These Oracle Bones, apart from being one of the great archaeological discoveries of the last century, are probably the earliest form of Chinese fortune-telling known. The kings of the Shang dynasty (1500 BC - 1030 BC) appear to have made most of the important decisions in their lives by consulting the bones, thereby neatly dodging the decision-making dilemma which dogs most politicians. Any problem, they simply called for their resident diviner and had him enlist the help of the Oracle Bones which answered with a simple "yes" or "no".

A question was posed: Should the King go hunting? Will it rain? Should the king declare war on a certain tribe? If the king welcomes the spirits by performing on the drum, will there be no disaster?

The diviner took a tortoise shell into which rows of shallow holes had been cut, and placed a piece of red-hot charcoal into one of the holes so that cracks formed on the surface of the shell. No one today knows how the cracks were interpreted, what sort of crack was lucky, what sort indicated bad fortune, but one Oracle Bone expert in Hongkong, Dr Tong Kin-woon, said one possibility is that vertical crack lines had no meaning while cracks to either side were lucky or unlucky depending on whether they pointed upwards or downwards.

Why tortoise shells? The ancient Chinese credited tortoises with great intelligence and very long memories. The shoulder-bones of oxen were also sometimes used).

The question was often scratched onto the bone after it had been cracked with the characters arranged around the cracks. Often the question was put in a positive manner on one side of the bone: "If there is an eclipse of the sun, will it be auspicious?", and in a negative manner on the other side: "If there is an eclipse of the sun, will it be inauspicious?" The answers as revealed by the cracks were compared and a decision made.

Sometimes a report was added to indicate the result of the divination. For instance, the diviner may ask: Should the king go hunting? An inscription added subsequently adds that the king DID go hunting and caught a tiger.

One of the most famous inscriptions so far deciphered comes from the thirteenth century BC. Roughly translated, it reads:

"On a certain day, the bone was cracked and Ku performed a divination for the king, asking: 'Would there be no disaster for the king in the next ten days?' The king studied the crack and said: 'This shows signs of bad omens. Record it as such.'
"On the following day, the king went hunting big-horned animals. His servant drove the horse carriage for him. A stone hindered the carriage and the King and Prince Yang fell to the ground."

The inscriptions sometimes refer to offerings and sacrifices made to the Four Winds, which appear to have been treated as gods. This may be half a clue to the later development of Chinese geomancy called Fengshui, which literally means "wind and water".

In 1977, a hoard of very special Oracle Bones was found near the ancient capital of Xian in central China -- the inscriptions on them were written in characters so small, it requires a microscope to read them. These oracle bones have baffled the experts, but one theory is they were contain predictions so sensitive politically that they were considered to be "state secrets", the ancient equivalent, perhaps, of a top secret microfilmed file.

After the Shang kings were overthrown by the armies of the next dynasty, the Zhou, around the year 1030 BC, the use of Oracle Bones to foretell the future fell into disuse. The bones were lost in the ruins of the Shang capital, which crumbled into ruins, and was buried and forgotten. Knowledge of the bones and their use passed out of human ken, to be rediscovered in the dying years of the Chinese empire in late 19th century.

Peasants in the area who came across the bones sold them to interested collectors, but in the late 1920s, proper archaeological "digs" were organised which turned up over 150,000 pieces of Oracle Bone.

But the Japanese invasion of central China in 1937 ended the organised search. The best of the Oracle Bones were packed up in crates to save them from destruction and they began a bizarre 12-year odyssey around China, moving with the Nationalist Chinese government, first to the wartime capital of Chungking, and finally in 1949 to Taiwan as the Communist armies of Mao Tsetung conquered the mainland.

When the crates were finally re-opened in Taipei in the early 1950s, it was found that most of the already-fragile Oracle Bones had shattered during their travels. One man, Chang Ping- chuen, has spent more than 30 years trying to fit them back together again like the pieces of thousands of jigssaws jumbled up together.

The Oracle Bones seem to have been for the use only of Shang royalty -- even nobles were forbidden to use this method of determining the "will" of the gods and ancestors. A tradition was thereby established: fortune-telling in China was for a long time not for the use of ordinary people, but the preserve of the ruling classes, and specifically a tool for use in deciding state policy.

During the Zhou dynasty which followed the Shang, the use of Oracle Bones was replaced by other methods of divination. But the use of bones continued with some primitive tribes right up to modern times. A tribe in Yunnan province in southwest China has been found which still uses bone-cracking for divination. They use goat, buffalo or pig bones, put charcoal on the bone then recite an incantation, and interpret the cracks that appear on the bone. But they don't make inscriptions on the bone or drill holes in its surface.

