Evening, June 12, 1936, Xiaotun, Anyang, Henan.

A few young archaeologists from the Institute of History and Philology spotted an inscribed piece of turtle shell in the wall of a pit. They expected to clean it up a little and finish for the day, as usual. Instead, the deeper they dug, the more inscribed shells they found.

In a pit of earth about two meters across and some 4.8 meters deep, layer upon layer, there was nothing but oracle bones.

1. Night Fell

It was nearly dark, and they still had not finished.

The team had no choice but to backfill a thick layer of earth and post a night watch. Seals were pasted over what had already been excavated, written in Mongolian. As Academia Sinica's digital archive of archaeological materials explains, few people could read Mongolian, so even if the finds were stolen, a thief would find it hard to forge a matching seal.

The next day they kept digging. By evening there was still no bottom to the bones. This time they did not backfill. All the archaeologists and several workers stayed on guard, with ten soldiers keeping watch through the night as well.

Word reached the Institute. Pan Que wrote a report he could not keep the excitement out of: never since the discovery of oracle-bone script had turtle shells so complete been found! Though he had not been there himself, he said, he was "overjoyed beyond measure, and did not sleep for two nights."

The pit was later numbered YH127. The bones it yielded make up seventy percent of the oracle bones held by Academia Sinica today.

2. A Legend in a Medicine Packet

To understand why this pit kept people awake for two nights, we have to go back more than thirty years.

1899 is usually regarded as the year oracle-bone script was discovered. Wang Yirong took notice of these antiquities and began buying them.

There is a very memorable story about how he first saw oracle bones: he fell ill, bought medicine, and recognized ancient characters among the drugs. Some versions put Liu E beside him for the discovery.

But the early accounts of the purchases do not agree, and Wang Yirong himself left no written account of what happened.

What is more solid is this: he recognized that these inscribed bone fragments were worth keeping, and he paid for them. Before him, local people had long been digging up oracle bones without knowing what was written on them.

In 1900, Beijing fell into the chaos of war, and Wang Yirong died. Most of his oracle bones later passed to Liu E. In 1903 Liu E published The Turtle Shells Collected by Tieyun, and rubbings of more than a thousand pieces reached readers for the first time.

3. The Layer of Earth That Was Dug Away

Once oracle bones became valuable, trouble followed.

As Academia Sinica's Museum of the Institute of History and Philology puts it, after 1899 the oracle bones of Yinxu were subjected to illicit digging and high-priced buying, and the total unearthed may have run to tens of thousands of pieces.

Dealers sold bone fragments, not their find spots. The farther the fragments traveled, the harder it became to recover which layer they had been buried in and what they had lain beside. Scholars later learned to read broken characters in ever finer detail, but they could not restore the layer of earth shoveled away in those early years.

4. Dong Zuobin Arrives

In 1928 the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica was founded, and it engaged Dong Zuobin as a corresponding member. That summer he went to Anyang to investigate how oracle bones were being unearthed, and wrote in his report that a full investigation was needed immediately if what lay underground was to be saved.

The president of the Academy, Cai Yuanpei, gave his support. That autumn Dong Zuobin led a trial excavation at Xiaotun, the first excavation at Yinxu.

As a boy, Dong Zuobin had carved seals for customers, charging four copper coins a character. In 1922 he went to Peking University as an auditing student and taught himself oracle bones by tracing the rubbings in the Yinxu Shuqi Qianbian with oil paint. Now what lay before him was no longer marks on paper, but earth that could be followed down layer by layer.

It did not go smoothly. In October 1929 the Henan provincial government sent He Rizhang to Anyang. He declared that he rejected the Academy's work, hired his own laborers, and began digging, and the archaeology section had to suspend work. In two months He Rizhang obtained a great many oracle bones and ancient objects. In March 1930 he began digging at Xiaotun again, and the section's work came to a complete halt.

5. Fifteen Seasons

From 1928 to 1937, the Institute excavated at Yinxu fifteen times.

They uncovered eleven great tombs of Shang kings; 1,300 sacrificial pits, chariot pits, and accompanying burials; and Shang palace and temple areas and altars.

The third season produced the "four great turtle plastrons." Dong Zuobin studied them and in 1931 published his interpretation, identifying from the inscriptions the "diviners" who presided over divinations. Identifying the diviners gave a key for dating the oracle bones.

From the tenth to the twelfth seasons, the work moved to the royal cemetery at Xibeigang, Houjiazhuang, on the north bank of the Huan River, where no oracle bones were found. In the thirteenth season they returned to Xiaotun.

It was in this season that they found YH127.

6. Turning a Pit into a Pillar

Freshly excavated bone and shell holds water. Exposed to the sun, it dries and cracks, and the characters on it are damaged with it. There were so many bones in this pit, pressed layer on layer, that taking them out piece by piece might not save them.

Shi Zhangru came up with a solution. Instead of separating the bones from the earth, they dug a larger pit around the original one, turning the "oracle-bone pit" into an "oracle-bone pillar." The whole thing was packed into a specially made large wooden crate, shipped back to the Institute in Nanjing, and excavated slowly indoors.

The method later became one of the standard ways of excavating oracle bones.

7. Six Days

Once the crate was packed, the real difficulties began.

It had to go from Xiaotun to Anyang railway station and then on to Nanjing. There were no trucks then, and ox carts or rollers might shake the bones to pieces. For the first stretch, it could only be carried by hand.

