Qualla: Hongshan Culture

Hongshan Culture: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prof. Gary Lee Todd, CC BY-SA 4.0. A Japanese archaeologist named Torii Ryuzo first noticed the site in 1908, on a red hill near the city of Chifeng in what is now Inner Mongolia. Nearly three decades later, in 1935, Kosaku Hamada and Mizuno Seiichi conducted extensive excavations and began to grasp what lay beneath. The Hongshan culture, named for that red hill in Chifeng's Hongshan District, would prove to be one of the most significant Neolithic civilizations in East Asia: a society that carved jade with extraordinary skill, built underground temples to goddess figures, and organized itself into chiefdoms with monumental architecture, all between approximately 4700 and 2900 BC, before the dynasties that would define Chinese history had begun.

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Image: Prof. Gary Lee Todd | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hongshan Culture: Jade Dragons and Pregnant Goddesses

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Windmemories, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Hongshan culture produced some of the earliest known examples of jade working in the world. Their signature artifacts are C-shaped jade pig dragons, enigmatic objects that may represent embryonic dragons or stylized pigs, depending on which scholar you ask. These pieces are c...

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Image: Windmemories | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hongshan Culture: The Goddess Temple at Niuheliang

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit पाटलिपुत्र, CC BY-SA 4.0. At the archaeological site of Niuheliang, excavators uncovered something that reframed expectations of Neolithic complexity: an underground temple built on stone platforms with painted walls. Inside they found a clay female head with eyes inlaid with jade, along with clay figurin...

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Image: पाटलिपुत्र | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hongshan Culture: Millet, Climate, and Collapse

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prof. Gary Lee Todd, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Hongshan people were farmers, and their primary crop was millet. Isotope analyses show that millet contributed up to 70 percent of the human diet in the early Hongshan period and up to 80 percent in the late period. They shared this agricultural base with the contemporaneous ...

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Image: Prof. Gary Lee Todd | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hongshan Culture: Origins of Chinese Civilization

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ismoon (talk) 18:09, 16 January 2014 (UTC), CC BY-SA 4.0. Archaeologist Guo Dashun has argued that the Hongshan culture represents an important early stage of Chinese civilization, pointing to its mature system of ancestral worship as a practice that persisted throughout all of Chinese history. The question of what language the Hongshan...

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Image: Ismoon (talk) 18:09, 16 January 2014 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 4.0