This summer, the Shanghai Museum unveiled its latest blockbuster exhibition, “Legends of the Dragon: The Ancient Civilization of Hongshan Culture.” To date, it is the most comprehensive display of the Neolithic Hongshan culture, bringing together over 300 precious artifacts from 20 museums and archaeological institutions across China.

It came just months after the Lingjiatan Site Museum in Hanshan County, the eastern Anhui province, opened its doors. There, the museum presented the first systematic public display of the largest and best-preserved Neolithic settlement yet discovered in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River-Chao Lake region.

Both events focus on archaeological sites dating back 5,000 to 6,000 years. Both feature exquisitely crafted jade artifacts that have been unearthed. Both offer a window into how Chinese archaeologists believe that jade may be the key to unearthing the bedrock of Chinese civilization itself.

For many Chinese archaeologists, jade is a point of fascination and an integral means of understanding China’s past. It can be traced back over 10,000 years on land that would become China, predating widespread estimations of when Chinese civilization began by at least 4,000 years. According to Professor Ye Shuxian, president of the Chinese Mythology Society, in the resource-scarce Stone Age, jade was one of the rarest and most treasured materials known to humankind — with the earliest version of the character for “jade” simply meaning “beautiful stone,” according to the “Shuowen Jiezi” book of etymology compiled in the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220). Within early animistic belief systems, the “beautiful stone” became a sacred object imbued with supernatural power and a medium for communicating with the divine.

Yet what makes jade so unique for China’s scholars is its enduring ubiquity. From sacred relics in the Neolithic period, imperial jade seals passed down by Chinese emperors, Confucian metaphors about upstanding gentlemen resembling jade, the development of ceramics as “jade-like” alternatives, and even the gold medals for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games designed with jade, the “precious stone” has long symbolized status, virtue, and power.

Why has jade been held in such extraordinary regard throughout Chinese history, and what does it tell us about the origins of Chinese civilization? The answer, many scholars believe, lies within the artifacts unearthed at Hongshan and Lingjiatan, and whether the two ancient cultures were connected in yet-unknown, profound ways.

Searching for clues in Hongshan

Stepping into the Shanghai Museum’s exhibit, visitors are greeted by one of the most iconic artifacts — the celebrated C-shaped Jade Dragon. Carved from a single piece of yellow-green tremolite jade, it features a gracefully arched silhouette — elegant, yet minimal in design.

To its side lies an even more visually striking display: a long glass case lined with a dozen jue, or slit ring, jade dragons. These jue-shaped jade dragons are emblematic of the later phase of the Hongshan culture, which was discovered in today’s northern and northeastern Hebei and Liaoning provinces, respectively, and the northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and maps the migration routes and territorial influence of this ancient culture.

A common refrain among archaeologists and scholars is that jade comes from Hongshan, despite other sites in China — such as the Xiaonanshan site along the Ussuri River in the northeastern Heilongjiang province and the Xinglongwa site in Inner Mongolia and Northeast China — yielding jade artifacts dating further back.

According to Gao Menghe, professor of archaeology at Shanghai’s Fudan University and the academic advisor to this exhibition, this assertion reflects how the Hongshan culture pushed China’s prehistoric jade tradition to its zenith. Gao tells me that as jade became a sacred medium, it underwent further transformation into an item carrying explicit political meaning, marking an important shift toward becoming an advanced civilization.

“Look at these jue-shaped dragons,” Gao says, pointing to the display case. “They were excavated from different sites across a vast area — nearly 200,000 square kilometers of the West Liao River Basin — spanning a wide time range. And yet their forms are remarkably consistent.

“What does this tell us?” he continues. “That a unified belief system had already emerged. These jade dragons functioned much like national flags today: symbols of shared spiritual identity among the Hongshan people.”

This evolving ritual landscape is further reflected in two burial phenomena observed at the Hongshan sites. In one, elite graves contained only jade, devoid of ceramics or stone tools; in the other, there were mass deposits of jade placed within stone-built cist tombs at the center of large burial mounds, with lower-ranked burials along the periphery. These patterns tell archaeologists that jade had become a marker of power and social status.

“In Hongshan culture, jade underwent a remarkable transformation,” Gao says. “It marked the moment when China’s ancient jade tradition moved from a sacralized phase into a ritualized one.”

A window to the past in Lingjiatan

Since its first excavation in 1921, the Hongshan culture had long been considered the only major jade culture in ancient China during that period — that is, until the unexpected discovery of the Lingjiatan culture.

In the winter of 1985, a villager named Wan from Lingjiatan Village stumbled upon jade rings and stone adzes while digging a grave for his mother. The Anhui Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology soon launched an investigation, confirming the site as a prehistoric burial ground. Since then, several rounds of excavations have unearthed more than 3,000 artifacts — over a third of which are jade.

As with Hongshan’s jade artifacts, many of those unearthed from the Lingjiatan culture have a distinctly religious connotation. Take, for example, the jade eagle unearthed from tomb M29 in 1998. Its wing tips are carved in the shape of a pig’s head, while its belly bears a delicate eight-pointed star motif. The design fuses the forms of an eagle, pig, and sun in a single piece, suggesting it may have served as a ritual object for communicating with the spiritual realm.

