Ruins of China: The Shape in the Ground and the Museum Next to It

01The Shape and the Museum

Which archaeological sites in China are worth visiting, and what is there to see?

A Chinese ruin is a shape in the ground and a museum next to it. Before you go, ask which of the two you are going for. At some sites the shape is the sight: a whole city dug out of a cliff at Jiaohe 交河故城, a stone city on a loess hill at Shimao 石峁, a grass square where Kublai Khan 忽必烈's palace stood. At others the ground is a lawn and everything is in the museum: the oracle bones 甲骨 of Yinxu 殷墟, the bronze faces of Sanxingdui 三星堆, the jade of Liangzhu 良渚. Both are worth the trip, with different expectations.

Why the two kinds. China built its early cities of rammed earth 夯土 on river plains, and two thousand years of ploughing, floods and later towns have flattened them; what archaeology finds is foundations, pits and graves, and what it finds goes into a building. The cities that still stand as shapes are the ones in the desert and on the steppe, where nothing was built on top and nothing rotted: Turpan 吐鲁番's two ruins, the Mongol summer capital, the Goguryeo 高句丽 fortress on its hill. The Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD and Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century palaces of Xi'an 西安 are in between, their earth platforms still ten metres high in the middle of the modern city.

The timeline is the second thing to hold. The sixteen sites on this page run from a cave where people used fire seven hundred thousand years ago to a palace burned in 1358, and between them they are the chapters of the story China tells about itself: the first cities before any dynasty, the first dynasty whose capital has been found, the capital where writing appears, a second civilisation in Sichuan 四川 that the histories never mention, the capitals of the Han and the Tang, the oasis cities of the Silk Road, and two kingdoms on the edges. The page keeps that order.

What a visit is like. Slow, flat and mostly outdoors. The site parks 遗址公园 that China has built over its great ruins since about 2010, at the Tang palace, at Liangzhu, at Yinxu and at the marquis's tomb in Nanchang 南昌, are landscaped grounds with paths, low walls marking where walls stood, glass over open pits and a museum at the gate, and the survey's advice at each of them is to take the museum first and the ground second. The desert cities are the opposite: go at the end of the day, when the sun is low and the earth turns red, and read the museum on the way home.

What is here. Five of the sixteen are inscribed as world heritage on their own, Yinxu, Liangzhu, Zhoukoudian 周口店, Xanadu 元上都 and the Goguryeo capital, and three more with the Silk Road in 2014. Six have a museum that belongs to the museums page; three are on the tombs page for what was buried in them; and every one has, by the survey's card, a coordinate, a ticket rule and an honest line about how much is left to see.

02Reading Rammed Earth

How do you read a Chinese ruin made of rammed earth?

Most of what survives of early China is rammed earth 夯土, and rammed earth looks like nothing until you know what you are looking at. Four things to learn to see, and a fifth that the Chinese invented to help you.

The wall that became a hill. City walls were built by pounding earth in layers between timber frames, and when the frames rotted and the top eroded, a wall three thousand years old became a long low ridge with a road on top or a field across it. At Yinxu 殷墟, at Erlitou 二里头, at the Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD capital, the lines of the city are those ridges, and the survey's site maps draw the old plan over the modern fields so that you can stand on a corner and see the rectangle.

The platform that was a palace. Halls were raised on earth terraces, and the terrace outlasts the hall. The Han front hall at Weiyang 未央宫 stands on a cut-down hill; the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century audience hall at Daming 大明宫 has a platform fifteen metres high with the ramps that led to it; the Goguryeo 高句丽 palace at Wandu 丸都山城 is a set of stone terraces up a slope. Where the platform is high the site reads as architecture; where it is low, as at Taosi 陶寺, you need the drawing.

The city cut down instead of built up. Jiaohe 交河故城 is the exception that teaches the rule: on an island of loess between two rivers the builders dug down, leaving the walls of streets, temples and houses standing as they removed the earth around them, so that the whole city is one carved block with no brick and no timber. It is the best preserved earth city in the world by the survey's account, and after it every other site on the page is easier to read.

