Chinese writing has a documented history stretching back more than 3,000 years, and the proof of it was, quite literally, sold in pharmacies for decades before anyone recognized what it was. Yinxu — the "Ruins of Yin" near modern Anyang, in Henan Province — is the site of the last capital of the late Shang dynasty and the source of the oldest confirmed mature writing system in East Asia: the oracle bone script. UNESCO inscribed Yinxu as a World Heritage Site in 2006, recognizing it as the archaeological anchor of China's earliest historically documented dynasty and the origin point of the country's system of royal mausoleums.
The site's modern rediscovery began, improbably, with an illness. In 1899, Wang Yirong, a Qing dynasty scholar-official serving as Chancellor of the Imperial Academy, was prescribed powdered "dragon bones" — a common traditional remedy — after contracting malaria. According to the widely told account, he happened to receive some bones whole rather than already ground into powder, and noticed unfamiliar carved markings on their surface. Together with fellow scholar Liu E, Wang began examining the inscriptions, suspecting they represented an ancient script rather than random scratches, though the apothecary who supplied them refused to identify their source. It took nearly a decade of scholarly detective work before philologist Luo Zhenyu traced the bones, in 1908, to fields outside Anyang known locally as Yinxu — and identified the site as the lost capital of the Shang dynasty, until then known mainly through later, semi-legendary historical texts.
