Heart of Hongshan still beats

Recent excavations have further strengthened Niuheliang's claim to that status.

At Locality 1, archaeologists have identified two temples — an upper temple to the north and the famed "goddess temple" to the south. Although the upper temple's above-ground structure has disappeared over five millennia, the finely crafted artifacts uncovered there rival those found in the goddess temple.

From the upper temple southward, past the goddess temple and sacrificial pits, the axis extends roughly one kilometer to Locality 2, where a three-tiered circular altar and burial mounds stand.

The layout is strikingly coherent: temples to the north, an altar to the south and elites' tombs aligned along the central axis.

Guo draws a parallel to Beijing, where the Forbidden City and Imperial Ancestral Temple stand in the north and the Temple of Heaven in the south.

Niuheliang, he says, contains the same core elements — an ancestral temple, sacrificial altar, tombs and a north-south axis — leading him to conclude that it was the capital of the Hongshan ancient state.

A bridge to the divine

In the highest-status tombs at Niuheliang, almost nothing accompanied the dead except jade. Scholars call this practice wei yu wei zang — "jade-only burial".

"Jade was the ultimate luxury, the high technology of its time," says Zhou Xiaojing, a research fellow at the Liaoning Provincial Museum, who has spent more than three decades studying Hongshan jade.

"Rarity made it precious — the difficulty of quarrying, transporting, and crafting it was precisely what made it a marker of status," she adds.

Most Hongshan jade artifacts can be traced to deposits in Xiuyan Manchu autonomous county, Anshan, Liaoning, which supplied the bulk of the culture's jade. A smaller number may have come from areas near Heilongjiang province and Russia's Lake Baikal.

Hongshan jade is renowned for its depictions of sacred animals — dragons, phoenixes, tortoises and silkworms. The jue-dragon and C-shaped dragon are among the most iconic, considered early prototypes of the Chinese dragon totem.

More intriguing, Zhou says, is what these objects reveal about Hongshan beliefs. A tubular jade object found near the head of a burial — the direction associated with heaven — is believed to have served as a medium for communicating with the divine. A large cloud-shaped jade piece placed on the chest likely signified the highest social rank.

Guo, the senior archaeologist, points to a recent discovery at the Yuanbaoshan site in Inner Mongolia, where archaeologists uncovered more than 100 jade objects embedded in a stone mound rather than inside tombs. The practice of "hiding jade in the mound", he says, appears to have been a ritual offering to heaven rather than part of a burial.

Guo believes this reverence for jade endured long after Hongshan culture, eventually finding expression in Confucian thought, where jade came to symbolize moral virtue.