Tortoise shells are also still used by many Chinese fortune- tellers today, but there appears to be little or no connection with the oracle bone divination methods of the Ancients. Many of today's fortune-tellers use a tiny tortoise shell simply as a container for three coins with which they consult the I Ching. They place the coins in the shell, shake them about then spill them out into a bowl in order to construct a Hexagram to be used to answer questions posed by clients.

But although China virtually forgot all about the Oracle Bones for two thousand years, there have always been clues to their existence lying about. The Chinese character for the word "to divine", for instance, is shaped much like a crack on an oracle bone -- (Bu ^ ).

The Oracle Bones were gradually replaced after the demise of the Shang dynasty by other methods of divination. The manipulation of a number of dried stalks of the yarrow plant (milfoil) became popular as a means of determining the will of Heaven, and the method is still in use today, with variations, both with the mystical classic, the I Ching and also used in Chinese temples when consulting the gods. To interpret answers received from the yarrow stalks, fortune-telling guides were compiled, of which only one, the I Ching, has survived (see I Ching section).

Sometimes both the tortoise shells and dried yarrow stalks were used at once. "When in doubt about important matters, consult the tortoise shells and milfoil stalks," says one classic text from the Han dynasty 2,000 years ago. "When the tortoise shell and the stalks are both opposed to the views of men, there is good fortune in stillness and ill-fortune in activity," another ancient text states.

The use of the yarrow stalks in conjunction with interpretive manuals such as the I Ching made the process of divination far simpler than it had been with the tortoise shells and their difficult-to-decipher cracks. Even so, the Oracle Bones were thought for a long time to be superior to yarrow stalks as a tool of divination. James Legge, in one of his many translations of the Chinese classics, tells the story of Duke Hsien of Tsin who was considering making his favorite concubine, the Lady Li, his wife. He consulted his diviners.

"The tortoise shell indicated that it would be unlucky, but the milfoil pronounced it lucky. The duke said: 'I will follow the milfoil.' The diviner by the tortoise shell said: 'The milfoil is reckoned inferior in its indications to the tortoise shell. You had better follow the latter.' The duke did not listen to the advice, and in consequence, the state was thrown into great turmoil after his death."

The Han dynasty scholar Wang Chung was a bitter enemy of most forms of fortune-telling and wrote a book entitled Discourses Weighed in the Balance (Lun Heng) which gives us some idea of the types of fortune-telling practices common during his lifetime (27-97 AD). He mentions chronomancers who specialised in choosing lucky and unlucky days, Fengshui experts, "phenomenologists" who interpreted natural phenomena as portents of the future and fortune-tellers who made predictions on the basis of the Five Elements and the date of a person's birth.

Nearly two thousands years on, all of these divination methods except for phenomenology are still alive in the Chinese world. And even with phenomenology, traces of its influence persist.

A couple of hundred years later, in the Three Kingdons period (221 - 265 AD), there lived an imperial minister and mathematician named Zhao Da who was said to be so good at divination that he could number locust swarms, and once used chopsticks to calculate that after an evening of mediocre entertainment, there was still plenty of wine and venison left in the house. The secret of his methods died with him as be refused to pass them on.

PHENOMENOLOGY - Very early on, the Chinese conceived of the idea that natural phenomena could be interpreted to foretell the future, and this idea of "phenomenology" played an important role in every dynasty in China's long history. Natural events in the sky or on earth all had meaning, and the resident experts had to be consulted as to whether they were auspicious or not. China's dynastic histories record countless eclipses, comets, meteor showers and other natural phenomena as having some supernatural, and political, significance. Good weather and good harvests were seen as a result of benign rule; floods, droughts, earthquakes, failed harvests were a reflection of a despotic, corrupt administration. Particularly hot summers and severe winters were viewed as Celestial raps on the knuckles for the Emperor. Especial significance was attached to natural disasters as a pre-cursor to a change of dynasty: they could indicate the gods were unhappy with the Emperor and that the Mandate of Heaven was about to be shifted.

The theory of phenomenology was of great use to rebels trying to overthrow a dynasty because they could point to certain unusual natural signs as proof that time for the present government had run out. By the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD), an Emperor had called for the burning of all books on the subject, and constant official attempts thereafter to suppressive such subversive ideas meant that by the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD) "phenomenology" as a recognisable school of divination had largely died out.

But even after the Communists took power in 1949, the notion of natural phenomena foretelling political events was still alive. In early 1976, soon after the death of Premier Chou Enlai, there was a spectacular meteor shower over parts of northern China which many took as a sign from heaven that changes were afoot. Then in July of that year, the city of Tangshan east of Peking was destroyed and a quarter of a million people killed by a massive earthquake. Two months later, the founder of the People's Republic of China, Chairman Mao Tsetung, died in the Forbidden City, once home of the Emperors of China. For many Chinese, these events were not unconnected.

