classics with the same astronomical events, but here it resulted from a thorough consideration of a broader range of evidence. Other scholars have raised several criticisms of this process. The connection between the layers at the archaeological sites and the conquest

175-602: Is the conquest of the Shang by the Zhou, described in traditional histories as the Battle of Muye , though the site of the battle has not been identified. Previous chronologies had proposed at least 44 different dates for this event, ranging from 1130 to 1018 BC. The most popular have been 1122 BC, calculated by the Han dynasty astronomer Liu Xin , and 1027 BC, deduced from a statement in

210-500: Is uncertain. The narrow range of radiocarbon dates are cited with a less stringent confidence interval (68%) than the standard requirement of 95%, which would have produced a much wider range. The texts describing the relevant astronomical phenomena are extremely obscure. For example, the inscription on the Li gui , a key text used in dating the conquest, can be interpreted in several different ways, with one alternative reading leading to

245-583: The Cambridge History of Ancient China : Earlier dates are given more approximately: Coverage of the project in non-Chinese press focused on the conflict between nationalism and scholarship. However, not every member of the chronology project agrees on all of the dates. Indeed, the project has been unafraid to contest dates proposed even by the director. This suggests that the dates are being considered on their own merits rather than by deferring to authority, and that politics does not influence

280-653: The Han dynasty , begins with the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors , leading through a sequence of dynasties, the Xia , Shang and Zhou . Sima Qian felt able to give a year-by-year chronology back to the start of the Gonghe Regency in 841 BC, early in the Zhou dynasty. For the period before that date, his sources (now mostly lost) were unreliable and inconsistent, and he gave only lists of kings and accounts of isolated events. Later scholars were unable to push

315-702: The Yinxu site in Anyang . Different interpretations of the text of the Bamboo Annals give intervals of 275, 273 or 253 years between this event and the Zhou conquest. The project settled on a date near the shortest of these intervals. The four phases of the Erlitou culture have been divided between the Xia and Shang dynasties in different ways by various prominent archaeologists. The project assigned all four phases to

350-457: The "old text" Bamboo Annals the day dawned twice. The Project adopted (without acknowledgement) the proposal of the Korean scholar Pang Sunjoo (方善柱) that this referred to an annular solar eclipse at dawn that occurred in 899 BC. Other scholars have challenged both this interpretation of the text and the astronomical calculations involved. Perhaps the most significant event requiring dating

385-537: The "old text" Bamboo Annals that the Western Zhou (whose end point is known to be 770 BC) had lasted 257 years. A few documents relate astronomical observations to this event: The strategy adopted by the Project was to use archeological investigation to narrow the range of dates that would need to be compared with the astronomical data. Although no archaeological traces of King Wu's campaign have been found,

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420-627: The Erlitou culture, the project also included the later phases of the Wangwan III variant of the Longshan culture within the Xia period. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project concluded precise dates for accessions of rulers from Wu Ding , the Shang dynasty king whose reign produced the oldest known oracle bone records. These dates are here compared with the traditional dates and those used in

455-507: The Xia, identifying the establishment of the Shang dynasty with the building of the Yanshi walled city 6 km (3.7 mi) north-east of the Erlitou site. The time span of the Xia dynasty was taken from reign-lengths given in the Bamboo Annals and from a conjunction of five planets during the reign of Yu the Great recorded in later texts. As this period was longer than the time spanned by

490-623: The Yellow River valley in Henan as the most likely site of the states described in the traditional histories. After 1950, remnants of an earlier walled city of the Erligang culture were discovered near Zhengzhou , and in 1959 the site of the Erlitou culture was found in Yanshi , south of the Yellow River near Luoyang . Radiocarbon dating suggests that the Erlitou culture flourished c. 2100 BC to 1800 BC. They built large palaces, suggesting

525-420: The Zhou conquest of the Shang in the mid-11th century BC instead of the 12th. In 1994, Song Jian , a state councillor for science, was impressed on a visit to Egypt by chronologies stretching back to the 3rd millennium BC. He proposed a multi-disciplinary project to establish a similar chronology for China. The project was approved as part of the ninth five-year plan (1996–2000). A preliminary report of

560-554: The accounts of the Xia and Shang, they suggested that the history of the Xia was invented by the Zhou to support their doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven , by which they justified their conquest of the Shang. Some even doubted the historicity of the Shang dynasty. In 1899, the scholar Wang Yirong examined some curious symbols carved on "dragon bones" purchased from a Chinese pharmacist, and identified them as an early form of Chinese writing. The bones were finally traced back in 1928 to

595-413: The date of 9 January 1044 BC. For the late Shang, the oracle bones provide less detail than Zhou bronzes, routinely recording only the day in the sexagenary cycle. However, calculations using a longer ritual cycle were used to date the reigns of the last two Shang kings. Mentions of five lunar eclipses in oracle bone divinations from the late Wu Ding and Zu Geng reigns were identified with events spanning

630-453: The day in the sexagenary cycle , the phase of the moon, the month and the year of reign. However, the rules of the Western Zhou lunisolar calendar , in particular the start of a month or year and the insertion of intercalary months, were not fixed. In addition, the current king is typically not identified. Occasionally an unusual astronomical event was recorded. A key reference point was the accession of King Yih of Zhou , when according to

665-450: The detailed work of the project. In addition to methodological concerns, scholars have complained that the project is part of a tradition of relegating archaeology to a role of verifying traditional histories. They argue that this forces archeological evidence into a framework of a single sequence of similar dominant states, as depicted in the histories and reflected in the title "Three Dynasties". However, when evaluated on its own merits,

