Yangshao Culture: Painted Pottery of Neolithic China

The Yangshao culture was a Neolithic farming culture of northern China that flourished in the middle Yellow River valley from about 5000 to 3000 BC. Famous for its red pottery painted with black spirals, fish and faces, it was the first prehistoric culture identified in China, after the Swedish geologist J. G. Andersson excavated at Yangshao village in Henan in 1921. Its villages of millet farmers form a central chapter in the long story of Chinese civilisation.

Background: farming in the Yellow River valley

The Yellow River, or Huang He, flows across the loess plateau of northern China, a landscape of fine, wind-blown soil that is fertile and easy to dig. Here people began to cultivate foxtail and broomcorn millet during the 7th and 6th millennia BC, in earlier cultures such as Peiligang, Cishan and Laoguantai.

By about 5000 BC these early traditions gave way to the Yangshao culture. Its people lived in larger and more permanent villages, depended more heavily on farming, and produced pottery of much higher quality. Over two thousand years Yangshao communities spread across the central plains and neighbouring regions.

The culture was not uniform. Archaeologists recognise several regional and chronological phases. The most widely used are the early Banpo phase, about 4800–4200 BC, the middle Miaodigou phase, about 4000–3500 BC, and a late phase ending around 3000 BC. The related Majiayao culture of Gansu, about 3300–2000 BC, is sometimes called Gansu Yangshao.

Discovery in 1921

Johan Gunnar Andersson came to China in 1914 as a mining adviser to the Chinese government. A geologist by training, he became increasingly interested in fossils and prehistory and played a part in the discoveries at Zhoukoudian that led to the identification of Peking Man.

In 1921 Andersson investigated the village of Yangshao in Mianchi County, western Henan, where he had seen prehistoric stone tools and pottery fragments. With Chinese colleagues, including the geologist Yuan Fuli, he began an excavation in late October that year, lasting several weeks. It was the first scientific excavation of a Neolithic site in China, and the date is often regarded as the birth of modern Chinese archaeology.

Andersson published his findings in 1923 in “An Early Chinese Culture”. He described a culture of farmers using polished stone tools and fine painted pottery. Many of his finds went to Sweden, forming the core of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, founded in 1926. Part of the collection was later returned to China.

In 1926 the Chinese archaeologist Li Ji excavated at Xiyincun in Shanxi, another Yangshao site, where he found half of a cut silkworm cocoon. Its significance for early silk production has been debated ever since.

The painted pottery

Yangshao is often called the painted pottery culture. Its vessels were made of fine reddish clay, shaped by hand, often with coils, and finished with great care. Potters painted designs in black, and sometimes white or red, before firing them in kilns, which reached temperatures of roughly 900 to 1,000 °C.

Common shapes include bowls, basins, pointed-bottomed jars used for carrying water, and wide-mouthed storage jars. The decoration varies by phase. Banpo pottery often shows fish, sometimes combined with human faces in a famous basin design. Miaodigou pottery has flowing curves, dots and petal-like motifs. Later Majiayao jars are covered with bold swirling spirals.

Some vessels were used as burial urns for children, placed near or beneath houses. The painted designs probably had symbolic meanings, but these are no longer understood. A few marks scratched on Banpo pottery have been compared with later Chinese characters, though most scholars do not consider them writing.

Villages and daily life

Yangshao villages were often built on river terraces. Houses were round or rectangular, partly sunk into the ground, with wooden posts supporting thatched roofs and a hearth in the centre. Many villages were surrounded by a defensive or drainage ditch, with a cemetery and pottery kilns outside it.

The best-known example is Banpo, near Xi’an, excavated between 1954 and 1957. Another, Jiangzhai in Lintong, revealed a village of the 5th millennium BC with houses arranged around a central open space, suggesting a community organised by kin groups.

In the middle phase, some settlements grew much larger. At Xipo in Lingbao, western Henan, archaeologists uncovered very large buildings of several hundred square metres, probably used for gatherings or rituals. These hint at growing social complexity.

Farmers grew foxtail and broomcorn millet using stone hoes, spades and knives, and stored grain in pits. They kept pigs and dogs, and hunted deer and other game. Fishing, with nets and hooks, and gathering wild plants remained important. Spindle whorls and impressions on pottery show that people wove textiles from hemp and other plant fibres.

