Who was Fu Hao?

Key Stage 2

History

The Shang Dynasty

Which civilisation was flourishing at about the same time as the Shang Dynasty?

Believing that anyone can talk to their ancestors.

Showing great respect for members of your family who have died.

Worshipping the emperor as though they are a God.

The Shang Dynasty was the only civilisation in the world that knew how to use Bronze in 1600 BCE

﻿If you've been watching regularly, welcome back so happy to see you again. You know the drill by now, make sure that you've got a pen or a pencil and make sure you've got an old notebook or a piece of paper is fine as well. So you've got something to write on for when I ask you to pause and do your tasks. We are going to be learning all about Fu Hao. I am really excited about today's lesson because we're learning about two extraordinary women. We're learning about Fu Hao who lived in the Shang Dynasty thousands of years ago. And we're also learning about somebody called Zheng Zhenxiang who is still alive now and they are two extraordinary women who have amazing achievements each of them. We are going to learn all about each of them. So I'm very, very excited for today's lesson. So today's lesson is Who Was Fu Hao? That's our title. This is what the lesson structure is going to look like. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to learn about Zheng Zhenxiang who I was just talking about. Then we're going to find out about how Zheng Zhenxiang opened the tomb of Fu Hao so that we could discover all about this amazing warrior princess. We're going to learn about Fu Hao's life, about how she was a warrior, a general, a priestess, just the most interesting life. And we're also going to learn, we're going to have our end of lesson quiz of course, to see if you can remember all of those key facts and have them locked into your brain. That's our lesson structure for today. Let's get started with Zheng Zhenxiang. Before we do though, a little bit of a recap of something that is really important. Who can remember what does an archaeologist do? Who can remember what an archaeologist does? We looked at archaeologists in lesson 1 and it's been in lesson 2. See if you can say now a really good definition of exactly what an archaeologist does. What does an archaeologist. Okay, see if what you said is close to this definition. And archaeologist finds and studies artefacts to discover how people used to live in the past. Is that what you said? If you did, well done, very impressive. We're going to learn about an archaeologist who is from China. So we're going to have a quick look at our map. So here's a map of the world not including the Americas and some other parts. But here is a picture of some Africa and Asia and Europe. And we of course, we can see that little red dot. You can see China and that's where the ancient Shang lived on the yellow river. Let's zoom in a little bit, and we're going to zoom in to a place called Anyang in China. So it's still there now Anyang, but Anyang was important 'cause for a lot of the Shang Dynasty it was the capital of the Shang Dynasty, that's where they built their palaces. And what we're going to look at today is an archaeological site in Anyang. Because there was an archaeologist called Zheng Zhenxiang, here she is studying a book looking all scholarly because she's incredibly intelligent woman. And Zheng Zhenxiang is known as the first lady of Chinese archaeology, that's what she's known us. She's just the best archaeologists in China. And she's learned and she's an absolute expert on the Shang Dynasty. So she was actually the first female archaeologist in China. She was born in 1929 and she went to university in 1959 and as I'm sure that you've already studied and know about, in history women weren't always encouraged to go to university and sometimes they were stopped from going to university. We know now that that of course is very, very silly, but back then they thought, oh no, women shouldn't be able to learn all these interesting things and so women were held back. But Zheng Zhenxiang had other ideas. She said, I'm going to university to find out all about archaeology. And she was tremendously successful. Because Zheng Zhenxiang was the person who discovered the tomb of this very important priestess and warrior and princess called Fu Hao. And she discovered that quite recently in 1976. So only about, what's that about 45 years ago, only about 44 years ago, that's when she discovered it. So it's still quite new. Considering it had been buried for thousands of years it was only recently discovered. And Zheng Zhenxiang is now a leading expert in the whole world on the Shang Dynasty and I love the Shang Dynasty so I'm so happy that we're finding out about Zheng Zhenxiang. So I'm going to tell you the story now about how Zheng Zhenxiang discovered this amazing tomb because it's a really interesting