Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City

UNESCO-listed archaeological site in Hangzhou preserving the remains of a 5,000-year-old city with a sophisticated water-management system, jade ritual culture and social hierarchy — regarded as one of the earliest state-level societies in East Asia.

The Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019, providing physical evidence for the existence of an early urban civilisation in the Yangtze River Delta approximately 5,300 to 4,300 years ago — roughly contemporaneous with the early cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt but independently developed.

The Liangzhu site complex encompasses a walled city of approximately 2.9 km² surrounded by an elaborate water-management system of dams, levees and canals. The outer dam network — covering over 100 km² — is the earliest large-scale water-conservancy project yet identified in China, designed to control flooding and channel water for agriculture. The engineering achievement implies a level of social organisation, labour mobilisation and political authority characteristic of state-level society.

The elite burial mounds found at Yaoshan and Fanshan within the city precinct contained extraordinary concentrations of jade objects — cong (hollow cylinders), bi (flat discs) and axes engraved with the Liangzhu deity-animal motif. These jade ritual objects, found across a broad region of eastern China, indicate that the Liangzhu culture exercised significant cultural influence beyond its immediate territory.

The Liangzhu Museum, designed by architect David Chipperfield and opened in 2018, interprets the site with an outstanding collection of original jade artefacts, reconstruction models of the water-management system, and stratigraphic sections revealing the city's buried remains. The outdoor archaeological park allows visitors to walk across the raised mounds and dam structures. The entire site sits within a wetland landscape that has returned to something approaching its original condition.