Liangzhu, a 5,000-Year-Old City Near Hangzhou, Joins the World Heritage List

The Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on 6 July 2019. The site lies in the north-western suburbs of Hangzhou, about 25 kilometres from West Lake, and dates from roughly 3300 to 2300 BCE. It is the strongest material evidence that a complex society with a capital, an elite and large public works existed in China some 5,000 years ago.

What was found

Liangzhu culture has been known since 1936, when a young museum employee excavated black pottery and stone tools near the town of that name. The scale of what lay there emerged only in recent decades. In 2007 archaeologists identified the walls of a city, and from 2015 they confirmed a system of dams in the hills to the north.

The inscribed property has four parts. The walled city covers about 880 hectares, with a raised palace platform at its centre, an inner and outer enclosure and waterways that served as streets. The Yaoshan site is an altar and cemetery of the elite. Two groups of dams, eleven in total, controlled floodwater and stored it for transport and irrigation; they are the earliest known hydraulic system of this size in the world, older than those of Mesopotamia.

The society that built them grew rice in the wetlands of the Yangtze Delta, and produced enough surplus to feed a population of specialists. It left no writing, though symbols are incised on some pottery.

The jades

Liangzhu is best known for its jade. The elite tombs contained more than 4,000 pieces, above all the cong, a tube that is square outside and round inside, and the bi, a flat disc. Many carry the same motif: a figure in a feathered headdress above a wide-eyed beast. The largest cong weighs 6.5 kilograms and is known as the King of Cong. The forms outlived the culture by millennia, and collectors of the Qing court owned Liangzhu jades without knowing their age.

Visiting

There are two places to see. The Liangzhu Museum, a restrained travertine building by David Chipperfield in a park at Liangzhu Cultural Village, displays the jades, pottery and tools. A few kilometres away, the Archaeological Site Park opened in 2019 on the city itself, with paths and electric shuttles between the palace mound, the wall sections and the reconstructed cemeteries. The remains are earthworks, and the park depends on imagination and good signage more than on monuments; allow half a day for the two, and book the park in advance.

The site adds a third World Heritage property to Hangzhou, with West Lake and the Grand Canal. It combines well with a stay in the tea hills, at Amanfayun, or with a morning in the Longjing tea fields.