The pit under glass. Where a dig has been left open, the survey's site parks 遗址公园 roof it with glass or a shed: the sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui 三星堆, the ivory pit at Jinsha 金沙 where you can watch the work, the palace foundations at Erlitou. These are the places where the ground and the museum are the same thing, and they are the easiest ruins for a first visit.

And the site park. From about 2010, beginning with the Tang palace in Xi'an 西安, China began turning its greatest ruins into parks: the plan of the city laid out in low walls and hedges, the platforms rebuilt to their outline in earth, a museum at the gate, and the whole thing free or nearly free to walk. Liangzhu 良渚, Yinxu, the Han capital and the marquis's tomb in Nanchang 南昌 followed. Foreign visitors sometimes find them empty; the survey's view, and ours, is that they are the most honest way a ruin has ever been shown, because nothing is rebuilt and everything is labelled.

The patience. A ruin rewards an hour with the map and the museum before the walk. Read the card, find the corner, walk the axis, and the field turns into a city.

03Before Writing

What can you see at the Peking Man site and at Shuidonggou?

Two sites on the page are older than any dynasty, any city or any script. One is the cave where a human ancestor kept fires burning seven hundred thousand years ago, and one is a loess bank in Ningxia 宁夏 where modern humans knapped stone thirty thousand years ago and a Ming 明, 14th to 17th century garrison later hid underground.

Zhoukoudian 周口店, Peking Man 北京猿人. Fifty kilometres south-west of Beijing, an hour by the Fangshan metro line and a bus, a limestone hill called Dragon Bone Hill 龙骨山 holds the caves where, by the survey's account, Homo erectus lived from about seven hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years ago, and where an ash layer six metres thick is the clearest evidence anywhere of an early human controlling fire. On 2 December 1929 a young Chinese archaeologist, Pei Wenzhong 裴文中, prised the first complete skull out of frozen sediment; in 1936 his colleague Jia Lanpo 贾兰坡 found three more in eleven days. In 1941, packed for shipping to the United States as the Japanese army closed in, the fossils vanished and have never been found, one of the unsolved mysteries of the science. An upper cave on the same hill held people of thirty thousand years ago with a bone needle and a necklace of animal teeth. The site was in China's first batch of world heritage in 1987. Two and a half to three hours with the museum, a small ticket, closed on Mondays, booking advised.

Shuidonggou 水洞沟, the first dig. Nineteen kilometres east of Yinchuan 银川 on the bank of the Yellow River, a bluff of yellow earth is where in 1923 two French priest-scientists, Teilhard de Chardin and Licent, made the first systematic excavation of a Stone Age site in China and found tools made by a technique known in Europe and the Near East, which the survey reads as evidence of contact across Eurasia thirty thousand years ago. On the same bluff the Ming built a fort of the Great Wall 长城's Ningxia line and dug a warren of tunnels for its soldiers under the gravel, which you walk through, so that a single cliff holds a hunters' camp and a garrison five hundred years old, the survey notes, chosen by both for the same water. Three to four hours with the museum and the tunnels, a combined ticket with the shuttle 观光车, real-name reservation.

Why begin here. Because the page is a timeline and these are its first two lines, and because both are the museum kind: the skulls are copies, the tools are in cases, and the ground is a hill and a bank. Expect a lesson, and a good one, more than a sight.

04The Cities Before the Dynasties

What are Liangzhu, Shimao and Taosi, the cities older than the dynasties?

Three sites in three provinces are cities that stood before any dynasty the histories record, and between them they have changed what the country believes about its own beginnings: a water-engineering capital by the Yangtze, a stone fortress on the loess that no text mentions, and a town with an observatory that may have been a legendary emperor's.

