About Liangzhu Museum

Liangzhu Museum

The Liangzhu Museum, known in Chinese as Liangzhu Bowuyuan, is an archaeological site museum in Yuhang District, Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province, China. It stands at No. 1 Meilizhou Road, in Meilizhou Park in the Liangzhu area on the northwestern outskirts of Hangzhou, the provincial capital. The museum is dedicated to collecting, studying, exhibiting and promoting the Liangzhu culture — the late Neolithic jade culture of the Yangtze River Delta, dated to about 3300–2300 BCE, or roughly 4,300 to 5,300 years ago. It is described in official and reference sources as an archaeological site museum, a type of institution whose displays are built around the finds and the significance of a particular archaeological site or culture rather than around a general survey of a city or region. In this case the subject is one of the most consequential early cultures in China: a rice-cultivating society with a planned capital city, a large water-conservancy system, sharply differentiated burials and a highly developed ritual use of jade. The museum presents that story through more than 3,000 movable cultural relics and a permanent exhibition whose theme presents the Liangzhu site as testimony to 5,000 years of Chinese civilisation.

The Liangzhu Culture the Museum Interprets

The Liangzhu culture was the last Chinese Neolithic jade culture in the Yangtze River Delta. It flourished in the Taihu Lake basin in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, across territory now in Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Shanghai, and it is dated in standard references to 3300–2300 BCE. At its centre stood a pan-regional urban centre at the Liangzhu site in northwestern Hangzhou, whose elite groups presided over local centres elsewhere in the region. The society was highly stratified. Jade, silk, ivory and lacquer artefacts have been found exclusively in elite burials, while pottery was more commonly found in the burial plots of poorer individuals — a contrast that archaeologists use to read social rank directly from the ground. The culture flourished particularly around 2500 BCE and then disappeared from the Taihu Lake area after about 2300 BCE, leaving almost no traces there in the years that followed. What survived was an exceptional archaeological record: ancient villages, noble tombs with exquisite jade burial goods, sacrificial altars, large-scale earthworks and the remains of a capital city. The museum exists to explain that record, and to explain why a culture without a surviving written history of its own can still be understood in such detail through its objects, its burials and its landscape engineering.

Discovery, Shi Xingeng and the Naming of a Culture

The modern discovery of Liangzhu began in 1936. The type site at Liangzhu, in what was then Yuhang County, Zhejiang, was initially excavated by the archaeologist Shi Xingeng (1911–1939), whose work in 1936–1937 first identified the culture from finds that included black-surfaced pottery and stone tools. Shi's report on the excavations was published shortly before his death from scarlet fever in May 1939, only a few months after the report appeared. He did not live to see the further excavations he had hoped to conduct. The name itself came later: the designation "the Liangzhu culture" was put forward by the archaeologist Xia Nai in 1959, after which scholars came to recognise the characteristics of the culture as a distinct entity. Archaeological work at Liangzhu has now continued for more than eight decades. More than 1,000 sites related to the Liangzhu culture have been identified in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces and in Shanghai around Taihu Lake, according to Liu Bin, director of the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. A decisive later step came in 2007, when the discovery of the ancient city of Liangzhu — the walled capital whose remains are now the core of the World Heritage property — advanced the known history of urban construction at Hangzhou by some 3,000 years and transformed understanding of how large and organised the Liangzhu polity had been.

The Ancient City and the UNESCO World Heritage Property

The museum interprets, above all, the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City. In UNESCO's description, the ruins, dating to about 3300–2300 BCE, reveal an early regional state with a unified belief system based on rice cultivation in late Neolithic China. The World Heritage property is composed of four areas: the Area of the Yaoshan Site, the Area of the High-dam at the Mouth of the Valley, the Area of the Low-dam on the Plain, and the Area of the City Site. Together they are an outstanding example of early urban civilisation expressed in earthen monuments, urban planning, a water conservation system and a social hierarchy expressed in differentiated burials in cemeteries within the property. The ancient city was the centre of power and belief of the Liangzhu culture. Its remains include river channels, carbonised rice, jade artefacts and burial sites, and they provide evidence of a complex water management system, mature rice production, unified cultural beliefs and differentiated social classes. The property's inner city covers about 2.8 square kilometres, with an outer section spread across about 6.3 square kilometres. The water-conservancy system — high dams in the hills northwest of the city, low dams on the plain, spillways and channels — was used to protect the city, to support irrigation downstream and to move timber and other materials, and its planning is understood to have been laid out early in the city's history. On 6 July 2019, at the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Baku, Azerbaijan, the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City were inscribed on the World Heritage List as a cultural site. The inscription made the property China's 55th World Heritage site at the time, Hangzhou's third after West Lake and the Grand Canal, and it filled a gap in the list for Neolithic urban archaeological sites in East Asia.