The crate was heavy and huge and could not travel on ordinary roads. Every time the workers came to a ditch or a stretch of potholes, they had to stop, build a temporary bridge or path, and only then move it forward.

From the moment the crate left the pit until it reached Anyang station took six days.

8. Changsha, Guilin, Kunming

The crate reached Nanjing. But before the bones could be numbered and glued, full-scale war against Japan broke out the following year, in 1937.

That year, illicit digging in Anyang grew worse. Someone openly posted slogans against the Yinxu excavations, reading "Down with Dong and Liang, who destroy the people's livelihood," meaning Dong Zuobin and Liang Siyong. Dong Zuobin later wrote four characters on a photograph of the antiquities that survived the looting: "a lamp for the people."

The Institute moved to Changsha, then that winter to Guilin, then the next year by way of Annam to Kunming, and later to Nanxi in Sichuan. On November 5, Anyang fell.

These oracle bones traveled with the Institute all the way, ending up at Yangmei and Nangang in Taiwan. On the road, even complete pieces were easily broken. Countless fragments had to be rejoined by oracle-bone scholars one piece at a time.

Only in 1940 did the numbering, gluing, and rejoining begin.

In October 1948 the first part of Inscriptions from Yinxu, Volume B, was published, containing the oracle bones from the thirteenth to fifteenth seasons. Volume B held more than four times as much material as Volume A.

9. Characters Written with a Brush

The oracle bones from YH127 include many things rarely found elsewhere.

There are genuine traces written with a brush by Shang diviners. There are divination cracks that were traced over again with a knife. On bones buried for more than three thousand years, the cinnabar and ink are still vivid. Some pieces record not divinations but the numbers of turtle shells sent as tribute from different places, or the Shang king's tours of inspection. And there is a kind of reworked back shell with a hole cut in the middle so that pieces could be strung together, perhaps the very shape behind the character ce, "bound records."

These oracle bones and the transmitted histories confirm each other, and they gave the doubting-antiquity trend then in fashion solid evidence against it.

10. Epilogue

In 1994, Volume B was reprinted. The publishers found the only surviving original rubbings at the Institute, repaired and rephotographed the places that were worm-eaten or blurred, and made new plates.

Fifty-eight years had passed since the turtle shell appeared in the pit wall in June 1936.

That evening, the team could have hurried to dig out the oracle bones one by one before dark. They did not. They stopped first, and packed the whole pit, earth and all, into a crate.

To read characters three thousand years old, they first learned to wait.

Sources and editorial notes

1. Zongkun Li, “The Discovery of Oracle Bone Writings and the Distinction between Ning and Wen: The Significance of the Correspondence between Wang Yi-Rong and Chen Jie-Qi,” Disquisitions on the Past & Present 18 (2008), pp. 33–46. The PDF was obtained and sections I–II consulted, particularly pp. 34–37 on discovery narratives. The medicine-packet story and claims that Wang identified particular Shang kings are not treated as established eyewitness facts. https://www1.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/Publications/Disquisition/31/Article/268 ; PDF https://www1.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/storage/w2_file/4705SLxIwdh.pdf 2. Museum of the Institute of History and Philology, 2006 exhibition commemorating seventy years since the YH127 excavation: discovery, Shi Zhangru's extraction proposal, object features, and subsequent movement. https://museum.sinica.edu.tw/exhibitions/13/ 3. Academia Sinica archaeological digital archives, “Happy Birthday to YH127” (2012): protective covering, conservation problems, manual crate transport, and six days to the station. This is a later institutional account, not a claim of direct consultation of every original field log. Its dramatic episodes involving armed robbers and a damaged railway axle have not been incorporated. https://archeodata.sinica.edu.tw/index.php/exhibition/detail/129 4. Fu Ssu-nien Library, Dong Zuobin chronology, adapted from a 1995 centenary publication, pp. 49–60. The online entries for 1922–1937 were read for his training, investigations, and excavation interruptions. The later chronology is not represented as a contemporary diary. https://lib.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/03-rare/MWSP/02/a.htm 5. IHP, Photographs of the Excavations at Yinxu, 1928–1937, thirteenth-season information page, checked for 1936, Xiaotun, and personnel. The textual fieldwork description was consulted; no claim is made of examining every photograph. https://archeodata.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/Publications/HPftAE/13.html 6. IHP publication description for Xiaotun, Volume II, Yinxu Wenzi Yibian, Plates, Part I: 1948 first publication, 1994 reissue, represented seasons, and reproduction repairs. The complete plate volumes were not obtained or read. https://www1.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/jp/Publications/Book/936 7. National Museum of China's 2019 oracle-bone exhibition, cross-checking early collecting, Tieyun Canggui, and material writing traces. https://www.chnmuseum.cn/portals/0/web/zt/20191022jiagu/ 8. Time and place: this narrative concerns modern recognition and excavation. Dates such as 1899, 1903, 1928, and 1936 are not paired with Shang-era production. Xiaotun lies in present-day Anyang, Henan; the UNESCO palace and ancestral-shrine component provides an area reference, not a false exact coordinate for YH127. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1114/maps/ 9. Rights and boundaries: original bilingual narrative paraphrasing historical facts; no modern article or photograph is reproduced. Traditions about Wang's first encounter are separated from his documented role in collecting. No dialogue, weather, private thoughts, or names for unidentified transport workers have been invented.