700-534: The evidence reveals a much more complex origin of Chinese civilization, with many other advanced states that are not mentioned in the histories. A session of the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in 2002 was devoted to the preliminary report, where its methods were criticised by David Nivison , among others. An international conference on chronology arranged for October 2003

735-675: The existence of an organized state. More recently the picture has been complicated by the discovery of advanced civilizations in Sichuan and the Yangtze valley, such as Sanxingdui and Wucheng , of which the traditional histories make no mention. Until the mid-20th century, many popular works, both Chinese and Western, used a traditional chronology calculated by Liu Xin early in the first century AD. However, modern scholars studying inscriptions on Shang oracle bones and Zhou bronzes were proposing shorter chronologies, for example typically placing

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770-587: The final report was published in June 2022. Among other findings, it dated the beginning of the Xia to c.  2070 BCE , the Shang to c.  1600 BCE , and the Zhou to c.  1046 BCE . However, some scholars have disputed several of the project's methods and conclusions. The traditional account of ancient China, represented by the Records of the Grand Historian written by Sima Qian in

805-564: The information about earlier dates in his sources to be unreliable and contradictory and so chose not to adopt them in his work. The government of the People's Republic of China sponsored the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project , a multidisciplinary project that sought to give better estimates for dates prior to 841 BC, but the project's draft report, published in 2000, has been criticized by various scholars. When encountering

840-474: The period from 1201 and 1181 BC, from which a start date for Zu Geng's reign was derived. The start date of Wu Ding's reign was then calculated using the statement in the "Against Luxurious Ease" chapter of the Book of Documents that his reign lasted 59 years. According to the traditional histories, Pan Geng , three reigns earlier than Wu Ding, moved the Shang capital to its last site, generally identified with

875-530: The pre-conquest Zhou capital at Fengxi in Shaanxi has been excavated and strata at the site have been identified with the Predynastic Zhou . Radiocarbon dating of samples from the site as well as at late Yinxu and early Zhou capitals, using the wiggle matching technique, yielded a date for the conquest between 1050 and 1020 BC. The only date within that range matching all the astronomical data

910-525: The project was issued in 2000. After lengthy review, the full report was sent to the publishers in 2019 and the offices of the Project were closed, with their materials sent to the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences . The full report was published in June 2022 after more than a decade of revision. Although the final report noted that some archaeological finds after

945-470: The publication of the preliminary report were inconsistent with its findings, the chronology of the preliminary report was adopted without change. The Project used a combination of methods to attempt to correlate the traditional literature with archeological discoveries and the astronomical record. The contemporary evidence for the Western Zhou consists of thousands of bronzes, many bearing inscriptions. Around 60 of these record dates of important events as

980-509: The title Gonghe . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gonghe&oldid=1182617157 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Articles containing Chinese-language text Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Gonghe Regency King Li of Zhou

1015-635: The western term " republic ", the modern Chinese (as well as the Japanese ), borrowed the word gonghe to have this meaning. Historically, however, the Gonghe period during the Zhou dynasty does not confer any republican connotations: the people of the time having had no opposition to monarchy as such, but only to one specific king. Xia%E2%80%93Shang%E2%80%93Zhou Chronology Project#Reception The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project ( Chinese : 夏商周断代工程 ; pinyin : Xià Shāng Zhōu Duàndài Gōngchéng )

1050-420: Was a corrupt and decadent ruler. To pay for his pleasures and vices, King Li raised taxes and caused misery among his subjects. It is said that he barred the commoners from profiting from communal forests and lakes, and instated a new law which allowed him to punish anyone, by death, who dared to speak against him. King Li's tyrannical rule soon forced many peasants and soldiers all around Zhou China into revolt. Li

1085-651: Was a multi-disciplinary project commissioned by the People's Republic of China in 1996 to determine with accuracy the location and time frame of the Xia , Shang , and Zhou dynasties. The project was directed by professor Li Xueqin of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and involved around 200 experts. It used radiocarbon dating , archaeological dating methods, historical textual analysis, astronomy, and other methods to achieve greater temporal and geographic accuracy. Preliminary results were released in November 2000 and

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1120-508: Was postponed due to the SARS outbreak, but never rescheduled. The Project's dates have however become the orthodox chronology in Chinese textbooks and reference works. Some bronze inscriptions discovered since the draft report was issued in 2000 are inconsistent with the project's dates for the Western Zhou. For example: The final report acknowledged many of these problems, but did not alter

1155-674: Was ruled by a single person—Gongbo He ( 共伯和 ; Elder He of the Gong lineage). This reading has been fully corroborated by an independent archaeologically unearthed text known as the Xinian (繫年). The first year of the Gonghe Regency, 841 BC, is highly significant in ancient Chinese history, in that Sima Qian was able to construct a year-by-year chronology back to that point, but he and subsequent historians were unable to confidently date any earlier events in Chinese history. Sima himself found

1190-581: Was ruled jointly by two dukes, the Duke Ding of Zhou  [ zh ] and the Duke Mu of Shao  [ zh ] , hence effectively transforming the state into a coregency . Later discoveries proved this incorrect. According to the Bamboo Annals , an archaeologically unearthed text discovered in antiquity but postdating Sima Qian, the Gonghe Regency was a period in which the Zhou dynasty

1225-462: Was sent into exile at a place called Zhi near Linfen (842 BC), his son was taken by one of his ministers and hidden. When King Li died in exile in 828 BC, power was passed to his son, the King Xuan of Zhou . According to the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian , who interpreted gonghe as 'joint harmony' in his Records of the Grand Historian : during the Gonghe Regency the Zhou dynasty

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