Qualla: Erlitou

Erlitou: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Windmemories, CC BY-SA 4.0. When archaeologist Xu Xusheng walked across the wheat fields near Yanshi in 1959, he was looking for the first capital of the Shang dynasty. What he found instead was something older and more enigmatic. Beneath the soil of the Yiluo Basin lay the remains of a city that had thrived centuries before the Shang came to power -- a settlement with palace complexes, bronze foundries, jade workshops, and a road grid that divided it into functional districts. Erlitou, as the site came to be known, has spent the past six decades challenging everything scholars thought they knew about the origins of Chinese civilization.

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Image: Windmemories | CC BY-SA 4.0

Erlitou: A City Between Rivers

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roci xu, CC BY-SA 4.0. Erlitou sits on the floodplain between the Yi River and the Luo River, both tributaries of the Yellow River, in what is now Yanshi District of Luoyang. At its peak around 1600 BC, the settlement covered approximately 300 hectares and may have housed upward of 24,000 people. Four ...

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Image: Roci xu | CC BY-SA 4.0

Erlitou: Palaces in the Mud

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kevin Poh from Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, CC BY 2.0. Eleven palace foundations have been identified across the site's four main phases, each built on massive platforms of rammed earth. Palace 1, the largest, covered an enormous footprint during Phase III, when the city reached its zenith. The palatial compound was enclosed by a wal...

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Image: Kevin Poh from Petaling Jaya, Malaysia | CC BY 2.0

Erlitou: Workshops of the First Bronze Masters

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A1A, CC BY-SA 3.0. South of the palatial compound, archaeologists uncovered a bronze foundry that was clearly under elite control. The workshop produced ritual vessels using the piece-mold casting technique -- a method unique to China that involved assembling ceramic molds around a clay core, pouri...

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Image: A1A | CC BY-SA 3.0

Erlitou: The Ghost of the Xia

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gary Lee Todd, CC BY-SA 4.0. Whether Erlitou was the capital of the Xia dynasty remains Chinese archaeology's most contested question. Ancient texts such as the Bamboo Annals and the Records of the Grand Historian describe the Xia as the first Chinese dynasty, but these were written a thousand or more years ...

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Image: Gary Lee Todd | CC BY-SA 4.0