History

Liangzhu was unknown to the modern world until 1936, when amateur archaeologist Shi Xingeng discovered painted black pottery and jade objects near the village of Liangzhu in what is now Hangzhou’s Yuhang District. Systematic excavation began after 1950 and intensified from the 1980s onwards, progressively revealing the outlines of a city of remarkable scale. In 2007, the discovery of the ancient city walls — stone-faced earthen ramparts enclosing 300 hectares — transformed the interpretation of the site from a “culture” to a “city-state”. The hydraulic system, discovered by LIDAR survey and confirmed by excavation, was dated to approximately 3100–2900 BC and comprised low dams, high dams, and flood storage reservoirs capable of managing large-scale inundation events in the low-lying delta environment.

The civilisation collapsed around 2300 BC. Sediment analysis and flood deposit evidence strongly suggest that a catastrophic rise in sea level and river flooding inundated the city and made the agricultural system untenable. The Liangzhu people appear to have dispersed northward and westward, carrying their jade traditions with them: the taotie face motif on Liangzhu cong reappears, 1,500 years later, on Shang Dynasty bronze vessels, suggesting a remarkable thread of cultural continuity across the Bronze Age transition that followed the Neolithic collapse.

UNESCO’s 2019 inscription — after a decade of Chinese government nomination efforts — was a formal recognition that Liangzhu constitutes “exceptional testimony to the existence of a 5,000-year-old civilisation and early state in China,” placing it alongside Ankor Wat, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Mesopotamian city sites as one of the defining monument complexes of early human civilisation.