Xinglongwa Culture: Early Villages and Jade in Inner Mongolia

The Xinglongwa culture was an early Neolithic culture of north-east China, flourishing from about 6200 to 5400 BC in what is now south-eastern Inner Mongolia and western Liaoning. Its people built planned villages of semi-subterranean houses surrounded by ditches, cultivated millet on a small scale and made some of the oldest known jade ornaments in the world. It is often seen as the ancestor of a regional tradition that later produced the Hongshan culture.

Discovery

The culture is named after the Xinglongwa site in Aohan Banner, near the city of Chifeng in Inner Mongolia. It was excavated by the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in several seasons between 1983 and 1994. The excavations exposed most of a village, which Chinese archaeologists have sometimes called “the first village of China” because of its early date and clear layout.

Further sites, such as Xinglonggou in the same county and Chahai in Liaoning, have since been studied. Together they show a distinctive culture spread across the Xiliao River basin, a region of grassland, hills and river valleys on the northern edge of the Chinese farming world.

Villages and houses

Xinglongwa villages were carefully planned. At the type site, dozens of houses stood in parallel rows, enclosed by an oval ditch. Not all were in use at the same time, as the village was rebuilt over several phases. The houses were dug partly into the ground, with square or rectangular plans and a central hearth. Most covered several dozen square metres, and a few in the middle of the village were much larger, perhaps used for meetings or rituals.

This regular arrangement suggests a community that shared rules about where and how to build. It is one of the earliest examples of such planning in East Asia, roughly contemporary with early villages of central China such as Jiahu.

Daily life and food

The Xinglongwa people lived by a mix of hunting, gathering and early farming. Deer and wild pig bones are common, and nuts and wild plants were collected. Stone tools include grinding slabs and rollers, hoes and small blades set in bone handles.

At Xinglonggou, the archaeobotanist Zhao Zhijun recovered charred grains of broomcorn millet and some foxtail millet dated to about 8,000 years ago. These are among the earliest millet remains in China, although the grains were still small and farming appears to have been a supplement rather than the main source of food.

Pottery was thick, sand-tempered and mostly shaped as tall cylindrical jars with flat bases. The surfaces were decorated with bands of impressed or incised patterns, including zigzags and net-like designs.

Burials and jade

Some of the dead were buried beneath the floors of houses. One well-known grave at the Xinglongwa site held a man buried together with two pigs, a rare and striking arrangement that has been interpreted as ritual or as a sign of the special status of pigs.

Graves also contained the culture’s most famous objects: jade ornaments. The most typical are jue, smooth rings with a narrow slit, probably worn as earrings, along with small tubes, pendants and blades. Working jade, a very hard stone, required patient grinding with abrasive sand and drilling. These pieces are among the oldest worked jade objects known anywhere, and they begin a jade tradition that runs through the Hongshan culture to the Liangzhu culture and Chinese civilisation in later periods.

At the Chahai site in Fuxin, Liaoning, which is linked to the Xinglongwa tradition, excavators found a long arrangement of reddish stones in the middle of the village, almost 20 metres in length. They interpreted it as an image of a dragon, which would make it one of the oldest dragon representations in China, though the interpretation is not universally accepted.

Successors and legacy

The Xinglongwa culture was followed in the same region by the Zhaobaogou culture, from roughly 5400 to 4500 BC, and then by the Hongshan culture, famous for its jade dragons and ritual sites. Many scholars see a continuous local development from Xinglongwa to Hongshan, with growing reliance on farming and increasingly elaborate ritual.

Xinglongwa also matters for the history of millet, the staple cereal of early northern China. Alongside sites such as Cishan in Hebei, it shows that millet cultivation emerged in several places across northern China during the 7th and 6th millennia BC.

Timeline

• c. 6200 BC: Xinglongwa culture emerges in the Xiliao River basin.
• c. 6000 BC: Millet grains preserved at Xinglonggou, among the earliest in China.
• c. 5400 BC: Xinglongwa culture gives way to the Zhaobaogou culture.
• c. 4700–4500 BC: Hongshan culture develops in the same region.
• 1983–1994: Excavations at the Xinglongwa type site in Aohan Banner.

Why it matters

Xinglongwa shows that planned villages, early millet farming and fine jade working existed in north-east China by the 7th millennium BC. It gives the region its own deep roots in Chinese prehistory and marks the beginning of a jade tradition that lasted for thousands of years.