Ritual re-representation and the making of sociality: rethinking elite burials in the Late Shang Yinxu

Introduction: the hegemony of ‘viewing the dead as if they were alive’

The Late Shang dynasty (thirteenth to eleventh century bce) was not the first dynastic kingdom in China, but it is the earliest one confirmed by contemporary texts. Although the extents of its geopolitical ‘territory’ remain uncertain, its capital was unquestionably located at Yinxu, in present-day Anyang, situated on the narrow plain between the Taihang Mountains and the ancient Yellow River, with the Huan River running through the city.

Since 1928, Yinxu has been the focus of intensive archaeological excavations (IACASS 1994), revealing an ancient city covering an area of up to 36 km², featuring a grid-like system of roads and drainage (ATIACASS and University of British Columbia 2016; Niu 2023). More than 20,000 burials have been excavated throughout the site. A dataset of more than 4,600 burials is available in archaeological reports, among which approximately 200 are un-looted and contain bronze ritual vessels, frequently referred to as elite burials or elite tombs, though burial data suggest that there was likely no clear elite–commoner dichotomy in this period, as higher-ranked burials¹ were constructed following a standardised and ideal formula,² with lower-ranked burials representing simplified versions of these (Campbell 2018, 212–21; Tang 2004, 119–20). This dataset offers considerable detail about the mortuary practices at Yinxu, which is essential to understanding the notion of personhood and sociality of the Late Shang dynasty. However, previous studies have mainly focused on establishing direct connections between mortuary and domestic structures, and between mortuary practices and political regulation of social hierarchy, under a discourse that I refer to as the hegemony of ‘viewing the dead as if they were alive’.

A similar saying comes early from Xunzi (2014, 211–12), a Confucian scholar active in the third century bce:

The funeral rites use life to ornament death – they make abundant use of semblances of the person’s life to send him off in death. Thus, one treats the dead as if still alive, and one treats the departed as if they survive, in order that end and beginning be given one and the same care … Thus, the appearance of the tomb resembles a home and dwelling.

According Xunzi’s (2014) interpretation, funeral rites were supposed to apply elements of life to ornament death, keeping the deceased ritually alive during the liminal period and creating an eternal home resembling the one occupied in life for dwelling in the afterlife. Although Xunzi’s original narrative was more nuanced, his interpretation is often simplified either as ‘serving the dead as if they were alive’ or even further as ‘viewing the dead as if they were alive’.³ While the former preserves some minor implication concerning ritual practices, the latter involves an assumption that the world of the dead mirrors the living world, though in the original context it actually means ‘fearlessness toward death’ (in the Book of Han, Biography of Chao Cuo, written in the first century ce) (Ban 1962, 2284). Routine citation of these idioms has become a ritualised convention in Chinese mortuary archaeology, anachronistically applied across periods from the Middle Neolithic to the Qing dynasty (from around 6000 bce to 1911 ce), often serving as the concluding statements in academic studies without meaningful engagement with either textual nuances or archaeological context. Consequently, a somewhat processual (compare Binford 1971; Parker-Pearson 1982) and reductionist approach has emerged within Chinese mortuary archaeology, directly correlating mortuary data with social orders, while underemphasising how personhood was reconstituted and social relationships were refashioned through the treatment of the corpse and its surroundings.

Bronze Age mortuary archaeology, particularly of the Three Dynasties (Xia: arguably identified with the Erlitou culture, twenty-first to seventeenth century bce; Shang: seventeenth to eleventh century bce; and Western and Eastern Zhou: eleventh to third century bce [Duandai 2022]), is under the same shadow, emphasising the reconstruction of pre-existing, institutionalised ritual systems and social hierarchies from burial data. For instance, in ‘A study on the system of Ding usage in the Zhou dynasty’, a three-part paper published in successive issues of a journal and one of the most influential works in Chinese Three Dynasties archaeology, Yu and Gao (1978, 1979a, 1979b) examine elite Zhou dynasty burials through regulations on ding tripod usage described in ritual texts. They apply a periodisation to the Zhou dynasty, defined according to the degrees of implementation of Zhou’s institutionalised hierarchical ritual system. For the Late Shang period, the mode of interpretation of burial data is exactly the same. For instance, a number of scholars attempt to reconstruct a system of gu-jue usage in the Shang dynasty as the predecessor of the system of ding usage in the Zhou dynasty (see, for example, Hu 2022; Hwang 2016; Yue 2017; Zhang 1992). At the same time, whether an institutionalised and standardised ritual system existed in the Late Shang kingdom has long been a central concern of Late Shang mortuary archaeology (compare Hu 2010, 30–67, 166–220 and Gao 2011, 82–92), reflecting the enormous scholarly obsession with framing a direct connection between mortuary practices and political order. Similarly, the presupposition that Late Shang elite burials directly mimicked domestic structures (Kao 1969, 177–88; Wang 2006, 79–83) remains prevalent, despite significant differences: royal tombs featured cross-shaped wooden chambers, whereas palace buildings consisted of units with rectangular plans with central atria.⁴ Although these studies can sometimes provide certain insights into the degree of social stratification during the Late Shang, they neglect the ritual nature of mortuary practices and fail to reveal the notion of sociality and personhood that formed the very foundation of any political regulation.

Relatively few efforts have been dedicated to exploring the ritual processes of Late Shang mortuary practices, and their transformative effects on contemporary society. For instance, Jing and Tang (2010) attempt to correlate spaces within inner coffins to the status of tomb owners, and the spaces between inner and outer coffins to their social connections. For another instance, Keightley (1999) analyses spatial classification in retainer burials within elite tombs, arguing that spatial proximity between retainers and tomb owners reflected degrees of social intimacy. However, these interpretations remain rather speculative and general in nature.

