The Grid at Erlitou

In 1959 the historian Xu Xusheng led a survey in western Henan that opened the site at Erlitou to scientific excavation; the provincial cultural relics bureau's account of the site begins there and has not stopped since. The site lies in Yanshi district, in the middle of the Luoyang basin on the north bank of the old Yi-Luo river, with a surviving area of about 3 million square metres. Its main remains are dated to roughly 3750 to 3520 years before the present. Those numbers are the honest core of the matter: a very large settlement, at the right date, in the right place, which is why the argument about whether it is a Xia capital has lasted as long as it has.

What has been excavated is a city with a plan. The bureau's account describes a multi-grid layout of roads, which it reads as evidence of a mature idea of capital planning, and the site's standard description adds a palace zone and separate workshops for casting bronze, firing pottery, working jade and cutting bone. The word grid matters more than the word palace: streets that cross at right angles imply measured plots, and measured plots imply an authority that could assign them. Visitors to the site park walk a reconstructed surface over the excavated area, with the buried layers left in place, and the museum fills in the objects. The effect is of a plan drawn on the ground rather than a ruin standing up.

One object carries the site's reputation. A turquoise-inlaid dragon 64.5 centimetres long was found here, assembled from pieces of turquoise set into a body, and it is the image most often used when Erlitou is introduced to a general audience. The museum that opened beside the site in October 2019 displays more than 2,000 objects across five permanent galleries: the First Dynasty; the great Xia capital and affairs of state; the capital laid out at the centre; land, people and the wider world on the upper floor; and a gallery on a century of exploration. The museum stands at Zhai township in Yanshi and opened free to the public on 20 October 2019, the day after its opening ceremony.

The argument the site makes is architectural rather than textual. A palace zone, a road grid and workshops for four crafts describe a place where power was concentrated and production was administered, which is what the later texts mean when they describe a capital. The bureau's page puts it carefully, saying the layout confirms a mature idea of capital planning; it does not say the site proves a dynasty. Visitors who want the textual argument will not find it in the ground, and visitors who want the ground will find it laid out under a walking surface. The two kinds of evidence are displayed side by side at Erlitou, and the museum's fifth gallery, on a century of exploration, is where the site's own historiography is on show.