Liangzhu 良渚, near Hangzhou 杭州. Twenty kilometres from the city, on the plain by Lake Tai 太湖, a walled city of about five thousand three hundred years ago with a palace mound at its centre, an outer town, and a system of eleven dams in the hills that the survey calls the earliest large water works in the world, was inscribed in 2019, and China counts it as the proof of five thousand years of civilisation. What it made was jade: tubes, discs and axe-heads carved with a masked figure that the survey reads as one shared god, found in 1986 in a cemetery here in quantities that founded Chinese jade culture. The site park 遗址公园 is free and the museum has a ticket; two to three hours, booking advised.

Shimao 石峁, in the loess. A hundred kilometres north of Yulin 榆林 at Shenmu 神木, on a hill above the Mu Us 毛乌素 desert, a stone city of about four thousand two hundred years ago covers more than four million square metres by the survey's count, the largest Neolithic city in China, with three rings of stone walls, bastions, a barbican and a central citadel whose walls are set with carved stone faces. No history mentions it; it was not understood until a survey of 2011, and the survey calls it a forgotten civilisation. The citadel platform and the eastern gate are what you see, with a gallery of the carvings. Free, two hours, a car from Yulin.

Taosi 陶寺, the observatory. Thirty kilometres from Linfen 临汾 in the Fen valley 汾河谷地, a town of about four thousand three hundred years ago that some scholars identify as the capital of the legendary emperor Yao 尧 has a ring of thirteen rammed-earth pillars, found in 2003, through whose gaps the sunrise marks the seasons, which the survey dates five hundred years before Stonehenge; and a pot with two characters in red that the survey counts as writing eight hundred years before the oracle bones 甲骨. The graves ran from a few hundred grave goods to none, which is what an early state looks like in the ground. Free, an hour and a half, and almost nobody.

What the three say together. Before the Xia, before writing, there were cities with walls, water works, astronomers and kings, in three different valleys, and the survey pairs them as the page's first triangle. Liangzhu is the one to see with a museum; Shimao is the one to see for the shape; Taosi is for people who like standing in a field with a drawing.

05The First Dynasties

Where are the Xia and Shang capitals, and where were the oracle bones found?

Two sites in Henan 河南, ninety minutes apart by train, are where the histories and the ground first meet: the capital that most scholars take to be the Xia, China's first dynasty, and the capital of the Shang 商, 16th to 11th century BC, where Chinese writing was found.

Erlitou 二里头, the Xia capital. Twenty kilometres east of Luoyang 洛阳 at Yanshi 偃师, in the fields along the Luo River, a city of about 1750 to 1500 BC has yielded what the survey calls the earliest palace compound in China, laid on an axis inside its own wall, with a road grid, a bronze foundry and the first sets of bronze ritual vessels, the cups and tripods that every later dynasty copied. Most scholars identify it as the last capital of the Xia, the dynasty the histories put first and archaeology could not find until 1959. The object everyone comes for is a dragon sixty-four centimetres long made of two thousand pieces of turquoise, found in 2002 on a nobleman's chest. The site is free and open; the museum beside it, opened recently, has a ticket. An hour and a half to two, no booking.

Yinxu 殷墟, where the writing is. On the edge of Anyang 安阳, a two-hour train from Luoyang, the last capital of the Shang, occupied from about 1300 to 1046 BC, spreads over thirty-six square kilometres by the survey's count along the Huan River 洹河: palace and temple foundations on the south bank, the royal cemetery on the north, workshops between. In 1899 a Beijing scholar recognised characters on "dragon bones" sold as medicine, and traced them here; in 1928 the first scientific excavation in Chinese archaeology began on the site; some hundred and fifty thousand inscribed bones and shells by the survey's count have been found since, the oldest mature Chinese writing, recording the kings' questions to their ancestors about war, harvest and rain. In 1976 the untouched tomb of a queen and general, Fu Hao 妇好, gave up more than a thousand objects; and the largest bronze vessel ever cast in the ancient world, a square cauldron of more than eight hundred kilograms by the survey's figure, came out of a field here in 1939. It was inscribed in 2006. Two to three hours, a modest ticket, booking advised; the new museum across the river is on the museums page.