Nevertheless, Xunzi’s (2014) insights remain inspiring, encouraging scholars to move beyond formality and dig into the underlying moral frameworks subtly shaping burial practices – consciously or subconsciously – by representing or re-representing aspects of life in varied ways. In this article, I will examine the ideal spatial division within elite burials at Late Shang Yinxu, arguing that the meticulous presentation of personhood in funerary rites was an aspect of social reality and a central political concern of the living in the Late Shang Yinxu. I will argue that the Late Shang mortuary practices featured a form of bricolage which picked up tokens of past and idealised ritual ceremonies and re-assembled them into a final re-enactment of the social existence of the deceased, which should be referred to as ‘ritual re-representation’.

The ritual structure of Late Shang elite burial practices

The Late Shang death ritual mainly consisted of three parts: (a) the mourning period, during which the inner coffin was prepared and the deceased was bid farewell; (b) the funeral period, when the mortal remains were placed into the burial; and (c) the pacification period, which established a connection with the spiritual being of the deceased in preparation for future commemoration and worship (Hu 2010, 116–65; Huang 2012, 5–13; Yü 1987). Once refilled, the burial became permanently inaccessible to the living, who mainly communicated with the deceased through ancestral temples (Wu 1988; Zhu 1990), and only rarely at the cemetery itself (Hu 2010, 116–65). This indicates that burials were intended to be sealed, isolated and transcended. Hence, the burial remains in question might be said to represent the deposition phase of a specific segment of the death ritual, a kind of rite of passage (van Gennep 1960).

According to the reconstruction by Guo (1951, 1–61), building a complete high-elite burial typically involved the following steps:

1. The burial pit was dug, likely during the mourning period before the funeral ceremony.

2. On the funeral day, a shallow pit was dug at the centre of the burial pit floor. A guard and a dog were killed and placed in this pit as attendants to the tomb owner, providing protection from dangers below. The burial pit floor was then covered with a mat or textile.

3. The floor and walls of the ‘outer coffin’ (also referred to as wooden chamber) were constructed from timber.

4. The space between the outer coffin walls and the burial pit was rammed and, in some cases, filled with retainer burials and animal victims, accompanied by funerary pottery.

5. The inner coffin, prepared during the mourning period, was lowered into the outer coffin. Ritual vessels, weapons and musical instruments were then successively placed in the space between the inner and outer coffins before the outer coffin was sealed with wooden planks.

6. The outer coffin and the surrounding platform were covered with mats or textiles, and additional attendants, victims, weapons and so on were placed on top.

7. The burial pit was refilled and rammed, layer by layer, with sacrificial rituals performed intermittently throughout this process. A passageway was also arranged, typically containing a horse-drawn chariot and, occasionally, additional attendants and victims. However, the exact sequence of this final step remains uncertain.

Given that steps 4 and 6 both involved the same theme of retainers and sacrifices, and that step 4 occurred before and step 6 after the final deposition of the corpse, it is more probable that the burial processes aimed to create a synchronic structure rather than achieve ritual transformation by strictly adhering to a diachronic sequence. Consequently, an underground complex emerged, featuring distinct spatial divisions: inside the inner coffin; between the inner and outer coffins; on and within the second-tier platform; on the wooden planks covering the outer coffin; within passageways and within the refills. The burial contents can be classified into three categories – ritual artefacts, retainer burials and victims (Yao 1960) – each meticulously arranged according to a fixed logic, forming a deliberate spatial rhetoric.

Body, propriety and the morality of essence transformation

The spatial division closest to the deceased’s body was inside the inner coffin. Grave goods within the inner coffin of high-elite burials mainly consisted of jade artefacts, along with cowrie shell, bone, stone, horn and gemstone objects smaller in proportion. These artefacts can be categorised into three groups based on their types and placements.

The first category comprises funerary jades in a narrower sense, as all jades among grave goods could be regarded as funerary items. These mainly consisted of fragments of small ornamental jades, placed directly on or inside the body – commonly found inside the mouth, in the palms, scattered at the feet or positioned on the pelvis when unearthed (ATIACASS 1979, 52; IACASS 2018, 983), probably serving as anal plugs. Such placements suggest their purpose was sealing the corpse to protect the essence within the tomb owner’s body. Although no direct epigraphical evidence from the Late Shang period supports this explicitly, Eastern Zhou ritual texts indicate that funerary jades were used to prevent the soul from escaping during the mourning period, and to preserve and strengthen the deceased’s mortal soul (Sun 2007).

The second category includes ornamental jades placed in positions corresponding to how they would have been worn in life, effectively ‘dressing’ the deceased as if they were still alive (Figure 1). Among these ornamental items, headdresses and pendants are particularly recognisable. Eastern Zhou texts suggest that clothing and ornamentation were crucial for distinguishing social classes, differentiating Sinic from non-Sinic groups (Yan 2009, 4–8) and ensuring the propriety of ritual ceremonies (Tu 2005, 125–56).

The third category consists of ritual jades, possibly placed outside the shrouds and farthest from the corpse (Figure 1). These jades were carefully arranged, with the largest one of ge dagger-axes placed near the head, that of qi axes and yue axes at the chest and that of bi discs at the waist. Most ritual jades, including ge, qi and yue, took their shapes from bronze weapons, symbolically linking ritual and warfare – a point that I will revisit later. A greater body of contemporary and quasi-contemporary⁵ textual evidence is available concerning ritual jades (Table 1), offering insights into their functions beyond mortuary contexts. Most ritual jades shared similar functions, suggesting that their ritual significance was derived more from their material and inherent properties than from their specific weapon-like shapes. Their functions can be summarised as follows:

Figure 1

Distribution of jades in inner coffins of: a. 00AHDM54 (after IACASS 2007, fig. 78); b. 77AXTM18 (after ATIACASS 1981, fig. 1); c. 90AGJZM160 (after IACASS 1998, fig. 55); d. 84AQJZM269 (after AICRA 2015, fig. 219); e. 94ALNM793 (after ATIACASS 2022, fig. 3). Ge dagger-axes are marked in red; yue and qi axes in pink; bi in purple; other ritual jades in yellowish brown; and ornamental jades in blue.

