Yan’s Urban Life and Final Days: From Prosperity to Decline

Today, we’ll continue to explore the daily life, social structure, and the mysterious decline of Yan’s capital and uncover how a once-thriving city was abandoned within centuries, leaving behind a legacy intertwined with both ritual practice and historical upheaval.

Transcript

Yan’s Urban Life and Final Days: From Prosperity to Decline

Today, we’ll continue to explore the daily life, social structure, and the mysterious decline of Yan’s capital and uncover how a once-thriving city was abandoned within centuries, leaving behind a legacy intertwined with both ritual practice and historical upheaval.

Before the discovery of the Jin Ding, another significant inscription had been unearthed from Tomb M251 on both the lid and the inner rim of a bronze li vessel known as the Boju Li. A bronze li vessel is a type of ancient Chinese ritual bronze vessel, characterized by its tripod form with three hollow legs and a bowl-like body. 

The inscription roughly reads: “Boju received a reward from the Marquis of Yan and, feeling deeply honored, cast this li vessel.” Both the Jin Ding and the Boju Li have become enduring witnesses to the origins of Beijing’s history. Their value extends far beyond archaeology – they provide important insights into the ritual system, food culture, and calligraphy of the Western Zhou. Today, both are treasured centerpiece artifacts at the Capital Museum in Beijing.

Tombs M251 and M253 are classified as medium-sized burials. The bronze inscriptions from these tombs reference two individuals: one who was rewarded by the Marquis of Yan, and another – Jin – who was entrusted to deliver offerings to the Duke of Shao across a long journey. Both were likely aristocrats of the Yan state; Jin may have even been a close younger relative of the Marquis himself. With the discovery of this noble burial ground, the question remained: where was the tomb of the Marquis of Yan that archaeology professor Zou Heng had long been searching for?

From 1981 to 1986, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Beijing municipal authorities launched another large-scale excavation campaign, revealing 214 tombs and 21 chariot-and-horse pits. Among them, Tomb M1193 stood out to archaeologist Yin Weizhang, then head of the Liulihe excavation team. This tomb was unusual – it had four burial ramps extending from its corners. At Yinxu (the Shang capital in Anyang), such four-ramp tombs were exclusively reserved for royals. However, M1193 had been badly looted: a large circular robbery pit in the center of the tomb chamber extended all the way to the bottom.

Yin Weizhang recalled, “The tomb owner must have been of extremely high status. Even if it’s been robbed, I had to excavate it. If it was completely looted, that’s just my bad luck.” On November 29, 1986 – the day before the excavation season ended – archaeologists reached the bottom of M1193. Snow was beginning to fall in the bitter winter cold. Racing against the impending ground freeze, the team hurried their efforts. But their hearts sank when they saw the looters’ pit, more than three meters in diameter, plunging straight into the burial chamber. As expected, most of the grave goods had already been stolen.

Suddenly, the staff member in charge of clearing the bottom of the tomb was struck by a remarkable sight. From the muddy water in the southeast corner of the burial pit, two complete bronze vessels with long inscriptions were unearthed – a bronze wine container lei and a bronze wine container he. The discovery brought cheers of excitement from the archaeologists on site.

Two months later, after rust removal and expert restoration, the two vessels quickly gained fame and were designated as national treasures. Each carries a 43-character inscription on the inner wall and the lid, with identical content but slight differences in layout:

“The King of Zhou said: Grand Protector (Duke of Shao), you have offered your sovereign an oath and clear wine. I am very pleased with your offerings. I now appoint Ke (son of the Duke of Shao) as the lord of Yan, to govern and oversee the people there. Upon Ke’s arrival in Yan, the region was incorporated into the territory of the Western Zhou. To commemorate this event, this precious vessel was made and inscribed.”

This inscription recounts the entire process of the Duke of Shao’s enfeoffment in Yan. The phrase “appoint Ke as lord of Yan” is considered crucial to determining the nature of the site. Based on the inscription, the two bronze vessels were named “Ke Lei” and “Ke He.” There is no doubt that Tomb M1193 belonged to the first ruler of the State of Yan, but scholars differ on the exact identity of the tomb’s occupant.

