How were Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Oracle bones discovered in Shang Dynasty?

In the Yin and Shang Dynasties, Chinese characters have been used to record what happened in daily life. Because at that time, people's ability to conquer and transform nature was very weak, big and small things in life were decided by divination, and good and bad luck were predicted accordingly.

At that time, people took local materials, took tortoise shells and animal bones as recording materials, and carved the contents of divination on tortoise shells or animal bones. In this way, the earliest books in China came into being, which is Oracle Bone Inscriptions.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions, which has been handed down to this day, was discovered in Xiaotun Village, northwest of Anyang County, Henan Province, during Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty. Xiaotun village is near the water in the north, which is the place where Yin merchants built their capital. Farmers in Anyang inadvertently dug up many tortoise shells and animal bones under the loess layer when they were working by the Huanshui River. They mistakenly thought it was keel medicine and sold it to pharmacies.

1In the summer of 899, Wang, a famous scholar in the late Qing Dynasty, sought medical treatment for malaria. He ate Chinese medicine with a blind keel and came across the ancient Chinese characters carved on the keel. This discovery surprised him, so he began to collect it.

Wang was a famous epigraphist at that time, and he had profound attainments in the study of ancient Chinese characters. The strange words on the keel aroused his great interest and made a careful study. Later, after research by scholars such as Liu E, Sun Yirang, Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei, it was identified as an instrument of Shang Dynasty, so it was called Yin Ruins, also known as Oracle Bone Inscriptions.