• Ritual jades could be presented to ancestors and gods as offerings, or as ‘catalysts’ in human and animal sacrifices, increasing the victims’ sacredness and thus making them more likely to be accepted by ancestors and gods. Additionally, ritual jades were frequently used as implements in libation ceremonies, infusing wine with sacred essence to summon ancestors and gods before worship.

• Ritual jades were closely associated with ownership and social hierarchy. They were given as rewards by higher-status individuals to those of lower status. In Western Zhou texts, ritual jades frequently appeared as elite gifts, sometimes initiating gift exchanges. Additionally, ritual jades played a significant role in land-transfer ceremonies supervised by kings or high-ranking officials, formalizing transfers of land tenure.

• Ritual jades were employed in the appointment ceremonies of bureaucrats, and, later in the Western Zhou period, also for appointing feudal lords.⁶

A saying, possibly originating in the spring and autumn period, states that ‘the morality of jade always matches the morality of its noble owner’ (Book of Rites: The Meaning of the Mission, Kong 2009, 3679).⁷ Some philological and anthropological interpretations have linked the ‘morality’ of jades and noblemen to the concept of essence (Li 2010, 115–24), and further connected it to notions such as the ‘spirit’ explored in The Spirit of the Gift (Mauss 1990), or specifically the Polynesian concept of Mana analysed by Mauss (1990, 9–12). Although Mauss’s interpretation of Mana remains controversial (Testart 1999) and may not directly apply in its original cultural form – given that jade usage in the Chinese Bronze Age was deeply embedded in a hierarchical social structure focusing on property accumulation and ancestral lineage (Keightley 2000) – the concept of person-thing fusion (Mauss 1990) remains insightful. Objects whose intrinsic nature corresponded to the sacred character of their owners could symbolise social status and simultaneously transform or enhance the essence or sacredness of people and things.

Similarly, ritual jades possessed inherent sacredness closely tied to the social and ritual capacities of their individual owners. Their qualities allowed them to serve as offerings to ancestors and gods, enhancing the sacredness of other offerings during sacrifices. They also carried sacred power in transactions, facilitating ownership transfers and legitimising property exchanges. Furthermore, their association with owners rendered them potent symbols of social status. In this sense, ritual jades in the mortuary contexts represented intrinsic morality and the ability to transform the nature of essence.

Feeding the ancestors and kinsmen

Moving outward to the space between the inner and outer coffins, where the majority of grave goods were placed, the inner sphere contained mainly bronze and ceramic vessels, while bronze weapons and musical instruments occupied the outer sphere (Figure 2). This spatial arrangement indicates that bronze vessels had a closer connection to the tomb owner’s personhood.

Figure 2

Distribution of burial goods between the inner and outer coffins of: a. 90AGJZM160 (after IACASS 1998, fig. 54); b. 00AHDM54 (after IACASS 2007, fig. 77); c. 04ADSK303 (after IACASS 2014, fig. 373). Bronze vessels are marked in blue; bronze weapons in red; and bronze musical instruments in green.

The functions of bronze vessels can be inferred from their shapes, inscriptions and wear patterns, although minor controversies still exist (Li 2020; Zhu 2009). They are generally classified into several types:

• cooking vessels, including large ding tripods for boiling large portions of meat for the entire ceremony (Yue and Wang 2021), small ding tripods for serving smaller individual portions and yan steamers

• food containers, including gui

• wine vessels, subdivided further into zun with angled shoulders, lei, you and hu as brewing or storage vessels, cylindrical zun, gong and square yi as mixing vessels, jia as large wine warmers, jue and jiao as small wine warmers, gu as libation vessels (and drinking vessels, as discussed below) and zhi as small vessels for transferring wine

• water vessels, including pan, he and yu.

Small pottery vessels found alongside bronze vessels contained residues suggesting preserved foods such as jams and meat sauces (IACASS 2007, 328). The significant quantity and volume of bronze vessels in elite burials, supported by firm textual evidence, clearly demonstrate that they were not intended for the tomb owner’s personal use but rather for feeding ancestors and clansmen during ceremonies organised by the deceased (Chang 1983, 66–7).

A detailed analysis of the spatial distribution of ritual vessels in several unlooted elite burials reveals a systematic arrangement based on function (Figure 3). Cooking vessels and food containers were mostly placed above the tomb owner’s head, centred on large tripods, except for yan steamers, which were placed alongside wine vessels. Human skulls have occasionally been reported placed in yan steamers (ATIACASS 2004), suggesting that steaming human heads might have regularly been part of drinking or libation rituals. Water vessels appeared alongside wine vessels, implying the cleansing of wine vessels in drinking rituals, as described in detail in Eastern Zhou ritual texts such as the Book of Rites. Fixed pairings frequently appeared among wine vessels, notably between gu and jue or jiao, and between cylindrical zun and you or hu (Wang 2019). However, this observation alone does not conclusively prove symbolic intention in the spatial distribution of vessels. To confirm intentionality, we must demonstrate that this arrangement deliberately represented a sacrificial feast rather than merely an organised storage of possessions. Several clues strongly support this interpretation.