Yin Weizhang believes that Tomb M1193 is the burial site of the Grand Protector, the Duke of Shao himself. According to this view, he was appointed by King Wu as the first Marquis of Yan and personally took up his post. However, during the reigns of King Cheng and King Kang, he mainly served in the capital as Grand Protector and was only buried in Yan after his death. Other scholars argue that the tomb belonged to Ke, the Duke of Shao’s eldest son, who was appointed to rule Yan in his father’s place.

No matter who the tomb’s owner was, the inscriptions on the bronze vessels Ke Lei and Ke He confirm that this site was indeed the original fiefdom of the State of Yan during the early Western Zhou Dynasty. In 2021, a number of bronzes were unearthed from the tomb of the nobleman Zuo Cehuan, five of which bear inscriptions. One line reads: “The Grand Protector [Shaogong] built the city of Yan and held sacrificial ceremonies at the palace of the Marquis of Yan.” This not only reaffirmed the identity of the site, but also confirmed that regardless of who the first Marquis of Yan was, Shaogong himself had personally arrived at Yan to oversee the city’s construction. 

This highlights the strategic importance of Yan to the Zhou royal court and establishes Shaogong as the city’s earliest known “urban planner.” The excavation of the Liulihe site has thus pinpointed the exact location of the “Northern Yan” fief mentioned in The Hereditary House of Shaogong of Yan in Records of the Grand Historian, which states that “After King Wu of Zhou overthrew the tyrant Zhou of Shang, he enfeoffed Shaogong Shi in Northern Yan.” In recent years, as archaeological work has continued, scholars have begun to gain a clearer picture of what the capital of Northern Yan looked like.

After passing a line of tall, upright poplar trees marking the inner-city wall, one enters a large field of crops. “You’re now stepping into the CBD of the Yan State,” said Wang Jing, head of the Liulihe site excavation team. To the north of this so-called “CBD” lies the northern excavation zone, where newly discovered outer moats and outer city walls have been uncovered.

In the past, archaeologists had discovered only a single ring of fortifications at the Liulihe site, with a total area of around 600,000 square meters. But scholars always felt that the city walls of the Yan capital must have been more robust. After all, Zhouyuan – believed to have been the capital of the early and middle Western Zhou Dynasty – had two concentric rings of fortifications in its early phase and three in the middle and later phases. Wang Jing said: “During the Shang and Zhou periods, urban design had already adopted dual or even multiple layers of fortification. It wouldn’t make sense for the Yan capital to have been enclosed by just a single wall.” 

They never gave up. Starting in 2019, after about three years of exploration and excavation, the newly discovered outer moat and outer city wall confirmed the existence of an outer city at the Liulihe site. Prior to this, no Western Zhou feudal state site had ever revealed a two-layered city wall structure. The discovery of the dual fortifications at Liulihe provided concrete evidence that ancient city planners during the Shang and Zhou periods embraced the concept of multiple concentric city rings. 

It also demonstrated the strong influence the Western Zhou central authority exerted over its feudal states. Based on the location of the outer moat, the estimated scale of the city expanded from less than 600,000 square meters to approximately one million square meters. To put it in modern terms, what was once thought of as a city extending only as far as Beijing’s “Second and Third Ring Roads” has now been found to have reached as far as the “Sixth Ring Road,” breaking through traditional perceptions of the urban complexity of the Western Zhou Yan capital. However, for reasons unknown, radiocarbon dating shows that the outer moat was only in use during the early Western Zhou period and had been abandoned before the mid-Western Zhou – its usage lasting barely a century.

The abandonment process seems to reflect a natural social transition – the moat was gradually filled in layer by layer with ash and debris, perhaps eventually leveling off into flat ground. At this point, the ancestors of Yan’s capital carried out a deliberate large-scale burial of animals, resembling a ritual sacrifice. Later, the gradually neglected outer city area evolved into an ordinary burial ground for common folk.

After the moat was abandoned, archaeologists discovered a small civilian cemetery dating to the mid-Western Zhou period. These graves were arranged in an orderly manner, strongly suggesting a family burial ground. Wang Jing noted that until recently, there was no scientific method to verify such hypotheses. In recent years, a research team led by Ning Chao at Peking University extracted DNA from the human bones and, through high-resolution whole-genome sequencing, reconstructed the familial relationships among these commoners, effectively building their family tree.