story. So Zheng Zhenxiang heard about this old abandoned house and she had an inkling from what she knew already about the Shang Dynasty that this could be an important site. And so she took a team with her and she went to investigate and you can see here, here's Zheng Zhenxiang leading a team of other archaeologists. And she started to dig out the site and they do that using something called a probe. Say that word probe, probe, probe. And a probe is it's kind of like a metal stick that you stick down into the ground and it can help you to see what's underground or feel what's underground without having to do a big digging excavation. And so, Zheng Zhenxiang said, let's put a probe down to see if there's anything down here. And that probe went down five metres. Five metres, well, I'm not even two metres so to get to five metres you'd have to put like three grownups on top of each other. It'd be something like that, three grownups on top of each other. That's how far down the probe went 'cause Zheng Zhenxiang said I think they are buried deep, deep, deep, after thousands of years, there might be something five metres down, but nothing came back. Nothing came back from the probe. And a lot of the people said, I don't think that there's anything down here we should give up. But Zheng Zhenxiang said no I'm sure that there's some things down here. And so she carried on digging three more metres and that's when they found some red paint and a hard surface. And they knew, Zheng Zhenxiang knew then that there was a tomb under there buried deep, deep, underground there was a tomb. A tomb is a room where somebody is buried and she said, "This is going to be from the Shang Dynasty "and now we need to dig it all up." So just look at it she persevered and carried on. And once you find a tomb, there's some new vocabulary 'cause I know that you love to learn your new historical vocabulary. Once you find a tomb, then it's important to very carefully dig all of the mud out and all the dirt out so you're just left with the objects and the things that are there. And when we dig away all of the different things and find the objects, then that's called excavating a site. Okay, so excavate. Say that word, excavate. Your turn, excavate. Excavate, saying it over and over again will help you to remember, excavate, finding out what's in that tomb. And I'll show you a picture now, here is a real picture of when they were excavating the tomb of Fu Hao. And she found lots of objects and of course, because she's a good archaeologist, she took them back to university. You can see her here studying these artefacts, she used porcelain, which is kind of like what your plates are made out of at home. She used that to recreate anything that was broken so that she could study in depth exactly what it was like for the Shang Dynasty. That's the story of Fu Hao, how she went to university, study archaeology had an idea about going to a site where she thought there might be a burial site. Probe down, was told by everybody, no, there's nothing down here. But said, no, we have to carry on digging we can't give up and discovered this incredible tomb of Fu Hao who we are going to learn about it in a moment. So it's your turn, it's your turn now. Can you remember that whole story of Fu Hao and draw a picture map? So what I'd like you to do is think about that story of Fu Hao. If you want to rewind and listen to that again then you can. Draw a picture map showing how Zheng Zhenxiang discovered the tomb of Fu Hao. So the first bit you might like to draw a picture of Zheng Zhenxiang with all of their books at university learning all of the important knowledge about the Shang Dynasty. And draw a picture for each stage of her discovering the tomb. Pause the video and do that now. Amazing, so once they were in the tomb, this is what they discovered. Are you ready for a picture of what it was like in the tomb? This is the picture of the tomb. It was almost perfectly intact, okay. Almost everything was untouched. So sometimes when people find ancient tombs, like grave robbers have been in there, they might have broken stuff, things are being damaged over time, they might have stolen stuff. But Fu Hao's tomb was completely intact, it was untouched. And so they had all of these amazing objects. What objects I hear you ask, what objects did they find in there, I'll show you. The objects that they found get ready, because there are a lot of objects in Fu Hao's tomb which tells us just how important she was cause there's so many objects. In her tomb there were, get ready, there were, 755 jade objects, 564 bone objects like hairpins and arrowheads carved out a bone. There were 468 bronze objects, including kind of vessels which are like cups or pots made out of bronze. And there were 130 weapons in those pots. There were 23 bells, there were 27 knives. There were four mirrors and there were four