SocietyEast Asia

Liangzhu

3,301 BCE – 2,301 BCE

A jade city with dams, a thousand years before China's first dynasty

In depth

Liangzhu was long dismissed as peripheral, but excavation shows a planned city of three square kilometres with a water system requiring nearly a million cubic metres of moved earth. Jade axes and discs in the graves follow a strict order of rank. The find pushed the starting point of Chinese civilisation back several centuries, and away from the Yellow River alone.

For children

In the Yangtze delta stood a city with earthworks, canals and the oldest known dam system in the world. Its craftsmen carved jade so finely that no one has managed to reproduce it with stone tools. Then the city vanished, probably in a flood.

Connects to

Rice domesticated on the Yangtze8,001 BCE
The first cities3,501 BCE

Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org