Central Plains

The Central Plains (Zhongyuan) of the middle Yellow River are where Chinese written history begins. The Erlitou site near Yanshi, dated about 1750 BCE, is the leading candidate for the Xia capital described in later chronicles, while Anyang’s Yinxu ruins — capital of the late Shang from roughly 1300 BCE — yielded some 150,000 inscribed oracle bones that constitute the earliest systematic Chinese writing. Farmers here still work loess terraces above sites where bronze casting, chariot burial, and ancestor worship took their canonical forms.

Political gravity stayed anchored in the Plains for three millennia. Luoyang served as capital to thirteen dynasties, Kaifeng’s Northern Song population passed one million around 1100 as depicted in the scroll "Along the River During Qingming," and Dengfeng’s Shaolin Monastery, founded in 495 CE, turned this heartland into the reference point for Chinese martial arts. The 1899 rediscovery of oracle bones by scholar Wang Yirong converted the Plains’ buried archives into modern historiography, and Yinxu entered the UNESCO list in 2006 as documentary evidence of a civilization whose script never broke continuity.