tiger statues. That's not all, there are 63 stone objects, objects made out of stone. There were 11 pottery objects, different kinds of pots and vases. There were five ivory objects. Ivory is a kind of material so it's like from an elephant's tusk, we don't use anymore because you have to kill elephants or rhinoceroses to get it which is very cruel. But back then they would use it. And there were 6,900 cawrie shells, were about 6,900 cowrie shells. And remember, a cowrie shell, they are those little seashells and it's what the Shang used as money. So that's like today being buried with like a million pounds in bank notes and just like a million pounds being put in a tomb. That's what they found in her tomb. So this is really useful evidence for historians, right? They found all of this evidence in the tomb. What I'd like you to do is look at those different objects and draw what you think they might have looked like. I'm going to show you in a minute what they really look like. But before I show you, choose any of those objects and based on your knowledge of the Shang Dynasty so far, can you draw what you think they would have looked like. Pause the screen and draw some artefacts from Fu Hao's tomb now. Great, I'd love to see some of those pictures. Don't forget at the end there's the hashtags that you can use to send it in so that I can see them. Let's have a look at what the artefacts really are 'cause we can see these artefacts. So let's have a look at what artefacts they really found. There were these mysterious little sort of figurines figures. We don't know who this is must've been somebody important to Fu Hao though the person that was buried there. There was this kind of, I think it's made out of jade as well. It's kind of like a dragon pendant. It's fascinating isn't it? Have a look closely at that. I'm going to make the screen bigger so you can see closely. There was this kind of vessel or pot that was actually used for wine. So it was used for pouring wine probably during religious ceremonies. There were all of these cowrie shells that they used as money, thousands and thousands and thousands, almost 7,000 of them. There was this, you might remember this, what's this? Who can remember what this was from a few lessons ago? That's an axe is that. So you put a wooden stick onto that and turn it into an axe. And lastly, there was this bronze sort of like pots. Maybe it was a maybe it was a sort of just to carry things to keep things in. Okay, so I'm going number of these now. So we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You can see six artefacts there. And what I would like you to do is I would like you to pause the video and think what would these different artefacts tell us about Fu Hao. This is the job that Zheng Zhenxiang had. She had these artefacts and she thought, okay, I found a tomb of somebody, they are buried, these are the objects, what can I infer, what can I work out about this person based on the objects I can see? So pause the video and answer that question now. Awesome, I hope that you've used the numbers there to say number one, these figurines could tell us that Fu Hao how was advised by this very important person and so she wanted a figurine to remind her. Very interested to hear about different historical analysis of those different sources. So we have since pieced together and worked out exactly who this tomb belong to. Because remember those oracle bones, there was somebody in the oracle bones it was mentioned lots and lots of times. And that person was called Fu Hao, and Fu Hao was a kind of, well, we're going to find out all about her. But perhaps her two most important roles is she was a great warrior and she was a great priestess, she led religious ceremonies. She lived during the time of this emperor in the Shang Dynasty, and his name is Wu Ding. And Wu Ding was emperor the Shang Dynasty and he went to different tribes and because he didn't want any of those different tribes to rebel against him or to attack him. And so one of his tactics that is he would get one of the girls, one of the women from each tribe and he would marry them. And so Wu Ding had over 60 wives from the different tribes. And that was a tactic he would use to try and make sure that nobody rebelled against him because he would say, well, look, my wife lives there. And one of his wives was this person here, has a statue and this is Fu Hao. She was just a normal sort of peasant girl and wasn't sort of from the nobility would have been in the working class that we looked at before, but she was married to Wu Ding. And she very quickly rose to be one of the most important people in the Shang Dynasty. You can see a statue of her there, and that's where her tomb is now in Anyang in China. So what do we know about Fu Hao? Well, one of the things we know is that she was a priestess. She led different religious ceremonies and she