Chinese legends hold that the creator, Pan Ku , was born from the egg of chaos and grew to fill the space between Yin, the earth, and Yang, the heavens. For eighteen thousand years Pan Ku chiselled the earth to its present state with the aid of a dragon, a unicorn, a phoenix and a tortoise. When he died his body became the soil, rivers, and rain, his eyes the sun and moon, while his parasites transformed into human beings. A pantheon of semi-divine rulers known as the Five Sovereigns followed, each reigning for a hundred years or more and inventing fire, the calendar, agriculture, silk-breeding and marriage. Later a famous triumvirate included Yao the Benevolent who abdicated in favour of Shu . Shu toiled in the sun until his skin turned black and then he abdicated in favour of Yu the Great , tamer of floods and said to be the founder of China's first dynasty, the Xia . The Xia was reputed to have lasted 439 years until their last degenerate and corrupt king was overthrown by the Shang dynasty. The Shang was in turn succeeded by the Zhou , who ended this legendary era by leaving court histories behind them. Together, the Xia, Shang and Zhou are generally known as the Three Dynasties.

As far as archeology is concerned, homo erectus remains from Liaoning, Anhui, Beijing and Yunnan provinces indicate that China was already broadly occupied by human ancestors well before modern mankind began to emerge 200,000 years ago. Excavations of more recent Stone-Age sites show that agricultural communities based around the fertile Yellow River and Yangzi basins, such as Banpo in Shaanxi and Homudu in Zhejiang, were producing pottery and silk by 5000 BC. It was along the Yellow River, too, that solid evidence of the bronze-working Three Dynasties first came to light, with the discovery of a series of large rammed-earth palaces at Erlitou near Luoyang, now believed to have been the Xia capital in 2000 BC.

Little is known about the Xia, though their territory apparently encompassed Shanxi, Henan and Hebei. The events of the subsequent Shang dynasty, however, were first documented just before the time of Christ by the historian Sima Qian , and his previously discredited accounts have been supported in recent years by a stream of finds. Based over much the same area as their predecessors and lasting from roughly 1750 BC to 1040 BC, Shang society had a king, a class system and a skilled bronze technology which permeated beyond the borders into Sichuan and produced the splendid vessels found in today's museums. Excavations on the site of Yin, the Shang capital, have found tombs stuffed with weapons, jade ornaments, traces of silk and sacrificial victims - indicating belief in ancestor worship and an afterlife. The Shang also practised divination by studying the pattern of fire cracks through questions incised on tortoiseshell and bone, surviving examples of which provide China's earliest written records , covering topics as diverse as rainfall, dreams and ancestral curses.

Around 1040 BC a northern tribe, the Zhou , overthrew the Shang, expanded their kingdom west of the Yellow River into Shaanxi and set up a capital at Xi'an. Adopting many Shang customs, the Zhou also introduced the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven : a belief justifying successful rebellion by declaring that heaven grants ruling authority to leaders who are strong and wise, and takes it from those who aren't - still an integral part of the Chinese political perspective. The Zhou consequently styled themselves "Sons of Heaven" and ruled through a hierarchy of vassal lords, whose growing independence led to the gradual dissolution of the Zhou kingdom from around 600 BC. Driven to a new capital at Luoyang, later Zhou rulers exercised only a symbolic role; real power was fought over by some two hundred city states and kingdoms during the four hundred years known as the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods.

This time of violence was also a time of vitality and change. As the feudal system broke down, traditional religion gave way to new ideas based on the writings of Kong Fuzi, or Confucius , and also on Taoism and Legalism. As the warring states rubbed up against each other, agriculture and irrigation, trade, transport and diplomacy were all galvanized; iron was first smelted for weapons and tools, and great discoveries made in medicine, astronomy and mathematics. Three hundred years of war and annexation reduced the competitors to seven states, whose territories, collectively known as Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom , had now expanded west into Sichuan, south to Hunan and north to the Mongolian border. The fighting came to an end only in the third century BC with the rise of a new dynasty - the Qin