Traditional Chinese historiography speaks of a legendary Xia dynasty before the Shang, but the Shang is the first dynasty confirmed by both excavation and written record. It emerged around 1600 BCE along the middle Yellow River in modern Henan and lasted some 550 years until the Zhou overthrew it in 1046 BCE. The capital moved several times; the last and longest-occupied, Yin, lies at the Yinxu mound near present-day Anyang.

Two technical clusters set the Shang apart in world history. The first is writing: roughly 4,500 distinct characters were incised on ox scapulae and turtle plastrons — the so-called 'oracle bones' — and they are the direct ancestor of today's Chinese script. Diviners interpreted the cracking patterns of heated bone to read the future harvest, the prospects of battle, or royal births; the question and the answer were then carved into the bone. The second is bronze casting: ritual vessels weighing hundreds of kilograms, made by piece-mould technique and used to offer food and wine to ancestors, are unparalleled anywhere in the contemporary Bronze Age. The 832-kg Houmuwu ding, excavated at Anyang, is the largest single bronze object known from the ancient world.

Shang society was a tiered agrarian polity: king, an aristocratic elite, craft specialists, and a vast peasantry. The horse-drawn war chariot entered around 1200 BCE from Central Asia — the first major technological exchange between the Eurasian steppe and China. Yinxu has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2006; more than 150,000 oracle-bone fragments have been excavated, and their translation remains a central project of modern Sinology.