Not everyone in ancient China believed in divination and portents. There was tradition of scepticism amongst many scholars who considered the various forms of fortune-telling to be baseless mumbo-jumbo.

"The divining stalks are so much withered grass, the tortoise shell is withered bone," wrote one Ming dynasty scholar. "They are but things, and man is more intelligent than things. Why not listen to yourself instead?"

A passage from the scholar Xun Zhong of the third century BC, as translated by H.H. Dubs in the 1920s, is equally adamant that signs from Heaven are best ignored:

"When stars fall or the sacred tree groans, the people of the whole State are afraid. We ask: Why is it? I answer: there is no (special) reason. It is due to an aberration of heaven and earth, to a mutation of the Yin and Yang. These are rare events. We may marvel at them, but we should not fear them. For there is no age which has not experienced eclipses of the sun and moon, unseasonable rain and wind, or strange stars seen in groups. If the prince is illustrious and the government tranquil, although these events should all come together in one age, it would do no harm. If the prince in unenlightened and his government bent on evil, although not one of these strange events should occur, that would do him no good."

The scholar Wang Chung (27-97 AD) was one of the most prominent sceptics: he argued that Heaven had no form and Earth was inert, and therefore neither could answer questions, listen to prayers or be affected in any way by what Man did. Divination is therefore a waste of time. Wang Chung also attacked the efforts of the Taoist mystics searching for ways to achieve immortality as being doomed to failure.

But although Wang Chung denied that man's actions affected Nature and the movements of heavenly bodies, he did believe that there was an influence the other way -- that the stars and planets had the power to influence the lives of human beings.

There was a strong link between fortune-telling and a number of the important advances made by the Chinese in science and technology.

Joseph Needham in his monumental work "Science and Civilisation in China" looks at the connections in a number of different fields. Chinese musical pipe instruments, for instance, developed from prototypes used in ancient times by shamans to determine the outcome of battles. They blew on their pipes before the battle and calculated the morale of their own troops and of the troops in the opposing army from the sound emitted, and then made a prediction of the outcome.

But the most famous invention related to Chinese fortune- telling is the compass. The story of its development also suggests that the game of chess was not invented in India as is usually thought, but had its roots in a form of Chinese divination. Needham's theory, which he backs up well, is that there was a very early form of divination in which a number of "chess-men" representing the Heavenly bodies were thrown onto a board, the answer to a question being revealed by the way the pieces fell. From this developed the game of chess, first using pieces named afer the planets, star constellations, the sun and the moon. (The centre of the modern Chinese chess board is still divided by a space known as the Milky Way, suggesting astrological origins.) Then at some stage, the chess pieces were militarised: the game changed from being a representation of heavenly forces to being a battle between two armies. Needham concedes that this last development may have taken place in India.

"Chess board" divination also developed in another direction which eventually led to the compass. The link was the Shi (or divining board as Joseph Needham calls it) -- a divining instrument already in use in the Han dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD). The Shi board was composed of two plates, a square Earth Plate (Di Pan) on top of which revolved a circular Heaven Plate (Tian Pan). The Heaven Plate was marked with twenty-four compass points and had at its centre a diagram of the Big Dipper (Great Bear) constellation. From very early on, the Chinese looked on the Big Dipper as an indicator of the seasons -- the constellation's tail turns in the sky, describing a full circle every year. Exactly how the board was used to predict future events is not now known, but the Heaven Plate must have been turned about the Earth Plate to represent the journey of the Big Dipper's tail through the Heavens. A magnetised spoon presumably representing the Big Dipper and probably made from lodestone was placed in the centre of the board and spun round. The handle of such a spoon would tend to point south as it stopped.

Needham quotes a fascinating passage from the Early Han dynastic history dealing with the attack of the Han forces in 23 AD on the palace of Wang Mang, only emperor of the short-lived Xin dynasty. Flames were engulfing the palace buildings and the palace maids and sevants were wailing in distress:

"Wang Mang, dressed all in purple and wearing a silk belt with the imperial seals attached to it, held in his hand the spoon-headed dagger of the Emperor Shun. An astrologicial official placed a diviner's board in front of him, adjusting it to correspond with the day and hour. And the emperor turned in his seat, following the handle of the ladle, and so sat. Then he said, 'Heaven has given the (imperial) virtue to me, how can the Han armies take it away?'"

But they did.

The spinning spoon atop the diviners' board led over the next few hundreds years to a magnetised iron needle floating in a bowl of water. How the connection was made is not clear, but Needham says there appears to have been a method of divination in ancient times which involved watching the shadow cast on the bottom of a bowl of water by a floating needle.