Figure 3

Distribution of vessels between the inner and outer coffins of: a. 90AGJZM160 (after IACASS 1998, fig. 54); b. 00AHDM54 (after IACASS 2007, fig. 77); c. 04ADSK303 (after IACASS 2014, fig. 373); d. 99ALNM1046 (after ATIACASS 2004, fig. 3). Cooking vessels (ding tripods and yan steamers) are marked in red; food containers (gui) in yellowish brown; water vessels (pan, he and yu) in blue; small wine warmers (jue and jiao), drinking or libation vessels (gu) and wine transferring vessels (zhi) in light purple; large wine vessels, including brewing, storing and mixing vessels (zun, you, hu, lei, gong, square yi) in pink; and small pottery vessels in green.

First, most vessels buried with tomb owners were practical items. Yet, during Phase IV of the Late Shang period, mingqi (miniature, thin-walled, coarsely made funerary vessels) became prevalent in lower-ranking elite burials (Yue et al. 2017). These mingqi were non-functional even during the mourning period. Combinations of mingqi and practical ritual vessels were common in elite burials from this phase. Notably, same types of mingqi and practical vessels were intentionally grouped according to their function (for example, AG84M1713, ATIACASS 1986). This strongly suggests that the funerary organisers aimed to represent a feast through ritual vessels, regardless of their practical availability.

Second, the spatial distribution of gu vessels has deeper ritual implications. Bronze gu and jue vessels frequently appeared as matching sets, often in equal numbers and sharing decorative patterns (Hu 2022; Yue 2017). While jue were undoubtedly small wine warmers, the functions of gu are more ambiguous. Inscriptions and classical texts suggest gu vessels were used in libation rituals to summon ancestral spirits before presenting offerings (Li 2020). However, by the Middle Western Zhou period, the gu-jue combination was replaced by the zhi-jue set (Zhu 2009, 1232). Since zhi was definitively a drinking vessel (Jicheng 06454/IACASS 1999, 28), it is highly likely that gu served similarly as drinking vessels in addition to their libation role. In elite burials at Yinxu, it is common that most gu remained with jue vessels, but a few were placed alongside cooking and food vessels (Figures 3b and d), sometimes accompanied by jades (IACASS 1998, 76; 2007, 91), believed to imbue beverages with sacred essence. Thus, it is most plausible that gu-jue sets represented drinking scenes, while gu placed with cooking vessels symbolised libation rituals summoning ancestors before offerings. This indicates that vessels arranged between inner and outer coffins symbolically represented sacrificial feasts rather than ordinary meals.

Third, in royal female burials, practices of funerary contributions reinforced bonds between related lineages (Cao 1995; Linduff 2010). The finest bronze vessels as gifts from higher-status individuals were placed in more prominent locations within the coffin (ATIACASS 1981; IACASS 1980, 12). These observations support the interpretation that the arrangement of bronze vessels was not mere storage but carefully curated to convey ritual meaning.

From warfare to music and dance

Bronze weapons were mainly placed against the walls of the outer coffins or stacked on top of bronze vessels, farther from the tomb owner’s body (Figure 2).⁸ Oracle inscriptions indicate Shang elites recruited troops from their lineages or subject populations, commanding these forces under royal orders during warfare (Keightley 2000, 52–8; Zhu 2022, chapter 1). The large quantity of bronze weapons in elite burials, often inscribed with family emblems, reflects the substantial military resources and command power of tomb owners during their lifetimes.

The most prominent weapons in Late Shang burials were curved-spine knives with backward-curved blades. If curved-spine knives were absent, yue axes became the most significant burial weapons (Cao 2022, chapter 2; Liu 2002). The largest and most formidable weapons were consistently placed at the first clockwise corner from the burial owner’s head, as proved by elite burials such as AGJZM160 (IACASS 1998), AHD2000M54 (IACASS 2007), 2006WYMDM5 (AICRA 2008) and AG84M1713 (ATIACASS 1986). Given that nearly all human sacrificial victims were male and placed face down in pits, and about half of males in regular burials were similarly positioned (compared with only 6 per cent of females), it is likely that the normative burial position was face up. A face-down position among males thus suggests an abnormal cause of death (Tang 2004, 83–4). If burial owners were ideally placed facing upwards, the prominent weapons positioned to their right likely symbolised the act of raising a weapon with the right hand to issue commands – just as the gesture of King Wu of Zhou issuing orders before deploying his troops to conquer the Shang, as recorded in the Speech at Mu from the Book of Zhou. This placement deliberately mimicked real military command scenarios.

Nao bells, the most common musical instruments in elite burials (Chang 2018; von Falkenhausen 1993, 136–7), frequently appeared alongside bronze weapons (Figure 2), suggesting functional or ritual connections. While bells might have served military signalling purposes, oracle inscriptions indicate their primary use in rites for rain prayers and ancestor worship (Qiu 2012). Given the ritual affinity between bronze weapons and musical instruments in burial contexts, bronze weapons likely held ritual significance beyond mere military symbolism (Guo 1951). Supporting evidence includes:

1. ritual jades and composite weapons with jade blades and bronze handles resembled bronze weapons and occasionally appear grouped together in burials, in the inner coffins or between the inner and outer coffins (for example, AHD2000M54, IACASS 2007, 91–3)

2. some elaborately decorated ge dagger-axes with curved apertures were too thin for practical warfare and were more frequently found in elite burials, suggesting that they served as ceremonial props rather than practical weapons (Jing 2011, 35–8)

3. the Wan dance, prevalent from the Late Shang to the Western Zhou periods, often co-occurred with musical performances during sacrifices. Early Western Zhou texts indicate the Wan dance applied dagger-axes and shields to display military achievements (Wang 1985).⁹ The Late Shang Wan dance likely highlighted themes of violence and warfare, similar to the Western Zhou version.

