Taosi: A City Older Than the Records That Name It

The site lies in Taosi township, seven kilometres northeast of the Xiangfen county seat, on the plain where the Fen runs south. Nothing on the surface announces a city; what is there now is open ground and marked excavation squares, with the line of the wall traced out. That wall was found only between 1999 and 2001, by archaeologists of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who dated it to the middle Taosi period, between 4,100 and 4,000 years before the present. The enclosure is rectangular, with an inner area of 280 hectares, and the settlement is the largest Longshan site discovered in the Linfen basin. In 1988 it was listed in the third national batch.

Dating comes from the layers of the site and from the phases into which its pottery is sorted. The English account assigns Taosi to the late Longshan of southern Shanxi, a phase of its own dated 2300 to 1900 BC. The Chinese account divides the town into two builds: a small early city of 560,000 square metres, about 2300 to 2100 BC, and a large middle city of 2.8 million square metres, about 2100 to 2000 BC. The dead give the same picture of a ranked society: a cemetery of 30,000 square metres held more than 1,500 burials, and the wealth was concentrated in nine large graves. That concentration, more than any single object, is what the site adds to the argument about early states.

On the site, a semicircular run of rammed-earth pillars marks the observatory, which is partly preserved. It was found in 2003-2004 and is described as the oldest astronomical observatory in East Asia: thirteen pillars set in a semicircle with a radius of 10.5 metres, on a platform about 42 metres across and more than a thousand square metres in area, inside an outer semicircular path and platform some 60 metres in diameter. Watching the sun rise behind successive pillars, the argument goes, gave the solstices and the length of the year. Whether or not the reading is accepted, the platform is the part of Taosi a visitor can see as a shape rather than infer from a trench.