The Shandong Provincial Museum has 1,319 pieces from Luo's oracle bones collection.

They were recovered from a Japanese arsenal at Dalian in Liaoning province after China won the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.

In the 1950s, the oracle bones were sent to Shandong and kept in the Shandong Provincial Museum.

How did Luo's collection end up in enemy hands in the first place?

Luo was the first academic who collected oracle bones being excavated near the present site of Xiaotun Village at Anyang in Henan province. This was where the capital of the Shang Dynasty was located.

After Luo died, however, his descendants sold his collection, with many of the oracle bones scattered both inside and outside China.

Another important collector was James Mellon Menzies, a Canadian who came to China in 1910, and who had gathered about 50,000 pieces of oracle bones by 1917.

He brought his collection to the Jinan-based Qilu University in 1932 when he went there to teach. In 1936, he returned home, and never came back because of the wars.

Menzies' collection later went to several museums in China, and 8,000 pieces are now with the Shandong Provincial Museum.

Unfortunately, many of those are small or crushed, and only 3,668 pieces are inscribed, according to Xu Bo.

The oracle bones are testaments to the shaman practices of the Shang Dynasty, when every important occasion involving kings and aristocrats needed divinations. The oracle bones themselves, contrary to belief, are not from dragons. They were mostly the shoulder blades of oxen, and the shells of tortoises and turtles.

During the divination ceremony, the date, the diviner's name and the question to the oracle were written on the bones, which were then heated until cracks appeared. These cracks were read as signs from the gods.

"When the kings wanted to make decisions, whether it be on national affairs or on going out hunting, they would seek an oracle for the success or failure," Xu explains. But for us, the oracle bones do not hold answers for the future. Instead, they tell us much about the past.

By Zhao Ruixue (China Daily)