Thus, bronze weapons in elite burials had dual implications: military power and ritual dance with themes of violence and valiancy. The same duality likely applied to musical instruments.

Travelling across lineages

The burial contents placed at the farthest distance from the tomb owner’s body were the chariots, whether integrated or as parts, sometimes accompanied by horses and charioteers. In some cases, chariots were buried in separate subsidiary pits outside the main burial chamber. In other cases, they were placed inside the burial itself, either on top of the outer coffin, on second-tier platforms (for example, 04ADSKM303, IACASS 2014; HPKM1001, Liang and Kao 1963), or on the floor of the southern passage (for example, 2006ATSM2118, ATIACASS 2015; AGM698, ATIACASS 1979; AGM701, ATIACASS 1979; AGJZM172, IACASS 1998).

Although chariots were used in warfare during the Shang period, their presence in burials, typically limited to one or two per tomb, is too rare to represent war scenes, so they likely express a symbolic function beyond military use. Shang textual sources test the usage of chariots in royal hunting (Guo 1999, 1532; Heji 10405) to declare Shang annexation of certain geographical domains (Keightley 2000, 61–74; 2012, 194–9). In the inscription of Babo Yu (Shanxi Institute of Archaeology 2018), a water vessel dating back to the middle Western Zhou period (tenth century bce), using chariots according to the ritual norms was a key concern in the ritual interactions between elites or, to be more specific, to travel to the domain of other elite lineages to attend ritual ceremonies as guests. In a king’s tomb from the Late Shang royal cemetery, two chariots were placed on the floor of the southern passage, each accompanied by a whale vertebra and rib (HPKM1003, Liang and Kao 1967). The origin of these whale bones and the means by which they reached the royal capital remain unclear. The Shang polity might have briefly controlled some part of the coast of Bohai Bay for the sake of salt sources (Yan 2013), where whale strandings are occasionally reported in modern times, though no textual sources record kings visiting the area. Therefore, the inclusion of whale bones in that tomb was perhaps only intended to ritually symbolise the king’s ability to travel great distances.

Later, in Han dynasty (202 bce–220 ce) mortuary practices, the inclusion of chariots in grave goods and funerary art is well attested, implicating the owner’s passage from this world and the other world (Wu 1998). Though vivid depictions of the other world are absent in the Shang and Zhou periods, the spiritual passage of soul from the burial to the ancestral temple, and the usage of chariots in mobilising the deceased in the death ritual is well attested (Yü 1987). It is very likely that similar ritual implications existed in Shang mortuary practices.

Rather than representing battle, the carriages buried in the Late Shang tombs signified the tomb owner’s mobility, to the domain of other elite lineages, to the edge of the known world and to the other world.

Retainer burials and human victims

Retainer burials and human sacrifices are two other key themes in Late Shang elite burials. Retainer burials included attendants of the tomb owners, deliberately killed during the funerary rituals to accompany their masters in death, with their bodies remaining intact (Yao 1960). This practice reflects a high degree of social stratification and institutionalised coercion (Testart 1993). Approximately 2.4 per cent of shaft burials include retainer burials within them and in subsidiary pits exclusive to royal tombs. Based on their associated grave goods, these retainers appear to have served as servants or guards. For instance, a subsidiary pit associated with a king’s tomb contained six human corpses buried with water vessels, mirrors and bath scrubbers, indicating these individuals served as the king’s bathing attendants during their lifetime (HPKM1005, Shi 2001). Horsemen have also been identified among royal retainers (Hwang 2018), reflecting a significant degree of occupational specialisation among royal attendants.

Fifteen retainers were found in the elite burial at Huayuanzhuang (AHD2000M54), positioned respectively in the space between inner and outer coffins, on second-tier platforms and within the infill. Isotopic analyses offer intriguing insights (He 2013; Zhang et al. 2017). The tomb owner, named Yazhang, was presumably born outside the royal capital, most likely originating from the eastern coastal region. Isotope values of retainers buried inside the outer coffin closely matched those of the tomb owner, whereas retainers buried outside the outer coffin showed isotope signatures consistent with the local Yinxu population. Thus, retainers buried closer to the tomb owner originated from closer geographic proximity to him. Moreover, retainers placed within the outer chambers generally possessed higher-value grave goods and wooden coffins compared to those positioned on second-tier platforms or in passages. This pattern was first identified by Keightley (1999) in royal tombs, while it also appears in lower-ranked elite tombs (AL83-86M9, ACRAT 1997). These observations demonstrate that the spatial arrangement of retainers in tombs reflected their social proximity to the tomb owner during life.

Human victims were mostly young males, ritually sacrificed and offered to ancestors similarly to animal victims, such as cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs (Hu 1974a; 1974b), as food offerings. This may indicate an ideological dichotomy between those who submitted to the Shang rule and those who did not, in which the ‘social’ existence of the latter was negated and degraded to the level of animal and food through ritualised destruction. They were sacrificed in both mortuary and non-mortuary contexts, typically representing captives obtained from groups outside Shang political control according to oracle inscriptions (Wang and Kubin 2007) – an interpretation supported by isotopic studies (Cheung et al. 2017). In mortuary contexts, human sacrifices were primarily found in royal tombs, indicating that foreign captives were a prestigious resource monopolised by the royal family. Textual evidence also indicates that the Late Shang government maintained a bureau specifically responsible for managing human victims (Cao 2018, 78), with successive divinations conducted by kings to determine whether subordinate nobles could successfully capture victims through warfare or hunting and send them to the royal family. These victims appeared as decapitated bodies or isolated heads in burial chamber infills, passages, second-tier platforms or subsidiary pits, but never within the coffins. Because human sacrifices were offerings to the tomb owner, and only transcendent beings – never living persons – could receive sacrificial worship involving consecration (Hubert et al. 1964 [1899]), tomb owners within their coffins were already ritually transformed into otherworldly beings before burial chambers were filled.