Slowly, Chinese diviners discovered that a piece of iron suspended or floating in water, will tend to point north-south. When the magnetic compass came into use in the West, it was decided the needle was pointing North: the Chinese considered it to be pointing south, and called the compass the South-Pointing Needle, a name still used today. The South-Pointing Needle became a very important tool for the Fengshui geomancers many centuries before it was adopted by ship's captains as an aid to navigation.

The reason for this seems to be that China was an agrarian society in which most water-borne traffic sailed along rivers or hugged the coast. Long sea voyages were rarely made by Chinese sailors.

But by the early 1100s, the compass was already being used by Chinese seamen venturing out of sight of land, a century before the compass was first mentioned in Europe. European scholars, however, once went to great lengths to try to prove that the Chinese picked up the compass from the West, or at least from Arab traders. Faced with the clear reference to the magnetic compass needle in Shen Gua's work, one scholar noted: "There is no immediately apparent ground on which this can be discredited."

Taoist adepts spent many centuries on a search peripherally linked to divination -- they sought ways to both achieve immortality and to turn base metals into gold and silver, two aims they shared with the alchemists of medireview Europe. They investigated various medications and breathing exercises which they hoped could turn a man into an Immortal, someone who lived forever in Taoist heaven. They also believed that many metals were related to each other, and slowly changed into one another as they lay buried in the earth. The idea was therefore to find some formula which could speed up the process in their alchemists' laboratories and produce an unending supply of precious metals.

They failed on both counts, but the Taoists believed they DID discover the secret to a satisfactory sex life: one should have sex as much as possible but the man should ejaculate as infrequently as possible. Robert van Gulik, author of the Judge Dee detective novels, translated one passage on the subject: "The art of commerce with women consists in refraining from ejaculation and causing the sperm to return and nourish the brain."

Marco Polo, the intrepid Venetian traveller, spent twenty years in China in the late thirteenth century under the auspices of the Mongol chieftain Kublai Khan, and his memoirs refer on a number of occasions to the astrologers and soothsayers he said were to be found in every city of the Empire.

At one point, he says the Khan learned from his astrologers that the Chinese residents of old Peking (which Marco Polo calls Khan-balik) were planning to rebel. So the Khan had a new city built next to the old one, and those residents whom he suspected of having rebellious intentions were forced to stay in the old city.

The city of Khan-balik, Marco says, had about five thousand astrologers and soothsayers who were given allowances of food and clothing every year by the Khan. The astrologers had "a sort of almanack in which are written the movements of the planets through the constellations, hour by hour, minute by minute, throughout the year", which is clearly recognisable as an ancestor of the almanacs still in use today (see Almanac section).

As to the work of these astrologers: "They search out and discover what sort of conditions each moon of the year will prooduce in accorance with the natural course and disposition of the planets and constellations and their special influences: in such-and-such a month there will be thunderstorms, in another earthquakes, in another lightning and heavy rain, in yet another deadly outbreaks of pestilence and wars and civil dissensions ... so they will make many little booklets in which they will set down everything that is due to happen in the course of the year, moon by moon."

Marco adds: "If any proposes to embark on some important enterprise or to travel somewhere on a trading venture or on other business, or has in mind some other project whose outcome he would like to know, he will consult the astrologers, telling them the year, month, hour and minute of his nativity. This he is able to do, because in accordance with their custom everyone is taught from birth what he must say about his nativity, and the parents are careful to note the particulars in a book. They divide the years into cycles of twelve, each with its own sign: the first bears the sign of the lion, the second of the ox, the third of the dragon, the fourth of the dog, and so on up to twelve."

Marco Polo also travelled extensively in southern China, and he reports that there too the astrologers were renowned for their accuracy. "When a marriage is planned the astrologers first investigate whether the bridegroom and bride are born under concordant planets. If so, it is put into effect; if not, it is called off. Great numbers of these astrologers, or rather magicians, are to be found on every square (of the cities)."

Chinese families still regularly check the birth dates of a couple considering marriage and consult with fortune-tellers to determine if they are a good match.

Marco Polo also reports one other form of Chinese divination (which thankfully has died out) used, he says, by ship's captain's to determine whether an intended voyage would be successful or not: the seamen would make a huge wickerwork kite and attach it to a long cable when there was a gale blowing. Then they would "find some fool or someone who is drunk -- for no one in his right sense would expose himself to so much risk", and lash him to the kite. The kite was then set upright so that the wind could carry it aloft.

"If the hurdle (kite) climbs straight up aloft, then it is said that the ship on whose behalf the experiment is being conducted will make a speedy and profitable voyage, and all the merchants flock to her to pay freight and passage money. If the hurdle fails to rise, no merchant will enter this particular ship, because they say that she could not complete her voyage and all sorts of diasters would overtake her. So this ship stays in port for that year."