Niuheliang: A Landscape Built for Ceremony

In August 2021, archaeologists preparing a section for aerial photography at Niuheliang noticed stones near its base. Excavation director Jia Xiaobing later described how the team followed the line and cleaned the earth above it. What emerged was another constructed platform, the ninth identified in the group, carrying the remains known as the Goddess Temple.

The discovery changed a plan. The temple could now be understood within a larger system of platforms, rather than as an isolated building beside them. Its position joined the temple to the ridges and stepped platforms of a deliberately organised ceremonial precinct.

Niuheliang lies across the boundary of Lingyuan and Jianping, both within Chaoyang in western Liaoning. Its late Hongshan remains belong to the Neolithic world, long before China’s imperial dynasties. Temples, altars and stone-covered burial cairns are distributed across a landscape larger than the modern visitor facilities.

The platforms used the natural ridges while reshaping them. Their ordered arrangement and substantial construction imply coordinated labour. The ceremonial centre is much better documented than the everyday settlements that supported its construction and use.

Archaeologists gave the building this name because it contained a female head and other fragments of female clay figures. The familiar head has stone insets for eyes. The name is an interpretation of the finds, not an ancient inscription identifying a deity.

A 2024 report explains that the temple remains had been covered again for protection; a marker identifies where the head was found. Site manager Wang Xuanlong distinguished the replica shown in the park museum from the original, held by the Liaoning Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. A replica can help explain scale and appearance without moving a fragile original back to its findspot.

Painted pottery cylinders provide another clue to the place’s specialised work. They resemble containers, but have no bottoms. Their form redirects attention from storage or cooking toward ceremonial placement.

Together, shaped hills, carefully arranged stones and objects made for particular uses suggest repeated, organised activity. Ceremony depended on an arrangement of built ground and specially made objects, extending from the platforms to the places where pottery was set and the dead were buried.