Animal victims typically comprised the left front legs of cattle, sheep or pigs (IACASS 2018, 973–82). These limbs symbolised entire animals, given that each animal has only one left front leg. These limbs were normally placed on second-tier platforms alongside pottery vessels, representing early antecedents to Eastern Zhou ritual practices (Z. Li 2022). They may have held deeper ritual significance beyond mere food offerings. The legs, associated with movement, could have symbolically represented both physical mobility and metaphysical transition, reinforcing the tomb owner’s journey from this world to the realm of the ancestors. Like human sacrifices, these animal victims, intended as offerings consecrated for otherworldly tomb owners, rarely appeared within coffins.

Enigma of social proximity and distance

The five sections above have demonstrated that the arrangement and display of grave goods in Late Shang burials followed a spatial and ritual logic reflecting an ancient perception of distance and proximity.

Regarding ritual artefacts, I have demonstrated that they were meticulously arranged within a multi-layered concentric structure. These layers ranged from funerary jades, which protected the mortal soul, to ornamental jades manifesting dignity and ritual propriety, and further to ritual jades embodying the power of essence transformation, bronze and pottery vessels enabling ancestral worship and facilitated food and beverage sharing among the living; weapons and musical instruments signifying warfare as well as ritualised displays of violence through music and dance; and finally chariots symbolising the actual and spiritual mobility of the tomb owner, concerning interactions between ritual networks and the Shang cosmography. The scale of social categories involved expanded progressively from inside to outside these ideal spatial divisions: from the body of the tomb owner, to their costume, then their morality that fused the self with things and people in direct exchange relationships, followed by those who could eat and drink in ceremonies the owner hosted, those who could witness such ceremonies through sight and sound, and eventually extending to other ritual units and polities accessed via warfare and travel.

This same spatial rhetoric applied equally to attendants and sacrificial victims in elite burials. For attendants, greater intimacy and higher social status corresponded to closer placement to the owner’s body, while less intimacy corresponded to more distant placement. The bodies of sacrificial victims – outsiders whose political identities were denied and ritually consecrated through destruction and violence – were placed outside the domain of the owner, separated and screened by wooden planks and textiles.

A reversal between natural and social distance is evident in Late Shang mortuary practices. Regarding the raw materials of ritual objects, the further their place of origin, the closer their placement to the tomb owner. Locally sourced materials, such as clay for pottery vessels (Stoltman et al. 2009) and wood for chariots, were positioned further from the owner. Materials sourced from hundreds of kilometres away, including copper (Ying et al. 2020), tin and lead (Li et al. 2024) from distant mining regions, were placed in intermediate layers. Materials originating thousands of kilometres away, such as fine jades presumably from Khotan (IACASS 1980, 114–15; or possibly other distant regions, Chen et al. 2023; Jing et al. 2007, 382–3) and cowries from the South China Sea (IACASS 2007, 343–4) or even arguably the Indian Ocean (Peng and Zhu 1995), were placed closest to the tomb owner. This indicates an underlying dynamic: the greater the physical distance from which materials were sourced, the greater their symbolic power within the cultural system (Helms 1993). The more symbolic power an artefact held, the greater affinity it had with the personhood of the elite, thus warranting closer placement to the corpse. Conversely, social proximity revealed through ritual symbolism operated in the opposite dimension: the closer to the owner’s corpse, the greater the social intimacy and proximity. A structural function of this spatial rhetoric thus involved reversing natural distance and transforming it into an idealised expression of social proximity as raw materials moved inward into burial contexts, crafted by workshops presumably controlled by managerial parties under the authority of the royal family (Y. Li 2022, 184). As Helms (1993) argues, in traditional societies trade and craftsmanship are not mere economic activities, but are closely bonded with cosmological frameworks, in which symbolic power and authority are legitimised by spatial and ideological remoteness. The spatial categorisation of burial contents reveals that the Late Shang elites were well aware of the rhetoric of distance, and meticulously expressed it in mortuary contexts, which affirms Helms’ (1993) observations on distance and symbolic power, and further reveals that spatial remoteness was associated with the charismatic nature of elite morality, while spatial nearness instead reflected the generic social connections of the elite.

Furthermore, a dialectical relationship between violence and order was evident within elite burials. Human victims, as the products of destructive violence directed towards outsiders, and weapons, as instruments of warfare and institutionalised violence, were positioned far from the owner. Yet, as argued previously, weapons simultaneously symbolised warfare, ritual re-enactments of military achievement and social order. Moreover, ritual jades embodying the tomb owner’s essence, which defined morality, legitimised property ownership and enabled ancestral summoning for sacrificial ceremonies, thus constituting the very basis of elite personhood, necessarily took shapes derived from bronze weapons. This affinity clearly suggests that the constitutive basis of social order was understood as intrinsically linked to violence. Thus, the relationship between sacrifice and warfare was not oppositional but deeply intertwined. Butchering and cooking human beings and animals into food offerings was no doubt a process of violence, indicating a fundamental correlation between food and violence – it was through the application of violence that animal and human victims became food, and it was through the act of eating that the Shang denied and annihilated the subjectivity of people beyond Shang political control. Moreover, as anthropologists have demonstrated, although the structural opposition between inside and outside is universal across social systems, with outsideness associated with impurity (Douglas 1966, 44), violence and disorder (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 20–226), the inside–outside opposition itself constitutes collective consciousness, and the enactment of violence, whether actual or ritual, is essential for restoring and maintaining social order (Girard 1977, 1–38).

