The Ancient Past and the Contemporary Nation:China’s Archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s

Diana Lary, History, University of British Columbia

The discovery of the fossil skull of Peking Man in 1929, the `first ancestor’ of the people that were to become the Chinese, was momentous. The find occurred at a time when China had been battered for almost a century by foreign and domestic troubles.. Many of China’s intellectuals were in the grip of incipient nationalism, founded on indignation and outrage at the maltreatment of China, and bitter shame at China’s inability to withstand the pressures of the West and Japan. These intellectuals rejected China’s past systems of philosophy, law and government.

Nationalist rejection of the past was only one response to China’s weakness. One group of intellectuals took a completely different tack in an effort to help their country climb out of the morass. They used Western science to help them recover the ancient past, China’s prehistory. In a series of staggering discoveries, these young men moved prehistory from myth to physical reality. They established North China as the cradle of Chinese civilisation, and they put to rest Western theories of diffusion that showed China’s civilisation as made up of elements brought in from the West..