The Ancient Chinese Dynasties: From Oracle Bones to the Empire — Sleep Podcast

There is a river in the far north of the world that is older than most of the nations that have watched it run. The Yellow River. It rises in the high plateaus of the west, picks up its silt from the loess — that pale, wind-blown soil that drifts down from the Gobi — and carries it, yellow and heavy, across the broad northern plain, before it bends into the sea. And on the banks of that river, in the deep afternoon of the second millennium before our common era, a kingdom read the bones of its ancestors, and the world we now call China began to take its shape. A slow bedtime history of the ancient Chinese dynasties.

One hour and a bit, in the voice of the show. We stand on the river at dusk; we find the kingdom in the bones, and the bronze of the ancestors; we watch the fall of a king, and the rise of the mandate of heaven; we follow a map drawn with a family tree; we sit through the beacon fires and the fracturing, and the hundred schools of thought; and we come, at the end, to one emperor, the ten thousand li wall, the army that never marched, the road of silk, and the paper, the fire, and the needle — and what they left.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About an hour and a half. Where the scholarship is genuinely uncertain, the narration says so.

Sources (a selection): Keightley, Sources of Shang History (1978); Loewe & Shaughnessy, eds., The Cambridge History of Ancient China (1999); Nylan, The Five “Classicics” (2001); the oracle-bone inscriptions (Anyang, Institute of History and Philology); the Shangshu and Shijing (early received texts); the Shiji (Sima Qian, c. 94 BC); the Mawangdui and Guanzhong bamboo texts; the Terracotta Army excavations (Xi’an); the Silk Road trade evidence (Xinjiang, Dunhuang); World History Encyclopedia, “Shang Dynasty” and “Mandate of Heaven” entries.