Originally, the ruins of Yin Ruins appeared in front of the world through oracle bones, and the appearance of oracle bones was borrowed from the name of the dragon bone.
There is also a legendary story in this process, in 1899, the Qing Dynasty Guozi Supervisor, the epigrapher Wang Yirongran, fell ill and sent someone to the Chinese medicine store to buy back a dose of Chinese medicine, one of which is called the dragon bone with some symbols engraved on it.
Coincidentally, Wang Yirong has studied ancient golden stone script, and it found that the carvings on these keels are very similar to ancient characters, so he began to collect keels with carved symbols everywhere, and after careful study, Wang Yirong believed that these were not keels, but turtle bones and animal bones thousands of years ago, and the engravings on them were ancient words.
After the news broke, the value of the oracle bone doubled, and many antique dealers and literati sought its source, including the scholar Luo Zhenyu.
In 1908, after investigation, Luo Zhenyu learned the source of the oracle bones, and he proved that these oracle bones were Shang Dynasty oracle bones based on the names of the former dukes and kings of the Shang Dynasty found on the oracle bones.
Wang Guowei also examined the Shang Dynasty ancestors such as Wang Hai, Wang Heng, and Shangjia seen in the Oracle Bone BuZhi, and confirmed that the lineage of the Shang Dynasty recorded in the "Records of History" and "Shiben" was credible.
At the same time, according to the names of the sacrificed emperors Kang Zuding, Wu Zuyi, and Wen Zuding, it was determined that emperor Yi's lineage was still built here, which proved that the "Ancient Bamboo Book Chronicle" recorded from Pan Geng's migration to Yin to the demise of Shangsu was in line with the facts, and this view was recognized by most archaeologists, historians, and paleographers, and in this way, with the discovery of the oracle bone, Yin Ruins will also enter the eyes of the world.
However, before the discovery of yin ruins, because the hemostatic effect of oracle bones can be used in medicine, the ruins of Xiaotun Village have been excavated and destroyed on a large scale, causing immeasurable losses to ancient cultural relics, and some people of insight began to appeal, hoping that the government would come forward and take effective measures to protect ancient cultural sites, which caused great attention from the Academia Sinica at that time.
In August 1928, the young scholar Dong Zuobin was sent to Xiaotun Village, Anyang City, Henan Province, to investigate and evaluate whether it was still worth excavating.
Dong Zuobin's investigation results believe that the Xiaotun Village site still has great excavation significance, so on October 13, 1928, under the auspices of Dong Zuobin, the first excavation in the history of Yin Ruins began, and by the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937, a total of 15 large-scale scientific archaeological excavations of Yin Ruins were carried out.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the New Chinese Archaeological Research Institute set up the Anyang workstation directly in Xiaotun Village and began the protracted archaeology and excavation of Yin Ruins.
In 1976, the discovery of the "Tomb of Women's Good Women" in Yin Ruins pushed the archaeological work of Yin Ruins to a climax.
A total of 1928 pieces of various burial items have been excavated from the tomb, of which more than 200 bronze ceremonial instruments and musical instruments, most of which are cast with inscriptions, archaeologists call this tomb "Women's Good Tomb" according to the word "Women's Good" that appears most often on the inscriptions.
With the continuous growth of archaeological excavations, the distribution and layout of Yin Ruins have gradually become clear, as far as the yin ruins that are now discovered, it spans both banks of the ZhuoHe River, and its range extends from Guojiawan in the northwest of Anyang City in the east to Beixinzhuang in the west, about 6 kilometers long, from the railway nursery in the south to Sanjiazhuang in the north, with a length of more than 4 kilometers and an area of about 24 square kilometers. If some of the sites discovered in recent years are also counted, the area of Yin Ruins has reached 30 square kilometers.
Yin Ruins is the first written site in Chinese history and confirmed by oracle bones and archaeology as the capital of the Shang Dynasty.
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