Archaeological evidence indicates that Lingjiatan craftsmanship was highly developed — perhaps even more so than Hongshan. For instance, their artisans could use a drill pipe with a diameter of just 0.17 millimeters to bore a core thinner than a human hair into the back of a jade object.

Lingjiatan also appears to have had a greater degree of social stratification and more advanced economic capacities. Tomb 07M23, for example, yielded more than 200 jade artifacts, including a massive jade pig weighing 88 kilograms. Hongshan burials, meanwhile, typically contained fewer than 10 jade items, none of which approached this scale.

The Lingjiatan culture also had distinct military features, as seen in the abundance of yue — ceremonial axes symbolizing military authority — found at the site. The burial layout of tomb 07M23 is particularly telling, with round, disc-like jade ritual objects such as the bi and huan near the head; arc-shaped jade huang resting on the chest; and stone axes, adzes, and chisels neatly arranged below the waist. Scholars believe the deceased held both religious and military power. In other words, Lingjiatan had already evolved into a more advanced proto-state that integrated social governance with religious authority.

A point of interest among China’s scholars is how archaeological sites for the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures have yielded jade artifacts that are strikingly similar in form. For example, a jade huang unearthed at a Lingjiatan site features comb-tooth patterns that closely resemble the hook-cloud motifs on pendants from the Hongshan culture. Of the over 100 jade artifacts discovered in 2024 in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, where the Hongshan culture was based, some resemble the jade crown ornaments associated with the Lingjiatan culture. Most astonishing of all are the jade human figures from both sites with almost identical postures and expressions — down to the closed eyes, clasped hands, and bent legs.

Considering that the Lingjiatan culture overlaps hundreds of years with the Hongshan culture, such similarity is practically unremarkable.

The problem is, they were located more than 1,200 kilometers apart.

Two jade cultures, both alike in dignity

In current Chinese archaeology, the question of how — and if — the two cultures relate is of great interest, since proof of contact between highly developed cultures may signal when disparate cultures coalesced into a state-level society, marking when Chinese civilization may have begun to take shape.

So, did the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures engage in any form of exchange?

Gao tends to think not. “The burial patterns of the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures are completely different, and most of the jade artifacts are different, with only a very few similarities,” he explains. “According to the typology of archaeology, this similarity can only mean that they are from the same era.”

There is an important piece of supporting evidence for Gao’s claim. If they did have contact, there should be lingering traces between them. Yet, there have been no similar archaeological sites found in the intermediate Huanghuai Plain separating them. The only culture to have existed there from the same period was the Dawenkou, where archaeologists have found very few jade artifacts.

But for Li Xinwei, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing, the similarities among certain jade pieces in the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures are so precise that it’s hard to believe they’re mere coincidences. “Therefore, there must have been some kind of interaction,” Li asserts.

How would people have managed to overcome formidable natural barriers and travel over 1,200 kilometers when horses had not yet been domesticated? According to Li, this kind of long-distance travel was possible for elite exchange.

“In ancient times, one of the most powerful ways a leader could assert authority was by forging connections across great distances,” he explains. “Ordinary people stayed local, but leaders had the resources and capacity to travel far and wide, bringing back knowledge and experience from beyond their homelands. Their heroic journeys would become legends.”

Because of this, Li proposes that a form of “high-level exchange” might have existed between Hongshan and Lingjiatan elites — an exchange of upper-echelon knowledge about jade sourcing, craftsmanship, cosmology, and sacred instruments. From this, each culture developed its own jade-centered belief system and used religious power to drive rapid social transformation.

“This is how China came to be,” Li tells me. “Or rather, this is how all civilizations take shape — through contact and exchange.”

As for the challenge posed by the intermediary Dawenkou culture’s relative lack of a jade culture, Li hypothesizes that the Dawenkou likely had contact with both the Hongshan and Lingjiatan peoples but simply did not adopt a jade-centric belief system. “Just like today, different regions follow different paths of development, based on their own resources and traditions,” he says.

Ye, the Chinese Mythology Society president, envisions a different scenario. In his opinion, it is not important whether the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures had direct exchanges. If anything, the similarity between their jade artifacts may indicate that they were part of a long-established jade cultural community in East Asia.

“Hongshan and Lingjiatan were just two known representatives of that jade community. There must be others — we just haven’t unearthed them,” Ye says. “Archaeology depends a lot on luck. Before the discovery of Lingjiatan, we knew nothing about that culture either, right?”

The stories jade can tell

Why, then, are Chinese scholars so interested in the relationship between the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures?

In part because archaeological evidence about the unification of jade coincides with the mythic period associated with the Yan and Huang emperors, who are often cited as the founders of early China.

Roughly 500 years after the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures faded into history, by around 3000 BC, a jade ritual system had matured with the emergence of the Liangzhu culture in the northeast of today’s eastern city of Hangzhou. With its ritual system centered around jade items such as the cong, bi, and yue, Liangzhu became China’s first state-level society, which some consider a bona fide civilization.

