| I share the same feeling with you, but I gradually grow out of it. Why? it happens all the time. Information will decay (and it's probably a Poisson process). Let's start from events happened in the ancient past 1. 尚书，the Book of Documents It has been largely lost. The "New Text" version is only a portion left. The "Recovered Old Text" version was made up by someone. It was said the there used to be 3240 articles and Confucius reduced it to 120 articles. Where did the rest go? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents 2. Also it was mentioned in the Book of Documents that "唯殷先人，有典有冊"(my translation: your Yin ancestors have scrolls and books). Yin is another name of Shang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty So where did those books go? Where did the Xia and earlier documents go? 3. Needless to say: the First Emperor burned a lot of books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o... Interestingly, the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips are documents preserved prior to the First Emperor burning of the books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips Also I think it's "lucky" that Qin reunified China. Qin uses Small Seal Scripts which is closer to the Large Seal Scripts that Zhou uses. The other states? Their font changed too much. Chinese would have been different had one of the other states won. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script BTW the Zhongshan state's scripts are very artistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_(state) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%... https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B... 4. The Nine Cauldrons Where did they go? Lost in the river? When the Zhou king left the capital, he probably brought a lot of documents with him. Where did they go? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons 5. 石鼓文， The Stone Drum Writings I call it China's Rosetta Stone. They were still intact by Song dynasty. People cherished them so much and even embedded gold to the strokes. What happened next? When the northern invaders came, they cut out the gold pieces and in the process destroyed the writings. Sigh.... https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87 I will stop here. There are so many of these events in more recent history. It's the nature I guess.... |
The Zhongshan scripts are beautiful indeed.
However, the major difference that I perceive between the Cultural Revolution (CR) and most of your examples is that in the case of the CR, we're talking about millions of people deliberately destroying stuff out of a mix of spite, arrogance, and folly. Whereas, bar the presence of evidence to the contrary, I would assume some of the artifacts you mentioned were simply lost to entropy. The ancient Chinese lacked the technology/know-how/capability to preserve those things. Circumstances may have forced them to abandon some of those artifacts. They probably did their best, in carving those things in relatively durable material like bronze and marble.
The only comparable example among those that you listed would be the burning of books and burying of scholars. (I know the burying of scholars is disputed.) But even then, it was mostly an idea that probably only very few people believed was good. The other people who cooperated (by turning in hiding scholars and hidden scrolls to the authority) probably did it out of fear for punishment.