A fortified city wall roughly 725 metres around, ringed by a moat and enclosing some 50,000 square metres of streets and building foundations, has turned up at the Chengba archaeological site in Quxian County, in eastern Sichuan Province. Researchers date the walls to the early Western Han Dynasty, between 202 and 141 BC, making the settlement about 2,000 years old. Writing in the journal Antiquity, the excavation team argues the site is the first Han Dynasty city ever identified in eastern Sichuan — every other known Han urban center in the province clusters around the Chengdu Plain, hundreds of kilometres away.
One feature has drawn particular attention: a dock complex beside the Qujiang River that researchers believe combined river transport with a checkpoint function, regulating who and what moved between regions. If that reading holds, it would be the only Han Dynasty water gateway documented in China so far.
Roof tiles stamped “Dangqu” solve a name lost to the records
Historical sources describe a county called Dangqu, established under Ba Commandery during the Han Dynasty, but nobody knew where it had stood. HeritageDaily’s report on the excavation describes large numbers of roof tiles recovered at Chengba bearing inscriptions containing the characters for “Dangqu,” combined with historical descriptions of the county’s probable location that make it “very likely” the site is the lost Dangqu City. An earlier phase of the settlement, identified through bronze objects dating to the Warring States Period, has been linked instead to a place called Cong City, suggesting Chengba changed identities as regional powers changed hands.
Bronze ritual vessels and weapons from that earlier Warring States occupation show the location was already important before it belonged to Ba Commandery at all. The Ba state controlled the area at the time, and the vessels recovered from Chengba’s oldest layers match the kind of goods a settlement of real standing, not a minor outpost, would have possessed.
The site’s position explains why anyone would have built there at all. Chengba sits on the Qujiang River’s eastern bank, a waterway that feeds into the Jialing River and eventually the Yangtze, while the Micang Pass to the north cut through the Daba Mountains toward China’s Central Plains. Overland travel across that terrain was difficult, but the combination of river access and a mountain corridor made the location a genuine crossroads.
A dock that may have doubled as a checkpoint
Archaeologists identified the dock area northwest of the walled city, and bamboo slips recovered there point toward an administrative role beyond simple loading and unloading. Officials, the researchers propose, used the site to inspect travelers and boats while regulating the movement of traded goods — a land-and-water gateway rather than a plain wharf. The bamboo documents themselves cover finance, judicial affairs, and education, including material on calligraphy, arithmetic, and literature, and some records relate to household registration, a category of Han-era bamboo text rarely recovered anywhere in China.
Most Han Dynasty bamboo-slip caches recovered elsewhere in China come from tombs or well shafts, where waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions preserved the organic material by accident. A cache tied directly to a functioning checkpoint, rather than a burial, gives researchers a different kind of record: paperwork produced while the county was still operating, not documents someone chose to bury with the dead.
Those documents could end up mattering more than the gateway theory itself. Household registration records are exactly the kind of evidence historians use to reconstruct how ordinary people, not just officials, were counted and governed under the Han state.
Twenty thousand fragments of slag trace centuries of ironworking
Chengba was not only a trading post and a checkpoint. Excavators recovered more than 20,000 fragments of slag, furnace lining, and tuyeres, the nozzles used to force air into a smelting furnace, and radiocarbon dating shows the ironworking ran from the late Western Han Dynasty into the middle of the Eastern Han. That scale makes the site a rare direct record of how iron was produced and moved through eastern Sichuan during the Han period, an area where this kind of evidence has been comparatively scarce until now.
A bronze musical instrument recovered from the Han-era layers, alongside inscribed roof tiles beyond the “Dangqu” examples already noted, adds a domestic and ceremonial dimension to what the slag heaps otherwise present as a purely industrial site. Outside the walls, archaeologists also mapped a cemetery and evidence of pottery production, indicating Chengba supported residential neighborhoods and craft workshops well beyond its administrative core.
A settlement occupied from the Warring States through two dynasties
Evidence at Chengba suggests continuous activity from roughly the fourth century BC, through the short-lived Qin dynasty, and into the centuries of Han rule that followed — a span during which the settlement’s function shifted from a Ba-state stronghold to a river checkpoint to a Han county seat with its own iron industry. The findings appear in the journal Antiquity, credited to researchers Sun T, Liu F, Chen W, Li Y, and Li Y, whose full study is catalogued under DOI 10.15184/aqy.2024.187. The team says future work will target still-unexcavated parts of the settlement, aiming to build a more detailed chronology of how a Han county-level city like Chengba was organized and governed — a question the roof tiles and bamboo slips have only begun to answer.
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This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