The criterion for what constitutes a civilization has been a topic of debate. For international scholars, an often-cited mark of a civilization is when a society presents metallurgy, a writing system, and cities. Yet as Chinese scholars delve into the ancient past through a decadeslong national project to unearth China’s origins, many are considering redefining these markers, instead searching for when state-level societies emerged — such as with Liangzhu.

“In Hongshan culture, jade primarily represented divine authority,” Gao says. “In Lingjiatan, it also came to symbolize military power. In the time of Liangzhu, all three — divine, military, and royal authority — had been united in jade.”

For Gao, this unification, which he says is “the first cultural unification in Chinese history,” is particularly exciting. Gao tells me to mark the thousand-year timespan from the beginning of the Hongshan to the end of Liangzhu — from roughly 4000 BC to 3000 BC. For many archaeologists, this period corresponds to the mythic era of the Yan and Huang emperors, which some cite as the beginning of Chinese civilization.

Though stories about Yan and Huang roving the Yellow River Basin are mythic in nature, archaeological discoveries of jade in recent years have lent substance to their existence. For example, a legend about Huang fighting with jade weapons was substantiated by the discovery of such objects dating back 5,000 to 6,000 years. Archaeological evidence also shows that, at its height, the Hongshan culture extended from western Liaoning through the Yan Mountains and into the Sanggan River basin — precisely where the legends of Yan and Huang are set.

Could archaeological evidence about Hongshan lend credence to creation myths for Chinese civilization? Gao warns against coming to such a hasty conclusion.

“We can’t say that the Hongshan culture was Emperor Huang’s tribe, nor that the Liangzhu culture might be founded by (rival) Chiyou’s men after their defeat and subsequent flight to the south,” Gao tells me. “What we can say is that the period from the Hongshan culture to the Liangzhu culture corresponds to the core of the Emperor Yan and Emperor Huang myth, which is the origin of Chinese civilization.”

Yet Ye takes a bolder stance. While most Chinese scholars ascribe Chinese civilization beginning some 5,000 years ago, Ye maintains that crucial aspects of Chinese civilization — including silk reeling, rice cultivation, belief in dragons, and a preference for pork — may have actually emerged in tandem with jade itself, some 10,000 years ago.

The search for more foundational evidence continues, but one thing is certain: Jade has witnessed and participated in the changing tides of Chinese history and may yet be the key to where it all began.

Jade throughout prehistory and beyond

So far, the debate continues on when and how exactly Chinese civilization took shape, but as more artifacts surface and provide insights into the evolution from disparate cultures to a unified civilization, it is increasingly clear that jade has played a significant role.

Many Chinese scholars believe that somewhere between the Hongshan and Lingjiatan cultures and the first historically recorded dynasty of the Xia around 2070 BC, the first glimmers of Chinese civilization must have emerged. This is in many ways supported by jade’s prevalence in subsequent historical records.

After the Liangzhu culture, a series of regionally organized societies — including Longshan, Taosi, and Shimao — emerged across ancient China. Excavations at these sites have all yielded substantial quantities of jade ritual objects, confirming that jade remained an important element in evolving ritual systems.

The earliest Chinese historical text, “The Commentary of Zuo,” describes a pivotal scene. In it, chieftains from various tribes gather at Mount Tu to present fine jades and silk as tokens of allegiance to Yu the Great, a mythic hero who was said to have tamed the floods. According to legend, these tributes enabled Yu to transition from a tribal leader to the first monarch of the Xia.

By this time, ancient China had entered its Bronze Age, developing the metallurgy, writing systems, and cities needed to be considered a civilization by most contemporary standards. Current archaeological evidence places the country’s earliest gold artifacts at the Huoshaogou site in the northwestern Gansu province, with the oldest known metallurgical production site, Xichengyi, dating to around 2000 BC.

Interestingly, despite the emergence of precious metals, jade did not fall in stature. In the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BC), whose name is synonymous with spectacular bronze ritual vessels, jade objects remained indispensable for elite burials. By the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BC), the “six ritual jades” were codified in written texts such as the Rites of Zhou. From the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) onward, the Heirloom Seal of the Realm, carved from jade, served as the token of an emperor’s divinely sanctioned and unquestionably legitimate sovereignty.

For Ye, this indicates how jade is essentially a “civilizational gene” and a crucial element of Chinese civilization. He believes that whenever Chinese people wear jade and speak of how “jade nourishes the wearer and the wearer nourishes the jade,” it is a glimmer of prehistoric civilization across time.

Yet what will this glimmer of the ancients reveal about China? Only time, and more archaeological digs, will tell. Luckily, as far as China’s archaeologists are concerned, these exhilarating excavations have only just begun.

“Don’t forget, Chinese archaeology has only been around for just over a century,” Ye says. “The truths buried underground are far more expansive than what we currently know.”

(Header image: Fu Xiaofan/Sixth Tone)