Sanxingdui Mysterious Age foresaw those things.

Data figure "癸冉" bronze ti liang 卣, through the height of 25.9 cm, caliber 11.9 to 14.6 cm, cover, bottom inside the inscription of the word "癸冉", now in the Hunan Provincial Museum

Some people say that Sanxingdui is "sleeping for three thousand years, waking up to shock the world", its discovery makes us realize the brilliant civilization that existed in the Sichuan Basin more than 3,000 years ago but was forgotten, and when we use Sanxingdui as a window to further explore the Yangtze River Basin of China 3,000 years ago, we will also see a network of bronze civilizations woven by many bronze civilizations.

1

Erlitou culture went south with the south nest

The story of the south may begin with the late Xia Dynasty, at this point in time about 3800 years ago, the Erlitou culture located in the Central Plains Yiluo Basin suddenly rose, huge cities, the earliest complex bronzes, and cultural influence across regions all show that a new political entity different from any previous ancient culture has been formed, which may be the starting point of the Chinese dynasty era - the Xia Dynasty.

The influence of the Erlitou culture on the south is remarkable, and sanxingdui and other cultures have benefited from this cultural expansion; the influence of erlitou on the south is limited, and their expansion has been shallow, and they have not invested a lot of manpower and material resources to establish rule in the south, and the real far-reaching impact on the south is the Shang Dynasty that was born soon after.

In the excavation of the Three Officials Temple, in addition to the discovery of a large number of high-grade artifacts, archaeologists also noticed an unusual phenomenon, along with the bronzes, there are also some human bones, identified as an adult male, and one belonging to children, these bones are mutilated and messy, indicating that they were not buried here after natural death. The bones and bronzes were covered with a layer of burnt earth formed by the fire, indicating that shortly after the 3 people were killed, there was also a fire in the area, which destroyed the building and buried the bodies of the deceased.

After this killing, the murderer did not take away the exquisite bronzes that symbolized power around the deceased, perhaps their purpose was only to "kill", and did not care about "crossing the goods", the life of the deceased itself was much more important to them than the artifacts.

According to the Bamboo Book Chronicle, the Chronicle of Justice and other documents, after being defeated by the Shang army, Xia Jie, the last monarch of the Xia Dynasty, was banished by Cheng Tang to a place called "South Nest" (it is also said that Xia Jie took the initiative to flee to South Nest), and the Water Sutra Notes also said: "Tang Fa Jie, Jie Ben South Nest, that is, Chao Ze Ye." The "Chaoze" mentioned in it is today's Chao Lake in Anhui.

More evidence may be needed for these speculations, but in any case, on the basis of Erlitou's exploration of the south, the nascent early Shang regime began to operate the southern region with real care.

2

Bronze culture went south

In 2016, Wuhan University conducted remote sensing archaeology of Panlong City and found that there were still a large number of early Shang remnants under the water of Panlong Lake, indicating that when Panlong City prospered, its scale was much larger than what is seen today. In this great city, merchants built large buildings and bronze workshops, as if they were a major capital of the dynasty in the southern region.

Panlong City was a core fulcrum in the southern strategy of the Shang Dynasty, and around this core fulcrum, sites such as Yueyang Tonggu Mountain, Hanshan Dacheng Dun, and Jingnan Temple in Jingzhou became the "port" for foreign exchanges of Shang culture. In the ruins of Jingnan Temple, in addition to the Shang culture, other indigenous cultural factors from the Jianghan region are not uncommon, and even the Sanxingdui culture in the hinterland of the Sichuan Basin also appears in this remain.

Facts have proved that the strategic vision of the merchants is quite good, and soon after, the early merchants ushered in a brilliant era that far exceeded the two litou, and "the wings of the shangyi, the pole of the four directions" is not empty words.

3

The collapse of the Chinese merchants and the rise of Wucheng

When Panlong City was in its prime, the merchants' forward troops traveled up the Yangtze River and followed the tributary Ganjiang River into the Qingjiang Basin, not far from Ruichang Tongling, where the ruins of Wucheng were built, and the merchants stationed here may have been to obtain local primitive porcelain. This is the earliest porcelain in China.

Judging from the excavation of the Wucheng ruins, in the second phase of the site, that is, the late Shang period in the Central Plains, the original strong Shang cultural background of the Wucheng ruins has changed. Although many Shang cultural artifacts are still preserved, innovative artifacts such as small-mouthed shoulder urns also increased at this time, which may indicate that after losing communication channels with the Central Plains, the merchants who remained in the Qingjiang Basin began to develop their own culture independently; at the same time, pottery with obvious local indigenous styles began to be excavated in the ruins, which shows that the merchants who established themselves here also began to communicate with the surrounding indigenous peoples.

4

A change in tactics in the South

After the "collapse of the Baijiazhuang period", the Shang Dynasty abandoned the fertile land of the Central Plains that had been operating for hundreds of years and returned to its hometown in southern Hebei and northern Henan. Although it was devastated, the rich copper mines and primitive porcelain resources in the southern region still made the remaining merchants remember, and they still tried to return to the south and try to rebuild their influence there.

Among them, the bronze bronzes such as the Bronze Dragon and Tiger Zun excavated have far surpassed the works of the early Shang in exquisiteness, indicating that after obtaining the copper mines in the Huai River Valley, the decaying bronze industry of the Shang Dynasty was finally revived.

From the evidence we have so far, we can see that in the early Shang Dynasty, with the great southward expansion of the Shang Dynasty, bronze, the most advanced material, appeared in the south, and promoted the qualitative change of local culture in various parts of the Yangtze River Basin in the change of the Shang Dynasty.

In the later Zhou Dynasty, the southern bronze culture finally merged into the Chu culture and became an inseparable part of the splendid Chu bronze civilization.