Anyang

UNESCO-listed Yin Xu — the late Shang dynasty capital and the earliest Chinese writing site (oracle bones). One of the cradles of Chinese civilisation; an under-touristed essential for serious history travellers.

Anyang's Yin Xu site is the capital of the late Shang dynasty (~1300–1046 BCE), the last of China's early Bronze Age capitals before the Zhou dynasty overthrew the Shang. UNESCO-listed in 2006, the site preserves foundations of palaces and ritual halls, royal tombs, sacrificial pits containing chariot burials and human remains, and the bronze-casting workshop area — the material record of a civilisation that was producing technically sophisticated bronzeware when contemporary European cultures were still in the early Iron Age.

The oracle bones excavated at Yin Xu since 1899 are the earliest substantial corpus of Chinese writing — over 150,000 fragments of animal bone and tortoise shell inscribed with divinatory questions to ancestors and deities, the direct ancestor of the modern Chinese script. The graphic connection between the oracle bone forms and contemporary Chinese characters is visible to anyone who can read modern Chinese; the lineage is unbroken.

The Yin Xu Museum, opened in 2022 at the archaeological site, displays over 4,000 artefacts including ritual bronze vessels, jade ornaments and oracle bone fragments in context. The National Museum of Chinese Writing in central Anyang covers the broader development of written Chinese from oracle bones through seal script, clerical script and the later standardised forms.

Anyang is a straightforward day trip from Zhengzhou (35 minutes by HSR) or a stop on the Beijing–Xi'an rail route. It is comprehensively under-visited relative to its historical significance.