2026 marks the 90th anniversary of the discovery of the Liangzhu ruins.
In 1936, scholar Shi Xin even discovered several pieces of black pottery in Liangzhu, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, opening the door to empirical research on the history of Chinese civilization of more than 5,000 years. On July 6, 2019, the "Liangzhu Ancient City Ruins" was successfully included in the World Heritage List, marking that China's civilization history of more than 5,000 years has been widely recognized by the international community.
Recently, during the fourth "Liangzhu Forum", scholars from many countries used Liangzhu as a sample to conduct cross-civilization comparisons around the occurrence mechanism and multiple paths of early civilizations, bringing Liangzhu further into the discussion of the genealogy of world civilizations.
From a piece of black pottery to an ancient city, Liangzhu research is experiencing a leap from "discovering ruins" to "interpreting civilization."
International dialogue: Putting Liangzhu into the pedigree of world civilizations
The key to exploring the origins of civilization lies in comparison. As a site that was discovered only 90 years ago, Liangzhu is quite "young", but its "rice farming-jade ceremony-ancient city" model has been re-examined by scholars in the context of global civilizations such as Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
According to Fu Daoxian, an academician of the British National Academy and a professor at the School of Archeology at University College London, ritual vessels such as jade bis and jade congs are the most touching parts of Liangzhu, but the premise for maintaining this ritual system is a stable and storable food foundation - rice.
"The rice planting process is complex, including irrigation and many other links. Reclamation, management and protection of contiguous rice fields and control of water sources are difficult to achieve by just a few people. It requires the collaborative work of the entire community." In Fu Daoxian's view, it is the collective effort required to manage rice that has paved the way for the subsequent construction of city walls, dams and other large-scale projects. "The grand water conservancy project in Liangzhu is to some extent the product of this collaborative culture."
Cereal agriculture in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt was dominated by wheat and barley. This type of crop is suitable for a semi-arid environment with significant seasonal differences. Rivers are almost the only stable water source. Since the birth of local agriculture, grain storage has been needed to cope with dry seasons. There was limited arable land in the valleys of ancient Egypt, which gave rise to competition for land very early on.
"The civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were born out of competition for scarce resources, while Liangzhu arose out of collective collaboration in fertile wetlands." He said that only by referencing different civilization trajectories can we more fully understand the diversity of early cities and complex societies.
Patrick Ryan Williams, dean of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, has long studied water and human transformation of the landscape. He said: "I was very excited to see the earthworks, dams, and reservoirs in Liangzhu, and how people used them to alleviate environmental constraints. This is a very far-sighted development in the history of human civilization."
In his opinion, although Liangzhu was discovered late and is very "young", it is one of the earliest cities in the world. He said that in the future, these cases will be brought into the classroom. “Contemporary young scholars should pay attention to early urban cases such as Liangzhu and learn from them how to better coexist with the environment and coexist with others.”
Multidisciplinary evidence: from a grain of rice to sea level rise
Empirical evidence is the skeleton of civilization exploration. Scientific and technological means such as botanical archaeology, environmental archaeology, and residue analysis are linking the "see things but not people" materials into a chain of evidence from industry to society.
In Liangzhu, one end of this evidence chain is a grain of rice that has been carbonized.
About 10,000 square meters of carbonized rice remains were revealed at the Chizhong Temple site in Liangzhu; 55,000 square meters of rice fields were discovered at the Maoshan site, with well-organized ridges and canals. Granaries, fields and water management interlock with each other, making "rice agriculture" no longer just a concept, but a traceable supply system.
However, the rice farming system is only the most conspicuous link in Liangzhu’s industrial network. The connections between people, animals, plants and even microorganisms are far more complex than a single crop.
Barbara Horace, academic director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute and professor at the University of Vienna, emphasized the need to study the process of the Neolithic Age from a multi-species perspective, such as paying attention to the relationship between humans and animals, plants, bacteria, fungi, and viruses.
Environmental archeology attempts to answer why Liangzhu prospered and why it declined.
Wang Zhanghua, a professor at East China Normal University, put forward a conjecture about the environmental evolution of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River: about 6,300 years ago, the sea level in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River stabilized, attracting population gathering; about 5,400 to 4,900 years ago, floods and other extreme events occurred frequently, and Liangzhu's early hydraulic system may have been a response to this climate; between 4,500 and 4,400 years ago, the sea level may have risen sharply by about one meter in a century, accompanied by seawater intrusion. "This is likely to cause the water conservancy project to fail and become an important reason for the abandonment of Liangzhu Ancient City."
Research isn’t just about plants and the environment. Lana Özbal, professor of archeology at Koc University in Turkey, said that researchers restored the early dairy processing technology by detecting butterfat residues in pottery in northwest Anatolia. "When we jump out of the anthropocentric perspective, we will see an extremely important dimension of the new lifestyle."
From carbonized rice and rice field canals to pottery residues and sea level records, multidisciplinary exchanges not only pieced together the evidence chain in Liangzhu, but also gave every field involved a new perspective.
Spiritual Decoding: Let Silent Sites “Speak”
If the empirical answer is "what", spiritual decoding asks "how to be civilized".
Patrick Ryan Williams shares his research at the Cerro Ball site in Peru. This important southern town of the Wari Empire has a temple on the top of the mountain and palaces, handicraft workshops, breweries and large warehouses at the foot of the mountain. The building faces the snow-capped mountains and mountain gods. Some pottery has been tested to come from hundreds of kilometers away. The temple also leaves traces of the blending of beliefs of different ethnic groups.
He used this to explain that the Wari regime relied on tolerating local beliefs and integrating different groups of people to continue to prosper on the border for hundreds of years - this echoed the Liangzhu unity of society through unified beliefs and jade rituals, forming a cross-oceanic connection.
Nechimi Karul, a professor of prehistoric archeology at the Faculty of Literature of Istanbul University in Türkiye, showed a building ruins with columns covered with figures of humans and animals. In his view, the buildings of early agricultural settlements were not just shelters but devices of collective memory. “Symbolic carvings such as public buildings, stone pillars, and passages in early agricultural settlements in the upper reaches of the Tigris River brought people together and provided a stable place for rituals, collaboration, and knowledge transfer.”
This construction of a spiritual world can also be traced in Liangzhu society.
Wang Ningyuan, a researcher at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, believes that Liangzhu Plain was originally a place where different groups of people gathered and clashed. Around 5300 years ago, in order to effectively reconcile the conflicts, the Liangzhu ancestors used a "genius design" to break the situation - integrating the beliefs of all parties into a unified Liangzhu emblem, that is, the facial pattern of gods, humans and animals. From this, the ritual system and jade system were established, and the ancient city of Liangzhu was built.
Faced with the long-term standard of Western academic circles that writing, metallurgy, and cities are the "three elements" of civilization, Chinese scholars have proposed new plans for judging entry into a civilized society based on archaeological discoveries such as Liangzhu. Whether the standard of civilization is universal or diverse has become one of the most talked about topics in free discussions on the forum.
This is the important revelation that the 90th anniversary of the discovery of the Liangzhu ruins has brought to the world: the origins and development paths of human civilization are diverse, and a single template should not be used to cover ancient civilizations in different regions. It is more important to understand the diversity of civilizations than to stick to a single conclusion.
From Shi Xingeng’s black pottery to today’s international dialogue, what has been accumulated over the past 90 years is not only a history of archaeological discoveries, but also a set of “grammar” that allows civilization to be understood by the world.
"Knowing how to cherish this diversity of civilizations may be a gift that Liangzhu left to today's world." Fu Daojian said.
