Anyang

For centuries, farmers near Anyang dug up turtle shells and animal bones and sold them to pharmacies as 'dragon bones'—ground into powder and swallowed as medicine. No one can know how many oracle bones, inscribed with the world's oldest verified Chinese writing, disappeared into people's stomachs before 1899, when, according to the most widely told account, a scholar named Wang Yirong bought unground bones for his malaria and noticed the scratches were archaic characters. Wang never found their source. He killed himself during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. It took another decade before the bones were traced to fields outside Anyang—and another two decades of excavation before the site revealed itself as Yin Xu, capital of the late Shang dynasty from roughly 1300 to 1046 BCE. This is path dependence at civilisational scale: the writing system scratched onto those bones evolved through bronze inscription, seal script, clerical script, and regular script into the characters used by over a billion people today—the world's oldest continuously used writing system, with 3,300 years of incremental modification rather than abrupt discontinuity.

What Yin Xu revealed was not just writing but institutional complexity. The Houmuwu Ding, unearthed in 1939, is the heaviest bronze vessel ever cast in the ancient world—833 kilograms of copper, tin, and lead, requiring up to 300 craftsmen and over a tonne of raw material. Fu Hao, a wife of King Wu Ding documented on oracle bones as commanding up to 13,000 soldiers, was buried with 468 bronzes and 755 jade objects in the only intact Shang royal tomb ever found. Her tomb is the fossil record of a state apparatus sophisticated enough to wage industrial-scale warfare and allocate resources across a continental economy. The site functions as an ecological inheritance—a niche constructed by one civilisation that shapes the selective environment for all that follow—for the entire Chinese civilisational narrative: Yin Xu is the physical proof that pushes China's verifiable written history back a millennium, and the Chinese state treats it accordingly.

Modern Anyang is two economies layered on one landscape. The industrial base dates to 1958, when Anyang Iron and Steel was founded as a Mao-era allocation; the city's eleven steelmakers collectively produced nearly fifteen million tonnes of crude steel annually before a consolidation drive reduced them to four, pivoting toward specialty steels—manganese, nickel, rare earth—in a classic phase transition from commodity volume to niche differentiation. Meanwhile, the heritage economy is undergoing its own phase transition. The Yinxu Museum opened in February 2024 as China's first comprehensive Shang dynasty archaeology museum, displaying nearly 4,000 artefacts—three-quarters never previously exhibited. It drew 1.8 million visitors in its first year. The city has built 105 oracle bone script bookstores and branded its cultural tourism cluster 'Great Shang'—niche construction at municipal scale, engineering a cultural environment the way the Shang themselves engineered bronze. Like a nautilus whose shell preserves every earlier chamber as it grows outward, Anyang is converting a 3,300-year-old founder effect into a growth industry—a city whose oldest product is its newest export.