Liangzhu Jade: Dawn of Civilization

Hello, my name is Wang Yan and I’m a reporter with NewsChina. With our weekly podcast, we aim to provide insight into the trends and happenings in modern China through a historical lens.

Today we discuss how the jade wares from one of China’s earliest civilizations were discovered and used in rites for heaven and earth worship.

More than 100 priceless relics were displayed at the exhibition “The Making of Zhongguo – Origins, Developments and Achievements of Chinese Civilization” at China’s Palace Museum. Among the treasured objects, two stand out as representative of their kind – jade cong (琮), a tube-like vessel with a square outer section around a circular inner part. 

One is the Liangzhu jade cong from the Zhejiang Provincial Museum collection. It was displayed at the center of the hall. The other one, owned by the Palace Museum, also originates from Liangzhu culture. To illustrate their importance, they were displayed together with the He Zun（何尊）, the oldest ancient bronze vessel bearing the characters for China.

With its exquisite design and unique shape, jade cong were collected by the imperial family during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Qianlong, the longest-reigning Qing emperor known for his knowledge of Chinese traditional culture, modified them. Inner containers and lids were added to some, while on others he inscribed poems on their insides. However, their meaning or purpose remained a mystery. The emperor proposed they were a part from horse-drawn carriages from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE).

In the Qing’s waning years of the early 20th century, epigraphists learned the jade cong were ritual vessels used for heaven and earth worship. However, they still did not know who made them. Qianlong would likely have never modified the jade cong if he knew their historical significance.

Their secrets were finally revealed with the discovery of Liangzhu culture, which flourished in China’s lower Yangtze River Basin. 

The Liangzhu were first discovered in 1936 when Shi Xingeng（施昕更）, a 24-year-old employee at Westlake Museum (now the Zhejiang Provincial Museum) noticed that some pottery fragments at the museum resembled those found in the fields around his hometown of Liangzhu, Zhejiang Province. He wondered if they came from some ancient civilization. He submitted his findings to the museum and government, and received a research grant.  

From late 1936 to 1937, he conducted preliminary surveys and excavations in Liangzhu where a wealth of stone and pottery wares were unearthed. In 1938, he released the Preliminary Report on the Black Pottery Ruins of Liangzhu-Hangxian （杭县）, becoming the first to discover Liangzhu ruins. Although renowned archaeologists, including Dong Zuobin （董作宾）and Liang Siyong （梁思永）had been involved in the excavation, they attributed the relics to Longshan culture, a late Neolithic culture of the Yellow River valley from about 3000 to 1900 BCE that as known for its black pottery.

Early on in the excavation, the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out. Shi Xingeng died of illness at 28 shortly after joining the army. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, little progress was made in the Liangzhu excavations. But in 1959, Xia Nai（夏鼐）, then director of the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, formally proposed that the Liangzhu was an independent cultural system. Also, jade cong and jade bi (ornamental discs) were unearthed from a Liangzhu tomb in 1973. Once regarded as relics from the Han Dynasty, these jades were in fact 2,000-3,000 years older.

During China’s deepening reform and opening-up in the 1980s, new achievements were also made in archaeology. On the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Liangzhu culture in 1986, an international academic conference on Liangzhu culture was held in Zhejiang Province. Alongside the conference, well-planned excavations were conducted and major breakthroughs were made. Eleven major Liangzhu tombs were unearthed at the Fanshan site. Jade pieces accounted for 90 percent of the total artifacts retrieved. At least 3,200 jade wares were discovered, with one tomb yielding about 500 pieces.

Coincidentally, major archaeological findings into the Hongshan culture in Liaoning Province and Sanxingdui culture in Guanghan, Sichuan Province, first discovered in the 1920s and 1930s, also drew global attention.

Finely designed Liangzhu jades vary in shape: bi (disc), cong (tube), yue (axe), huang (semicircle), zhu (bead), dai (belt) and many others. In Liangzhu culture, separate cemeteries for nobility and commoners show a clearly defined social hierarchy. Tombs for nobility were luxurious and spacious burial mounds, while tombs for commoners were much smaller and built nearer to settlements. Burial objects also reflected these class differences: jades for nobility and pottery or stone wares for commoners. Furthermore, jades found in noble tombs are large and mostly used for rituals. Jade pieces in common tombs are much smaller and served as jewelry.

Excavation of Liangzhu jades drew attention not only in the archaeological community but also among collectors, auction houses and publications. Museums worldwide revised their exhibits of Chinese jades to reflect the new discoveries as to their origins, names and purposes.

The Liangzhu Museum collection mainly comprises jade objects from noble tombs with bi, cong and yue accounting for the majority. These three categories of jade wares were reserved for the highest ranks of nobility. According to the Rites of Zhou (周礼), a Confucian classic on statecraft written in the 2nd century BCE, jade bi represented heaven and jade cong represented earth in ritual ceremonies. The bi and cong mentioned in the classic were found in the Liangzhu sites.

Who used these sophisticated ritual vessels? Jade yue, another item unearthed in large quantities in Liangzhu, held some clues.

 The yue resembles a battle axe. Many stone yue were found in tombs of commoners and lower nobles who served as soldiers. The common belief is that yue made from jade were only given to military leaders for ritual purposes.

Jade bi and yue rarely bore engravings. Jade cong, however, were decorated with finely engraved patterns by the most skillful craftworkers. Carvings on all jade cong featured taotie（饕餮）, a distinct design motif that involves a zoomorphic face common during the Shang and Zhou dynasties. The three-section cong from Zhejiang Provincial Museum and 12-section one from the Palace Museum in the Making of Zhongguo exhibition both have taotie, indicating they served the same purpose.

That is end of our podcast. Thank you to our writer Song Yimin, translator Liu Junhuan , and copy editor James Tiscione. We hope you enjoyed it and thank you for listening. See you next week.