Life expectancy was short by modern standards, and many children died young. Studies of skeletons show that the millet diet was rich in carbohydrates, and dental decay was common. Isotope analyses of human and animal bones also suggest that pigs and dogs were fed partly on millet, a sign of how closely domestic animals were tied to farming households.

Burials and beliefs

Yangshao cemeteries usually contained single burials laid out in rows, with modest grave goods such as pottery and tools. Differences in wealth were small in the early phase, which suggests a relatively equal society.

A remarkable grave at Xishuipo in Puyang, Henan, dated to the 5th millennium BC, contained the body of an adult man flanked by a dragon and a tiger laid out in mosaics of clam shells. It is one of the earliest known depictions of a dragon in China, although some scholars place it in a regional variant rather than core Yangshao.

By the late phase, some graves were larger and richer than others, and settlements varied more in size. These trends continued into the following Longshan period, when walled towns and clearer social ranks appeared.

Late Yangshao and the move towards complexity

The last centuries of the Yangshao period saw significant changes. At Shuanghuaishu in Gongyi, Henan, archaeologists excavating in the 2010s uncovered a large settlement of about 5,300 years ago, surrounded by three rings of ditches and containing large buildings and cemeteries. Some Chinese scholars have described it as an early political centre on the central plains.

Further west, the Majiayao culture of Gansu, closely linked to Yangshao traditions, produced one of the earliest bronze objects known in China, a small knife found at Linjia in Dongxiang county and dated to roughly 3000 BC. Metal working did not become widespread for many centuries, but its appearance in this period is significant.

These developments show that the late Yangshao world was not static. Population growth, competition between settlements and wider exchange networks laid the foundations for the walled towns and social hierarchies of the Longshan period that followed.

Debates about origins

Andersson noticed similarities between Yangshao painted pottery and pottery from western Asia and eastern Europe, such as the Anau and Tripolye cultures. He suggested that painted pottery had spread to China from the west.

Later excavations disproved this idea. Radiocarbon dating showed that Yangshao pottery was as old as or older than many of its western counterparts, and that it grew out of earlier local cultures. Chinese archaeologists, notably Xia Nai, also showed in the 1940s that Andersson had confused some of the sequence in Gansu.

Today the Yangshao culture is seen as one of several regional Neolithic traditions in China, alongside the Hongshan culture in the north-east, the Dawenkou culture in the east and rice-growing cultures of the Yangtze. Interaction between these regions shaped the later Chinese states.

Legacy

The Yangshao culture formed the foundation of farming life in the central plains, the area where the early dynasties, beginning with the culture at Erlitou, would later arise. Millet farming, pig keeping, loess-dug houses and ceramic craftsmanship all continued into later periods.

The discovery of Yangshao also shaped Chinese archaeology itself. In 2021 China marked the centenary of the Yangshao excavation as the hundredth anniversary of modern Chinese archaeology, and a museum stands at the original site in Mianchi County.

Yangshao pottery is now displayed in museums across China and abroad, including the National Museum of China in Beijing and the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, where it continues to shape how visitors imagine early Chinese life.

Timeline

• c. 5000 BC: Yangshao culture emerges in the middle Yellow River valley.
• c. 4800–4200 BC: Banpo phase; villages such as Banpo and Jiangzhai.
• c. 4000–3500 BC: Miaodigou phase; Yangshao influence at its widest.
• c. 3500–3000 BC: Late phase; larger settlements and growing social differences.
• c. 3000 BC: Yangshao gives way to Longshan-type cultures in the central plains.
• 1921: J. G. Andersson excavates at Yangshao village, Henan.
• 1923: Andersson publishes “An Early Chinese Culture”.
• 1954–1957: Excavation of the Banpo village near Xi’an.
• 2021: Centenary of the Yangshao excavation celebrated in China.

Why it matters

The Yangshao culture was the first Neolithic culture to be identified in China and one of its most important. Its painted pottery is among the finest of the prehistoric world, and its millet-farming villages laid the foundations on which later Chinese societies were built.