Conclusion: ritual re-representation and Late Shang notions of personhood

The elements represented in mortuary practices were not isolated from each other in non-mortuary social interactions. A bronze inscription from the later phase of the Late Shang period, likely produced at Yinxu, helps bring these themes together:

It was the Xinwei day, one of the wives of the king co-hosted a sacrificial meat presentation ceremony, in the grand palace at Lan. The king hosted the wine offering session, then came the bells rehearsal, then the new sacrificial meat was presented, that was in June. A dance troupe of 10 fellows performed three programs, I, named Xi, led the dance in front. The king rewarded me, thus I commission this bronze vessel in commemoration of father Yi. Da Wan. (Zhu 2015)

This inscription appears on a Zun vessel commissioned by a chief dancer who led a performance before the king during a ceremony honouring a royal ancestor in a palace. His performance was well received, and he subsequently used the king’s reward to commission the bronze vessel. The inscription clearly describes the sequence of the ritual events: a wine offering (which involved summoning the ancestor at or prior to this step), followed by musical performance and the Wan dance, and concluding with the presentation of sacrificial meat. Though not mentioned, the servants and guards of the king must have attended this event, and as indicated by oracle inscriptions, human and animal sacrifices were ubiquitous in ancestral worship. Thus, except for travelling, all elements found in elite burials appear drawn from a similar kind of single, cohesive sacrificial ceremony.

An interpretation of the structure of Three Dynasties ancestral offerings, formulated by Western Han scholars and ritual experts, is preserved in the Book of Rites, a classical text compiled in the first century bce:

Under the Yin, sound was thought most important. Before there was any smell or flavour, the music was made to resound clearly. It was not till there had been three performances of it that they went out to meet the victim. The noise of the music was a summons addressed to all between heaven and earth. Under the Kau (Zhou), a pungent odour was thought more important. In libations they employed the smell of millet-spirits in which fragrant herbs had been infused. The fragrance, partaking of the nature of the receding influence, penetrates to the deep springs below. The libations were poured from cups with long handles of jade, to employ the smell of the mineral. After the liquor was poured, they met the victim, having first diffused the smell into the unseen realm. Artemisia along with millet and rice having then been burnt (with the fat of the victims), the fragrance penetrates through all the building. It was for this reason that, after the cup had been put down, they burnt the fat with the southern wood and millet and rice. So careful were they on all occasions of sacrifice. The intelligent spirit returns to heaven; the body and the animal soul return to the earth; and hence arose the idea of seeking for the deceased in sacrifice in the unseen darkness in the bright region above. Under the Yin, they first sought for them in the bright region; under Kau, they first sought for them in the dark. (Legge 1885: 443–4)

According to this interpretation, to worship the ancestor, the sacrificer had to summon the soul of them through the exertion of yin and yang power, in which music, ritual jades and sacrificial meat and crops inevitably tempt the ancestor’s soul. In this type of ritual again, most of the elements represented in the Late Shang and also Zhou elite burials, which largely inherited from Shang the tradition of wooden chamber burials first found in the Dawenkou culture, were presented at the same time successively.

During the final disposition of the corpse, these elements were not simply placed as grave goods but deliberately arranged to symbolically re-represent the sacrificial ceremony. Rather than directly replicating the ceremony through funerary art or structurally mimicking ancestral temples, the various elements were disassembled and reassembled according to Late Shang perceptions of materiality, social proximity and scale.¹⁰ The closer a ritual artefact was placed to the tomb owner, the more directly it related to the deceased, representing social exchange on smaller scales. Conversely, more distant placements symbolised broader social exchanges. Moving outward from the tomb owner’s body, burial arrangements successively conveyed themes of the mortal soul, morality of essence transformation and ancestral summoning, those participating in the ceremonial feast, those witnessing through sight and sound, and finally interactions between lineages.

This is what I call ritual re-representation – a structured way of symbolising, through burial arrangements, the Late Shang elites’ understanding of ideal nobility and their surrounding social exchange system. The additional prefix ‘re-’ has two implications. First, the rituals represented in mortuary practices were, from the perspective of the mourners, left in a past state. Second, since rituals are collective representations of social facts in the Durkheimian sense (Durkheim 1995, 421–2), mortuary practices intended to represent sacrificial rituals should be more accurately described as a form of ‘re-representation’.

Revisiting Xunzi (2014), we can see that his notion of the burial chamber as a subterranean palace or domestic structure does not apply to the Late Shang period. However, his idea of ‘using life to ornament death’ and ‘making abundant use of semblances of the person’s life to send him off in death’ (Xunzi 2014, 211) remains relevant. To frame this in Robert Hertz’s (2004) or Arnold van Gennep’s (1960) terms, the funeral is an intermediate or liminal stage between biological death and social death, during which the deceased’s social existence is temporarily preserved and re-represented within the social exchange system, before the final farewell and their full integration into the realm of the dead. In other words, re-representing and re-enacting the social existence of the deceased is a key concern of death rituals, apart from transforming the deceased’s existence to the next state. From this perspective, Late Shang elite burials functioned to analogise, encapsulate and send off the tomb owner’s social existence, which was proportional to their capacity for organising ritual networks. Ritual re-representation left only a memory trace among the living, revisited solely during ritual occasions in temples.