Wang Jing explained, “They were buried together, so they probably lived together as well.” The family and social relationships reflected by this small cemetery area reveal the microstructure of society. While traditional historical texts and unearthed documents often record the lives of nobles and aristocrats, modern archaeology is now giving a voice to commoners, telling us how ordinary people lived, how they organized themselves, and how their communities functioned.

Looking south from the outer city, about 350 meters away stands the inner-city wall of the Yan capital. Near the northern center of this inner city is the second large rammed-earth architectural foundation – suspected by many to be the Yan Marquis’ palace – along with two large rammed-earth wells. The cross-sectional diagram of one of these wells, drawn from archaeological surveys, is quite astonishing: although the well opening is only about two meters wide, the diameter of the rammed-earth structure around it exceeds 25 meters.

At first, archaeologists did not understand why such a large rammed-earth area was used. Later, they speculated it was likely because the surrounding soil was poor in quality, with a high sand content, making vertical digging prone to collapse. Inside the inner city, several similarly large rammed-earth wells were discovered, some with accompanying facilities. These features may have served as distinctive markers of different urban units within the city.

This provides valuable clues for exploring the zoning and functional divisions of Western Zhou cities and will aid future research into the overall urban layout. After all, with wells of this enormous scale and the high construction cost involved, they must have been an important part of the architectural and urban planning units at that time.

Although it remains uncertain whether the second large rammed-earth architectural foundation is the Yan Marquis’s palace, the discovery of high-grade artifacts and building materials – such as divination tortoise shells and bones, primitive ceramics, bronze-mimicking pottery shards, roof tiles, and wall plaster – allows archaeologists to infer that it was at least an important, high-status structure. Whether it served as a palace, ancestral temple, or government office requires further investigation.

Careful observation of the rammed earth on the surface reveals subtle differences in color and texture even to the untrained eye. Wang Jing explained, “This is because the rammed earth inside the foundation is divided into three types.” Type C is yellow raw earth, well compacted and of the highest quality, dating to the early Western Zhou period. Type B is slightly later, consisting of a layer of yellow soil topped by a layer of bluish clay – this bluish clay is only found about five meters underground and is thought to have been constructed and used simultaneously with the wells. Type A is the latest and of the poorest quality, dating to the middle and late Western Zhou period. It contains many pottery shards and bones, suggesting a major change in the building during that time, possibly including a fire, as burnt soil and construction materials were found mixed into the rammed earth.

This transformation may be related to the site’s abandonment as a capital city. Wang Jing said: “The early rammed earth was part of an official construction project – carefully planned and supervised – while the later construction may have been unofficial and represent a reuse after abandonment.” 

Today, only yellow earth remains here, but archaeologists are diligently “finding soil within soil” to restore the life history of Yan’s inner and outer cities. Beneath this earth still lies the most authentic human story from 3,000 years ago. At that time, the Yan capital was densely populated, with people organized by social rank and division of labor. The middle and minor nobles assisting the Marquis of Yan were responsible for diplomatic missions, divination, record-keeping, and administration. They lived inside the city alongside skilled “blue-collar” workers engaged in high-level crafts such as bronze casting. 

Outside the city lived commoners mainly engaged in farming and animal husbandry. Beyond them were numerous villages and satellite towns under the Marquis’ control. Their staple foods were millet and broomcorn, while the nobility regularly enjoyed meat and traveled by chariots and horses. Commoners’ houses had thatched roofs; those better off built homes on the surface with even a “one-room, one-hall” layout, while the poorer lived in semi-subterranean dwellings known as earth pits.

But this orderly and once-thriving Yan capital existed for only a century or two before it was abandoned for reasons still unknown. Another puzzling detail is that while the northern city wall remains well preserved, only fragmented remnants of the southern wall’s slope protection survive. Considering the large rammed-earth structure thought to be the Marquis’ palace was heavily damaged by fire, it is unclear whether the site suffered from natural disasters or warfare.

After the capital was abandoned, some commoners remained, but traces of their residence vanish by the late Western Zhou period. After more than 800 years of Zhou Dynasty history, Chinese civilization would soon enter an era dominated by a powerful and unified empire. Before that happened, the Yan crown prince Dan famously dispatched the assassin Jing Ke in a desperate bid – “The wind is bleak, the Yi River cold; the hero departs and does not return.”

In 222 BCE, the State of Yan came to its end.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Li Jing, translator Wang Yuyan, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.