From the Liangzhu Culture Museum to the Present Building

The institution predates its present home. The museum was formerly the Liangzhu Culture Museum, opened in 1994 in Meilizhou Park in Liangzhu Town, Yuhang District. Construction of the new exhibition hall began in March 2005. In September 2008 the institution was renamed the Liangzhu Museum, and the new museum opened to the public in October 2008 — sources also record a formal opening date of 29 September 2008 for the new hall. The project had taken about five years to design and construct. The new building gave the Liangzhu material a purpose-built setting at a scale the earlier museum could not offer, arriving just after the 2007 discovery of the ancient city had raised the profile of the site sharply. The museum and the ruins it interprets are related but distinct places: the museum stands inside Liangzhu Meilizhou Park, about seven kilometres from the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City protected inside the Liangzhu Ancient City Ruins Park, and visitors are commonly advised to visit the museum first, to learn the culture's story from its objects, before going to see the largely earthen and waterlogged remains of the city itself.

A Building by David Chipperfield Architects

The present building was designed by David Chipperfield Architects, with David Chipperfield as principal, and developed in conjunction with ZTUDI, the Architectural Design and Research Institute at Zhejiang University of Technology. The project dates from 2003, construction was completed in June 2007, and the museum opened in October 2008. It was among the practice's first projects in China, completed alongside Ninetree Village, and it forms the northern point of Liangzhu Cultural Village, a newly created park town near Hangzhou. The museum houses a collection of archaeological findings from the Liangzhu culture, also known as the Jade culture of around 3000 BCE. Its architecture is deliberately restrained. The building is composed of four parallel, bar-shaped volumes clad in Iranian travertine stone, equal in width at 18 metres but differing in height and length. The cream and tan travertine has been noted for recalling the milky-white jade for which the Liangzhu people were renowned, and the design concept is described as "a handful of jade cones scattered on the ground" — the museum as, in a phrase associated with the building, a box for collecting treasures. Five internal courtyards punctuate the four blocks, connecting the galleries and admitting daylight. Contemporary coverage in Architectural Record and BusinessWeek recognised the building with a Best Public Building award, and its abstract, geometrical composition was praised for integrating art and nature, and history and modernity, rather than imitating an ancient Chinese form.

Site, Landscape and Scale

The setting is part of the exhibit's meaning. The museum site was previously a contaminated, formerly industrial site, isolated from the town, and it was remediated and landscaped into a park by Levin Monsigny Landschaftsarchitekten, with hills and manmade streams. The stone-clad building is surrounded on three sides by a manmade lake and is set on that lake within Meilizhou Park, amid water and marsh planting that evokes the wetland world in which the Liangzhu people lived. Visitors enter the building via a bridge across the lake — an approach that has been read as echoing the aquaculture and irrigation systems of the Liangzhu people — and choose from the entrance hall whether to begin with the permanent collection or the temporary exhibitions. A courtyard at the back gives access across a second bridge to a small island on which outdoor exhibitions can be displayed. In scale, the museum site uses more than 40,000 square metres, including about 10,000 square metres of building or gross floor area. Inside are three conventional exhibition halls and a temporary exhibition hall, together with other function rooms that include a special store for cultural relics and public leisure space. The regular exhibition area exceeds 4,000 square metres.

The Collection: More Than 3,000 Movable Relics

The museum holds a collection of more than 3,000 movable cultural relics. They are mainly of jade, pottery, stone and bone, with lacquer also represented among the materials of the Liangzhu finds — alongside, in the wider record of the culture, silk and ivory objects from elite contexts. The relics were unearthed during the successive archaeological excavations of the Liangzhu sites, including the burial objects found in and around the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City. Not all of the collection is on view at once. The permanent exhibition displays 608 pieces or sets of cultural relics, nearly half of them new archaeological discoveries made in the preceding ten years at the time of the exhibition's renewal. Typical objects on display include jade cong, jade bi and jade yue, jade-inlaid lacquer cups and carved pottery jars. Earlier reporting at the museum's opening also highlighted jade wares with fine patterns, lacquer ware, linen products and elephant-tusk ornaments among the highlights of the holdings. The emphasis throughout is on objects as evidence: the same classes of material — jade for rank and belief, pottery for everyday and funerary life, stone for tools and production, and lacquer and other organic materials where they survive — are used to reconstruct how Liangzhu society was organised, what it produced and what it valued.

The Permanent Exhibition and Its Three Halls

The theme of the museum's permanent exhibition is given in English as "Liangzhu Archaeological Site: A Sacred Place to Showcase the 5,000-year-old Chinese Civilization" — in other renderings, the Liangzhu site as a sacred place that empirically proves, or bears witness to, 5,000 years of Chinese civilisation. The exhibition is organised in three halls. The first, rendered as The Early Wetland State and also as A Water Town or Water Country, explains how the early inhabitants lived in the wetland environment of the Taihu basin: the lakes, marshes and rivers around the ancient city, the dams built against flash floods from the hills, the canals used to transport materials, irrigate farmland and support fishing and aquaculture, and the mature rice cultivation on which the state's economy rested, with carbonised rice and ancient paddies among the archaeological evidence. The second hall, A Sacred Place of Civilization or Holy Land of Civilization, focuses on the ancient city itself — its planning, its palace and residential zones, its workshops for pottery, wood, stone and jade, its altars and its graded cemeteries, including the Yaoshan site, where an altar was built using a natural hill and more than ten tombs yielded over 700 pieces or groups of relics, most of them jade. The third hall, Jade as the Spiritual Symbol of the State — also rendered Jade Soul, National Spirit, or Jade and the State — interprets the jade ritual system through which belief, rank and power were expressed. The halls together present the archaeological achievements and heritage value of the Liangzhu site and reflect the place of Liangzhu civilisation in the historical development of Chinese civilisation.

