Soundbites

Guo Dashun, honorary director of the Liaoning Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology

Since its discovery, Hongshan has been regarded as a new culture, born from the convergence of northern and southern cultures due to its distinct multicultural characteristics.

Following the discovery of the Niuheliang site, the emergence of such a large-scale ritual complex in western Liaoning province has been attributed not only to the region's profound historical and cultural foundations but also to cultural exchange as a primary driving force.

While academic discussions often focus on exchanges between Hongshan and the Yangshao culture of the Central China Plains, some scholars have begun exploring Hongshan's connections beyond China.

The culture not only produced uniquely shaped jade artifacts for communicating with deities but also revered painted pottery from other places as sacred. These two elements — distinct in material, technique and design — merged within Hongshan culture, generating immense cohesion, boundless creativity and enduring vitality.

Its painted pottery features three patterns, which are roses from the Central China Plains, dragon motifs native to Hongshan and geometric patterns, like diamond grids, from the central expanse of Eurasia. These designs represent sparks from the fusion of Eurasian cultures, suggesting that about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, a "pottery road" existed, running south to north and west to east, with the West Liaohe River basin serving as a melting pot for both West and East Asian cultures.

Thus, examining the Hongshan culture from a global historical perspective remains essential for deepening our understanding of this ancient society.

Elizabeth Childs-Johnson, US Sinologist specializing in Chinese art and archaeology

Large-scale ceramic sculptures of a "fertility goddess" match abundant evidence for a sophisticated figural tradition of representation, from pre-Hongshan through Hongshan time.

Hongshan artists were clearly gifted in creating life-size clay images of human dimensions and gifted in portraying specific icons, whether "goddesses" or "male shamans".

The significance of fertility symbolism is represented not only by the numerous pregnant female sculptures as objects of worship and ritual sacrifice. In addition, the fetal form of the jade dragon reveals an emphasis on fertility and transformational power. Art from this period belongs to the category of religious icons.

Hongshan was the earliest culture to work jade as a symbol of power and wealth. Jades are the only goods found in Hongshan elite burials at Niuheliang and elsewhere in Inner Mongolia, Liaoning and northern Hebei.

The earliest evidence for the image of the popular Chinese dragon lies with the invention of Hongshan craftspersons.

The distribution of Hongshan ceremonial sites versus residential centers is significant. The culture was not dominated as a chiefdom with one dominant leader ruling from a major city or settlement as characterized by other late Neolithic and Jade Age cultures. In nonanthropological terms, Hongshan peoples populated a vast area with sparse distribution and without an integrated political institution. Ritual and ceremonial interests are what allied Hongshan people. Hongshan culture in essence was a theocratic civilization.

Jiang Bo, professor at the Institute of Cultural Heritage at Shandong University, former vice-president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites

We Chinese archaeologists are always talking about Liangzhu and Hongshan cultures. They appear like the two wings of ancient Chinese civilization. Now, the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City have already been successfully inscribed on the World Heritage List of UNESCO. We are all looking forward to seeing Hongshan on the World Heritage List.

So, what's the real ... outstanding universal value of Hongshan for the potential nomination? People are talking about the altar, tombs and the temple. But based on my own experience with the international nomination work for World Heritage, if I can kindly suggest we can outline the most important things in three respects: the stone-structure establishments as outstanding archaeological monuments and sites; then, the jade dragon as the cultural symbol of traditional China; and the statues and sculptures to reflect the early-period belief systems.

(The Niuheliang site) is very impressive if you look at the structure, shape and size of this kind of ceremonial center. The jade dragon is so important. We all say the Chinese people are "sons of the dragon". If you look at jade dragons found from different Hongshan cultural sites, (you can find) they are all so well-designed and they are very, very unified.

So, we can see the dragon culture is deeply rooted in the early period (of Chinese civilization) like Hongshan culture. It's amazing and very interesting, but very complicated to study the early belief systems of the Hongshan people, based on the very important archaeological findings like this female head. I think Chinese archaeologists need to do more research on this female head to understand the very complicated belief systems.

Christian E. Peterson, professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States

Archaeological field research by my colleagues and me over the past 2.5 decades has focused on better understanding the shape and social dynamics of Hongshan-period societies in northeastern China's western Liaohe River valley.

Hongshan society was long-lived. It was highly stable, and the social organization had a strong ritual basis.

Only modest prestige and even less productive differentiation is represented, and no evidence of wealth accumulation is present.

Overall, this represents a flavor of complexity distinctly different from other natural experiments with prehistory that are known worldwide.

We are left then with the conclusion that the presumed leaders of these Hongshan super local communities, some of whom were buried in elaborate ceremonial facilities, were special principally in the ritual realm that was little reflected in the economics and social interactions of daily life.

It is worth questioning, however, whether the important individuals in these burials, as important as they seem to have been in ritual, exercise much if any political power at all … Perhaps they were ritualities instead.

The successes (of our research) are a testament to a shared recognition in the importance of Hongshan society and a shared interest in better understanding its social dynamics, so as to be able to lay it alongside other examples of differently complex societies from both inside and outside China for a comprehensive comparative analysis.

Dennis Schilling, professor of philosophy at Renmin University of China

From the point of view of science and research, Hongshan culture is indeed an important part of what could be called the "World Heritage of Humanity".

It has significance not only for later Chinese cultural history but also for our knowledge of the cultural and social development of humanity itself.

The complexity of Hongshan communities relates to very different phenomena of human activity and early human society.

Hongshan culture itself appears as a complex of local communities scattered over a large area and sparsely populated. The basic idea behind the complexity here is "communication" in its spatial and temporal extension. Communication also seems to play an important role behind social stratification and labor coordination.

What we see in the artifacts and relics of Hongshan culture is not only symbolic nature inherent in communicative activities, but an elaborate complex of symbolic power attributed to it, so that it becomes the basis of social organization.

The relics of Hongshan culture reflect how a human community thinks of itself and how self-consciousness is expressed in the symbolic language of ritual artifacts and activities.

Both the communicative and the symbolic aspects make complexity a trajectory of human civilization. And yet, behind complexity as a motor and sign of human civilization and development, there is also the doubt of a power purely based on symbols. Human action should be bound in some way to natural processes and conditions to ensure that it can thrive and be beneficial to humanity over time.