would do the pyromancing that we looked at earlier with the oracle bones where people put hot sticks into the oracle bones and ask questions to the ancestors. She wasn't just a priestess though she was a great general. A general is a military leader. Somebody that leads an army and Fu Hao led lots of armies into battles and fought in those battles. There were actually a few. So you might be thinking, those was thousands of years ago, were women allowed to be in the army then? And the answer is, in ancient China we do have some evidence that there were female generals and female warriors who would go and fight in wars and lead armies. And Fu Hao is the most successful example that we have. Because she was a great warrior and she never lost a battle. In fact, there was one tribe who the Shang Dynasty had been fighting with for years and years and years, they were called the Tu Fang tribe. And they were defeated in a big battle by Fu Hao and her army. So she was very, very successful as a priestess and as a general and as a warrior and she was even successful as a politician so somebody led the country. So when leaders from other countries or other states would go to the Shang Dynasty, Wu Ding didn't always meet them to discuss the different matters, Fu Hao would sometimes meet them. So she was an incredible woman with all of these different talents and all of these different jobs. So to put together all of our knowledge about Fu Hao, this amazing woman from the Shang Dynasty. I've got some sentences here but I've been in little bit naughty and I've scrambled up all the sentences, okay. I've scrambled up all the different chunks. And your job is to look at the sentence and see if you can unscramble it to make a sentence that makes sense. So for example, our first sentence here if you look at that top line it says, was discovered in 1976 the tomb of Fu Hao. So two different parts to the sentence there but they are jumbled up in the wrong order. So I write that out, that new sentence, I would need to write that out as the tomb of Fu Hao was discovered in 1976. So I'm using the same words, was discovered in 1976 the tomb of Fu Hao but I put it in the correct order and you can see I've used my capital letters and full stops in the correct places. The tomb of Fu Hao how was discovered in 1976. See if you can have a go at the other five sentences, read the different parts carefully, unjumble them so they write a sentence that makes sense. Pause the video and do that now. Great, okay, let's see how successful you were. If you've got a different colour pen then you can get a different colour pen to mark your work to see if you were correct. And if you've got it wrong, don't worry 'cause now is a chance to edit it. So let's look at some of those answers. So, the second sentence the correct answer was, Fu Hao was a very successful military general, tick or fix. The next one, the next sentence was, Wu Ding married over 60 women from different tribes. Our next sentence, almost 7,000 cowrie shells were found in Fu Hao's tomb. Our next sentence, Fu Hao was a priestess as well as a military leader and a politician and all sorts of other interesting things. And lastly, everything in Fu Hao's tomb was found untouched. That's what we know about Fu Hao, that's what we found out. Thanks to Zheng Zhenxiang, the first lady of Chinese archaeology, that amazing expert on the Shang Dynasty. We now know about this other amazing woman, Fu Hao, this warrior priestess, who never lost a battle, was a politician. And I'm really, really grateful to Zheng Zhenxiang for finding out all of that stuff so that I can learn more about the Shang Dynasty and this amazing person the past. So that's it for today's lesson. We've learned all about Fu Hao, who she was, how she was discovered. I'd love to see some of your work, I love to read it it makes my day. So if you've got your parent or carer, when they're not too busy, then if you ask them to take a photo of your work and post it on Twitter and use those hashtags, #learnwithoak and the handle is @OakNational. So if they use that, if they put that in their tweet with the photo, then I will see it. 'Cause I search for that every night and I will be able to see it and see your work and I'll write back to you. In our next lesson, we are going to be learning all about how the Shang Dynasty ended. And it's sad because it's our final lesson learning about the Shang Dynasty. We've learned loads so far. We've learned about how the Shang Dynasty began, some of the important events during the Shang Dynasty and so we're going to finish with how the Shang Dynasty came to an end in about 1066 BC. Look forward to seeing you then. Please share your work with me so that I can see it. Well done for working so hard. Bye.

Who was Fu Hao?

Who was Fu Hao?

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UnitHistory / The Shang Dynasty

History