Jade as a Symbol of Belief and Power

Jade is the museum's central material argument. Liangzhu artisans inaugurated what is described as the apex of prehistoric Chinese jade culture, and archaeologists in China have unearthed more jade artefacts in scientific excavations from Liangzhu ruins than from any other comparable site. With uniform images of their gods, the inhabitants established a hierarchical ritual system represented by jade objects such as cong, bi and yue. The cong is a tube with a circular inner section and a square, quadrilateral exterior; the largest discovered weighs 3.5 kilograms, and its precise original function remains debated, though it is generally understood as a ritual object. The bi is a flat disc, a symbol associated with wealth and power, and the yue is a ceremonial axe. In the exhibition's interpretation, the deity emblem together with the cong, the yue and the bi forms a distinctive system: the cong representing divine power, the yue military and royal power, and the bi wealth or financial power, together expressing a state form with theocratic characteristics, in which jade identified status and distinguished levels. The emblem itself — a human-shaped deity, shown with a feathered headdress above a beast's face, often called the god-human-and-animal or man-animal mask motif — is the ubiquitous symbol incised on Liangzhu jades and is regarded as the culture's common emblem of belief. The king, in reconstructions of Liangzhu regalia, held the privilege of the highest jade symbols: he wore jade combinations as a headdress, held a large jade yue and a regal sceptre, and possessed a large jade cong. Many Liangzhu jades have a white, milky, bone-like aspect because of their tremolite origin and the effect of water-based fluids at burial sites, although jade made from actinolite and serpentine was also common. Personal ornaments make up a large share of the jades found, and forms unique to Liangzhu, such as the trident-shaped plaque worn as a headpiece, underline how completely this one culture codified jade into a language of belief and rank.

Renewal in 2017–2018 and a National Exhibition Award

A decade after opening, the museum renewed its displays to absorb a decade of new archaeology — above all the fuller understanding of the ancient city and its water-conservancy system. In August 2017 the museum began a project to upgrade and reconstruct its basic exhibition; accounts describe a 315-day improvement project, and the museum was closed for about ten months. It reopened to the public on 25 June 2018. More than 600 cultural relics were on display at the reopening, nearly double the number previously shown, and the latest exhibits presented the ruins of the ancient Liangzhu city and the large water projects dating back about 5,000 years. High technology was a highlight of the reopening: nineteen digital multimedia projects presented subjects including climate change in the Taihu Lake area, the history of rice planting, and the symbols and characters carved on the pottery and stoneware of the region, supplemented in the renewed displays by techniques including 3D printing and scene simulation. The timing was deliberate: in January 2018 the archaeological site had been officially submitted to UNESCO for consideration as a World Cultural Heritage site in 2019. The renewed themed exhibition was subsequently named among China's top ten best museum exhibitions of 2018, announced on 18 May 2019 at the main International Museum Day event at Hunan Provincial Museum — the highest award of its kind in the Chinese museum industry, and the second time the museum had received it, after 2008.

World Heritage, Liangzhu Day and Visiting the Museum

The World Heritage inscription of July 2019 changed the museum's public role from interpreter of a national treasure to interpreter of a property of recognised world significance. Hangzhou marked the anniversary directly: in 2020 the city designated 6 July as Hangzhou Liangzhu Day, and week-long celebrations around that date have since included exhibitions, seminars and dialogues linking Liangzhu with other World Heritage sites and civilisations, with admission arrangements at the relic site adjusted for the occasion. The first Liangzhu Forum was held in Hangzhou at the end of 2023, further raising the site's international profile. For visitors, the practical pattern is well established. Hangzhou tourism sources list the museum's opening hours as 9:00 to 17:00 from Tuesday to Sunday, with no entry after 16:30 and closure on Mondays except on national holidays, at its address of 1 Meilizhou Road, Yuhang District. Recommended Hangzhou heritage itineraries place the museum alongside the city's other two World Heritage properties — West Lake, inscribed in 2011, and the Grand Canal, inscribed in 2014 — typically combining the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City and the Liangzhu Museum in a single day on the city's northwestern side. Seen in that company, the museum's purpose is clear. West Lake and the Grand Canal can be walked on and sailed on; the Liangzhu capital is a low, earthen, waterlogged landscape whose significance is not self-evident. The Liangzhu Museum, in its travertine building across a lake in Meilizhou Park, is where that significance is assembled — object by object, in jade, pottery, stone, bone and lacquer — into the case that the ruins outside are the remains of an early state, and testimony to 5,000 years of Chinese civilisation.