How to read them. At Erlitou the ground is low, the axis of the palace is marked, and the turquoise dragon is the reason to go inside; at Yinxu the palace foundations are outlined in the grass, the chariot pits are under glass with the horses still in them, and the queen's tomb is a reconstructed shaft you can look down. Neither is a sight from the road, both are the beginning of Chinese history, and the survey's advice is to take them on one day, in that order, with the train between.

06The Other China

How do you visit Sanxingdui and Jinsha, and why do the bronzes look like that?

Forty kilometres apart on the Chengdu 成都 plain lie the two capitals of a civilisation that no Chinese history mentions, whose bronze faces look like nothing else on earth, and whose discovery is still going on under glass.

Sanxingdui 三星堆. At Guanghan 广汉, forty kilometres north of Chengdu, a farmer digging a ditch in 1929 turned up jade; in 1986 two pits of burned and broken bronze were found, and between 2019 and 2023 six more, still being emptied. What came out is a bronze standing figure taller than a man, masks with eyes that stand out on stalks and ears like wings, a sacred tree four metres high hung with birds by the survey's count, a gold mask, and ivory by the tonne, all made between about 1200 and 1100 BC by a state that had a walled city of three and a half square kilometres here and then, around 1100 BC, broke its treasures, buried them and moved away. The survey calls it the most mysterious discovery in Chinese archaeology and says the new excavations are still making headlines. The museum, rebuilt recently on a large scale, is the visit; the pits are under a shed beside it; a reservation is required by the survey's note and the museum sells out. Two to three hours.

Jinsha 金沙. In the western suburbs of Chengdu, on the metro, a building crew in February 2001 cut into a layer of ivory and gold, and the city built a museum over the spot. This is where the Sanxingdui people went: the same bronze and gold and jade, smaller and finer, from about 1200 to 650 BC, and a gold disc twelve centimetres across cut into a sun with four birds 太阳神鸟 flying round it, which in 2005 became the emblem of all Chinese cultural heritage. The excavation hall is built over the sacrificial ground with the ivory still in the earth, so that this is the site on the page where you can watch the work. Two hours, a modest ticket, booking advised.

What they change. Until 1986 the story of early China ran down the Yellow River from Erlitou 二里头 to Yinxu 殷墟. Sanxingdui showed a second centre a thousand kilometres away with its own gods, no writing and a taste for the monstrous that the Shang 商, 16th to 11th century BC never had; the survey notes that its collapse and Jinsha's rise pushed the founding of Chengdu back a thousand years. See Sanxingdui first and Jinsha the same day if you can, in the order the people themselves moved.

07Two Capitals of Xi’an

What remains of the Han and Tang palaces in Xi'an?

Xi'an 西安 has the ruins of two imperial capitals inside the modern city, one Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD and one Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century, and each is larger than the Forbidden City 故宫 several times over. One is a free park of earth platforms; the other is the site park 遗址公园 that started the fashion.

Weiyang 未央宫, the Han palace, 200 BC. Fifteen kilometres north-west of the centre, a metro ride and a bus, the palace that the chancellor Xiao He 萧何 built for the founder of the Han in 200 BC covered five square kilometres by the survey's count, seven times the Forbidden City, in the south-west corner of a capital that was among the largest cities in the world. The founder is said to have been angry at the extravagance and to have been told that without magnificence there is no majesty. From here, in 138 BC, the envoy Zhang Qian 张骞 was sent west on the journey that opened the Silk Road, and here stood the two towers that the survey calls China's first state libraries. What remains is earth: the front hall on its cut-down hill, still the height of a house, the lines of the walls, and a landscaped park around them that is free and open from six in the morning, with a small exhibition. It was inscribed with the Silk Road in 2014, and the survey calls it far quieter than anything else in Xi'an. Two to three hours.

