People at a 5,000-year-old Chinese capital dismantled and buried their own palace

About 5,000 years ago, residents of Nanzuo, a large settlement near Qingyang in China’s Gansu Province, pulled the wooden columns and beams out of their monumental palace and buried the shell under compacted earth. The building they sealed away was no outbuilding: its main hall, called F1, covered about 824 square meters. Archaeologists working at the site since 2021 still cannot say why a community of perhaps 10,000 people hid its grandest structure.

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A palace-style courtyard on the Loess Plateau

Nanzuo dates to roughly 5,100 to 4,700 years ago, the Late Yangshao period, and spreads across about 6 square kilometers of the Loess Plateau. Its monumental center alone covers some 300,000 square meters, where nine massive rammed-earth platforms stand in an inverted U around the core and ditches divide the major precincts. Researchers first identified the site in 1957, and a new excavation campaign began in 2021.

Inside that core sits a courtyard of about 4,000 square meters. According to Arkeonews’ account of the excavation, F1 has a front hall and a larger rear chamber joined by three doorways, thick rammed-earth walls finished with several layers of white lime plaster, and a circular fire installation 3.2 meters across. Han Jianye of Renmin University, who co-leads the dig, based the estimate of more than 10,000 residents on the sheer labor the monuments demanded, which means the number is an inference drawn from construction effort rather than a headcount of houses or graves.

Salvaged timbers and rammed-earth fill

The burial looks planned rather than panicked. Reporting from Renmin University of China says residents recovered still-usable pillars and beams and then backfilled the entire palace area with rammed earth. Layers of alternating dark brown and pale yellow soil show in the front hall, and the excavators found no clear sign of an attack or a violent catastrophe. The sequence suggests a deliberate transformation of the precinct, though the motive remains unknown.

The fill did the archaeologists an unexpected favor. Walls and architectural details that would normally rot or collapse stayed protected, and Guangming Daily’s coverage quotes site staff member Yang Xiaohua calling it the best-preserved and largest palace-style building from 5,000 years ago found in China so far.

Later buildings were raised on top of the buried palace, though little of them survives. Zhang Xiaoning, a field director at the site, says the palace was used for about 300 years and that occupation of the settlement continued for nearly 200 more. Longdong, the eastern Gansu region around the site, may have been an important corridor for the movement of people, materials and ideas, which would help explain how a settlement of this size could organize the labor, food and ritual supplies that the palace and its burial required.

Rice, pig bones and the ritual house F2

The richest clue to the burial sits next to F1. A roughly 70-square-meter room labeled F2 held hundreds of small white decorated jars, nine painted bottles, a lidded white vessel and a painted jar nearly 70 centimeters tall, some of it broken among animal remains and traces of burning. A field assessment in September 2025 also reported intact pig skulls and vessels decorated with cinnabar, and an artificial winding channel with at least twelve bends lies close by within about 15 square meters.

The Northwest University write-up adds that the ritual precinct east of F1 yielded millions of carbonized rice grains, described as unprecedented on the Loess Plateau, along with many pig bones. Millet was the more typical regional crop, so rice on that scale suggests food prepared for special occasions. Whether the feasting and burning marked the closing of the palace or something older is not settled.

A kingship without a visible tomb

Han Jianye argues that the scale of the work points to political power. In the Renmin University account he says that only the emergence of a coercive regional kingship gathering state power could achieve such a feat. Wang Wei, a leading scholar of Chinese civilization’s origins, has placed Nanzuo alongside Liangzhu as a landmark of early state formation, and the site was named among China’s top ten new archaeological discoveries of 2025.

The gap in the evidence is conspicuous, though. Wang Hui of Fudan University noted that no large tombs have been found, and tombs are what would reveal family structure and social rank. Zhang Xiaoning suspects the ruling group moved away while part of the population stayed behind, and Han has floated a move toward northern Shaanxi, where Shimao later rose to prominence. The reporting states no direct link between the two sites, and future seasons will focus on the monumental center and on settlements across the surrounding Dongzhi Plateau and the Malian River basin. Nanzuo also belongs to the broader Yangshao culture of the Yellow River region, which makes the buried palace one of the clearest windows onto how its communities organized power.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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