A Study on the Ancient State of Shen

The well-known State of Shen in ancient China,sometimes referred to as You-xin-shi clan,is a descendant state of Xia royal families.The name of the state comes from Ri-ming System,a system for the Shang addressing their ancestors with numbers of the Celestial Stems.The Chinese character Shen evolves from the character Xin and appears rather late.The ancient clan of Shen owned feoff in Weihe River Basin around the beginning of the Xia Dynasty.Later,a main lineage gradually moved eastward,settled on what is now the border between eastern Henan Province and western Shandong Province,and became a big fang-guo( fang-state,a particular geopolitical entity consisted of several settlements) under the control of the Shang Dynasty.Traces of the historical records of the ancient State of Shen can be found in the historical materials of the Shang Dynasty.The Bamboo Annals has the record about the rebellion of the Shen in alliance with the Pi and the Lanyi against the early Shang State.And the marriage between the Shen and the Zhou in the late period of the Shang Dynasty is also manifested in the Book of Songs.The clan of Shen after the eastern movement came to be merged and civilized into Dongyi Culture and finally disappeared over the period when the Shang Dynasty was replaced by the Zhou Dynasty.Its people were then migrated to what is now Shen County in Shandong Province.One of the King Tang's capable ministers,Yi Yin,who made great contribution to King Tang's overthrow of the Xia Dynasty,could be a Shang or a maternal relative of a Shang according to the oracle bone inscriptions.Since Yi Yin once provided service to the Shen,he was not only a statesman in the Shang Dynasty,but also an important figure in the history of the ancient State of Shen.