Daming 大明宫, the Tang palace, 634. North of the railway station, a metro stop away, the palace built in 634 as a summer residence for the retired first emperor of the Tang and occupied by his grandson in 663 became the seat of government for the next two hundred and thirty years: three point two square kilometres by the survey's count, four and a half times the Forbidden City, with an audience hall on a platform fifteen metres high from which, a Tang poem says, the emperor received the envoys of every nation. It burned in 896 in the wars that ended the dynasty. In 2010 the city cleared the shanty town that had grown over it and opened China's first great archaeological site park: the platforms of the halls rebuilt in earth to their outline, the axis and the lake restored, a museum, a film, and miles of paths. A modest ticket for the core, two hours; the survey calls it the place to feel the scale of a lost capital.

Read them with the Forbidden City. The Ming 明, 14th to 17th century palace in Beijing is the one everyone sees; these two are the sizes it was measured against, and standing on the Han platform or the Tang one is the quickest way to grasp that the Beijing palace was a late and modest heir. The Tang tombs and the terracotta army 兵马俑 are on the tombs page and the pagodas of the same city on the architecture page; a Xi'an day that takes the two palaces in the morning and the Wild Goose Pagoda in the afternoon is the whole of Chinese imperial history before lunch.

08The Desert Cities

What are the ruined cities of Jiaohe and Gaochang at Turpan?

Turpan 吐鲁番 has the two best ruined cities in China, forty kilometres apart, and they are the opposite of everything else on this page: nothing is in a museum, because the cities themselves are still standing, in earth, in the driest air in the country.

Jiaohe 交河故城, the city dug down. Ten kilometres west of Turpan, on a leaf-shaped island of loess thirty metres above two river beds, the people of the kingdom of Cheshi 车师 began in the second century BC to make a city by digging: streets cut down into the earth, the walls of houses, temples and government halls left standing as the ground around them was removed, no brick and no timber anywhere. It was the seat of the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century protectorate that governed the western regions from 640, a Buddhist city with a hundred and one stupas in its north-east quarter by the survey's count, and it was abandoned in the thirteenth century and never reoccupied, which is why it is the largest, oldest and best preserved earth city in the world by the survey's claim. Walk the main street to the great temple at the end, look down into the houses, and go at sunset, when the survey says it is one of the most dramatic ruins in China. Two hours, a modest ticket, no booking. Inscribed with the Silk Road in 2014.

Gaochang 高昌, the city of the sworn brothers. Forty kilometres east of Turpan at the foot of the Flaming Mountains 火焰山, a walled city of the first century BC with an outer, inner and palace wall on the plan of Chang'an was for a century and a half the capital of a kingdom of Chinese settlers in the desert, then a Tang prefecture, then the capital of the Uyghurs after they came south in the ninth century, and was abandoned at the end of the thirteenth. In 627 the monk Xuanzang 玄奘, on his way to India, stayed a month here and was made a sworn brother by the king, who tried to keep him, and the survey counts the episode as one of the real events behind the Monkey King 孙悟空's story. The walls stand, the great temple in the south-west corner stands, and a donkey cart or a shuttle 观光车 carries you across the enclosure. Two hours, a modest ticket, no booking; the painted caves of the same Uyghur 维吾尔族 kingdom are on the grottoes page.

How to do them. One day with a car: Jiaohe in the morning while it is cool, the caves at Bezeklik 柏孜克里克石窟 and the Flaming Mountains at midday from the road, Gaochang in the late afternoon. Turpan is the lowest and hottest place in China, and the survey's note that there is no shade is meant literally; the season is spring and autumn, and the ruins are the reason to come.

09Xanadu

Is Xanadu a real place, and can you visit it?

One ruin on this page is a word every English speaker knows. Xanadu 元上都, the summer capital of Kublai Khan 忽必烈, is a grass square on the Mongolian steppe three hours north of Beijing, and it is inscribed as world heritage because of what stood there and who wrote about it.

