19 Civilization on the North China Plain

Civilization on the North China Plain

Civilization and the Shang Dynasty | From Shang to the Zhou Dynasty 

By 5000 BCE, tribal agricultural communities had spread in what today is China. There were agricultural villages from the Wei River Valley eastward parallel with the great Yellow River (Huang He). That river flowed out of the Kunlun Mountains through deciduous forest and along the loess soil of the North China Plain and then to the Gulf of Jili. (See above map.)

Where people were free of forest and had access to water they grew millet, while they continued to hunt deer and other game and to fish and gather food. And they raised dogs, pigs and chickens. They built one-room homes dug into the earth, with roofs of clay or thatch: pit homes grouped in villages. They had spinning wheels and knitted and wove fibers. And they made pottery decorated with art.

Flooding along the Yellow River was worse than it was along the Yangzi River to the south. Along the Yangzi River, through the Hubei Basin and on the coastal plain to Hangzhou Bay, farming had also developed, but people along the Yellow River had to work harder at flood control and irrigation, and perhaps this stimulated a greater effort at organization. This greater organized effort along the Yellow River may have made it larger and more dense in population than what developed along the Yangzi.