中国范儿 97 良渚古城遗址：中华五千年文化的见证者

Liangzhu Ancient City (between 3300 B.C. and 2300 B.C.) is located in Pingyao Township of Yuhang District, which is under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province. As the first city relic of the Neolithic Age ever found in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, it is praised as “the First City of China”. On the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee held in July 2019, Liangzhu Archaeological Site was inscribed on the World Heritage List under the category of World Cultural Heritage.

Liangzhu Ancient City has a roughly rectangular plan with round corners, and covers a total area of 2.9 million square meters, even larger than 400 modern soccer fields combined. It was a grandiose city. Commoners lived in the peripheries of the city while nobilities lived in the city center on a 30 hectares raised-platform. The city was surrounded by a flood control system, which also separated it from the outside world. Constructed somewhere between 4700 and 5100 years ago as a measure to ensure the city’s safety and development, the flood control system is the earliest large-scale water project that has ever been found in China. In addition, it even included a dam system that was the earliest of its kind in the world.

Nearly 10000 utensils, including jade wares, potteries, stone vessels and lacquer ware have been unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. No less than 7000 jade wares have been unearthed from some hierarchical cemeteries there so far. Among them, the Cong remains the most important and typical jade ware. As an original style of utensil in the Liangzhu Culture, the Cong is a cylinder-shaped jade ware that usually has a round interior and a flat exterior, echoing the cosmological beliefs of the ancient Chinese that “the heaven is round and the earth is flat”. In particular, the “King of Cong”, unearthed from the Fanshan Hill, has the most typical “deity and animal mask pattern” of Liangzhu jade ware, exhibiting the religious features of the agricultural civilization in the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins.

Liangzhu Ancient City largely remained as it was. It explains the remarkable achievements of the rice agriculture in the pre-history stage of Chinese civilization. As a unique witness to the 5000-year history of the Chinese civilization, it has shed much-needed light on the archeological relics in the Neolithic Age of East Asia, which have long been absent from the World Heritage List.

Today, the Liangzhu National Archeological Relic Park is under construction. According to the plan, the park will put into use of such modern technologies like VR. With the help of the VR technologies, visitors would be able to “visit” the palaces on the Mojiao Hill that existed more than 5000 years ago. How did the people in the Liangzhu area live their life? How did the Liangzhu Ancient City survive the huge floods in history? State-of-the-art technologies can probably re-create the scenarios in which answers to all these queries could be found. Encounters between the ancient and modern civilizations brought us a unique opportunity, with which we are able to preserve and showcase the ancient city of Liangzhu.

来源：中国网

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