Life itself cannot be replicated but can only be represented through abstraction. We are always dealing with a selection or subset of reality, and its transformation in the context of ritual passage between states. In other words, from a more epistemological perspective, social reality in a fixed sense does not truly exist, unless we define social reality as the very processes of transformation and abstraction that shape our perception of it. Therefore, it is impossible to fully reconstruct the lives of ancient individuals. Only in certain cases can we gain insight into how the ancients understood and intentionally represented themselves and their social worlds. For the Late Shang, the elites were defined first by their mortal body, then their essence, their morality of sharing, their military laurels and power, and lastly, their connections to other lineages and their ability to travel. The different scales of social exchange were imagined and spatially arranged based on these ideals. I believe this approach provides a stronger methodological basis for understanding ancient societies by examining how they presented themselves.

Furthermore, the Late Shang notion of personhood re-represented in mortuary contexts may offer deeper insights into understanding societies of the Three Dynasties period. Influential scholars have argued that traditional Chinese society and state developed along bureaucratic and secular paths. Max Weber (1951) asserts that Confucianism lacked a strong concept of divine order and salvation, suggesting that the Chinese imperial state developed along secular and moral rather than religious lines, a view adopted by sinologists such as John K. Fairbank (1957) and Benjamin Schwartz (1985). An even more radical version of this argument, prevalent in mainstream historical narratives, holds that the secular and disenchanted path of Chinese civilisation is among its defining merits. Chinese archaeological scholarship has often subconsciously followed this presupposition. For instance, Yu and Gao (1978, 84) considered Zhou dynasty rites as secular regulations devoid of religious ideology. In their study of the Zhou dynasty’s institutional regulations governing tripod usage, they started from the premise that:

During the Zhou dynasty, a comprehensive system of rites and music governed virtually every aspect of daily life, including dress, food, housing, and transportation. All actions were expected to conform to its prescriptions. In effect, it functioned as an unwritten code of law.

Though Yu and Gao (1978) then asserted that this system of rites and music was rooted in a slave-based mode of production, their understanding of ritual regulations was more representative of the myth that all social relationships in early China were secular, based on coercive social contracts without a cognitive and ideological grounding.

However, what we have discovered in Late Shang mortuary practices is the re-representation of personhood constituted by numerous deeply intertwined themes imbued with religious implications. It was precisely because funerary jades were believed to have the magic of protecting the mortal soul of the owner that the regulation of jade-coat usage in the Han dynasty became possible. It was because ritual jades were believed to be equal to the morality and essence transformation of their owner that the imagined regulations regarding jade gui usage by Eastern Zhou ritual specialists became possible. Similarly, it was because bronze tripods signified the owner’s capacity to offer sacrificial meat to ancestors and host food-sharing ceremonies among the living that idealised regulations for tripod usage became possible. Likewise, because bronze bells functioned to entertain the ancestors and the living, the regulation of bell usage became possible. All these elements were deeply interrelated and inseparable, embodied within the same complete re-representation of elite personhood as a total social fact (Mauss 1990, 3–4), which predated all those constitutional regulations partially factual and partially imagined. Similar symbolic systems of jade usage in mortuary context flourished in Liangzhu culture around 3000 bce, and motifs of food and drink sharing prevailed in Dawenkou culture around the same period (Zhang 2015), later converging and synthesising into the dynastic culture of the Central Plain. We would rather argue that this systematic representation and re-representation of personhood and ritual networks led to the institutional stratification of hierarchical societies along a ‘sacred’ path, preceding any degree of disenchantment proposed later by certain Confucian scholars, not necessarily in the salvation-oriented sense that Weber (1951) emphasised.¹¹

Although this study is limited in temporal and spatial scope, the underlying ideology was representative of northern China during the Bronze Age, where the nature of elite mortuary practices did not fundamentally change for more than a thousand years (Wu 1988). What I have revealed can thus provide insights into broader patterns of Classical Chinese social structure from a ritual and mortuary perspective. Drawing a parallel to Fei’s (1992, 71–83) concept of the differentiated pattern, which views traditional Chinese society as individualised (not in the modern Western sense) and hierarchical, and likens traditional Chinese social relations surrounding an individual to ripples expanding outward from a rock thrown into water, we can understand Three Dynasties societies as a dynamic field in which varying scales of social networks radiated outward from elite individuals. In this earliest integrated version of the Chinese notion of personhood, social relations were understood and enacted through ancestral practices of food and violence, defining the essential nature of Classic Chinese societies. Moreover, we know the ancients were aware of this and keen on representing these relationships explicitly in sacrificial and mortuary contexts.

To summarise, the contents of Late Shang elite burials were meticulously arranged to symbolise the ceremonial contexts, not as exact replicas, but as a disassembled and reassembled version of the original ideal event, containing the Late Shang’s perception of the res extensa of human, subsidised human, dehumanised human, animals and artefacts, embodied in the practices of eating and killing, and presented in a concentric system concerning distance and proximity. This process served to re-represent the tomb owner’s social existence as it was expressed in past ritual networks, which justifies the title, ‘Ritual re-representation and the making of sociality’.

Acknowledgements

This article was originally presented as a lecture in the UCL Institute of Archaeology Thematic Research Seminar series on 12 March 2025. I am grateful to Dr Manuel Arroyo-Kalin and Dr Sada Mire for organising the series and for kindly inviting me to present my work. I am especially thankful to Professor David Wengrow for his warm and inspiring mentorship throughout the development and revision of this article. My sincere thanks also go to Miss Kan Yu-chun, who generously offered helpful suggestions in preparation for the lecture. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Michael Rowlands, who is no longer with us, for his reading of the manuscript and the insights he offered. He was an extraordinarily incisive scholar and a rare soul. I was fortunate to have him as both a mentor and a friend. His passing is a profound loss.

Declarations and conflicts of interest