ABSTRACT
After the period of the ‘Five Emperors’, of whom the Yellow Emperor was the first, ancient Chinese texts record the earliest Chinese dynasty, the Xia. The actual existence of this dynasty remains unproven, as no contemporary written records of it have survived, but it is increasingly accepted that later accounts are likely to be reliable at least in their general purport. Dates at this period are very uncertain, but the Xia dynasty is usually accepted to have begun somewhere between about 2100 and 2000 BCE. Little is known about the extent of any Xia ‘state’, but it was probably quite small and is very unlikely to have included the Beijing area. Xia power was probably centred mainly in what is now the province of Henan, well to the south-west of Beijing. However, this does not mean that people living in the Beijing area during the Xia dynastic period did not share a similar level of culture with the Xia. The upper cultural level at the Xueshan site in Changping District has similar artefacts to those found at Erlitou in Henan, now usually considered to be a Xia site. Most importantly, objects made of copper and bronze form part of the cultural assemblage of upper Xueshan. This level probably dates to about 2000 to 1700 BCE.