What it was. In 1256 the Chinese adviser Liu Bingzhong 刘秉忠 laid out a walled city for Kublai on the Luan River 滦河, three hundred kilometres north of the site where he would later lay out Beijing; in 1260 Kublai was proclaimed Great Khan here, and after he took the Chinese throne the Yuan 元, 13th to 14th century court moved between two capitals every year, Beijing in winter and this one in summer, the emperor riding north in the second or third month and back in the eighth or ninth. It was where the Mongol assemblies met and the Mongol rites were held, a Chinese triple-walled city with a steppe encampment beside it, and the survey calls it the best preserved Yuan city there is. Marco Polo 马可·波罗 saw it and described its marble palace and its cane pavilion; five hundred years later Coleridge, reading Polo in an English translation, wrote the poem that made the name a synonym for paradise. In 1358 a rebel army burned it, and it was never rebuilt.

What is there. The earth walls of the three enclosures, the platform of the great hall, the lines of streets, and grass. The survey is honest that it is a shape and not a building: you walk the axis, climb the platform, and the steppe runs to the horizon on every side. The museum, five kilometres away and free, has the finds and a model; the site has a ticket and a daily limit on the core zone, so book ahead. Two and a half to three hours with the museum.

How to get there. Twenty kilometres from the town of Shangdu 上都 in Zhenglan Banner 正蓝旗, two hundred kilometres from Xilinhot 锡林浩特, and by the survey's advice a drive, from Beijing in a long day or from the grasslands of Bashang 坝上 as part of a steppe trip. Go between June and September; the plateau is high, cold and windy the rest of the year.

Why it matters more than it looks. Kublai's other capital is Beijing, and the man who drew both is the same; the Forbidden City 故宫 stands on the axis Liu Bingzhong laid out for the Yuan. Xanadu is the draft, the summer version, and the only place where the Mongol side of the dynasty that ruled China can still be seen in the ground. The survey pairs it with the Yuan wall park in Beijing, and with the Mongol khans' memorial at Ordos 鄂尔多斯 on the tombs page.

10The Kingdom on the Yalu

What are the Goguryeo sites at Ji'an?

On the Chinese bank of the Yalu 鸭绿江, at the small border town of Ji'an 集安, lie the capital and the mountain fortress of Goguryeo 高句丽, a kingdom that ruled the river and the north of the Korean peninsula for seven centuries, and the stone that tells its story.

Guonei 国内城, the city under the town. In the year 3, by the survey's account, the kingdom's second king moved his capital to this plain by the river, and it stayed the seat of the state for four hundred years, until a later king moved south to Pyongyang 平壤 in 427. The modern town of Ji'an sits directly on top of it, which the survey calls a rare city on a city: the stone walls of the old capital run through the streets, still three to four metres high in places, with their towers, bastions and drains, and a corner of the circuit is a free park. An hour, on foot from anywhere in town.

Wandu 丸都山城, the fortress on the hill. Two and a half kilometres up the valley, a mountain fortress of 209 with nearly seven kilometres of stone wall on the ridge line, a palace on terraces inside and a gate at the bottom of the bowl, was the kingdom's refuge when the plain was attacked and its capital at times; it was sacked in 342 by a steppe army that dug up the king's father's grave, and the survey calls the two together, plain city and hill fortress paired, a system found nowhere else in East Asia. An hour and a half on the paths.

The stele. Six kilometres from the fortress, in a pavilion beside the royal tombs, stands a stone six metres high set up in 414 by a king for his father, carved with one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five Chinese characters that tell the kingdom's founding legend and the father's campaigns, the longest text of Goguryeo in existence by the survey's account and the document from which most of what is known about the state comes. The stepped stone pyramid of the son who set it up is on the tombs page.

Practical. The three sites, the pyramid and the museum share one ticket valid for three days, by the survey; Ji'an is a hundred kilometres and two hours by road from Tonghua 通化, and the river is the border, with the far bank in North Korea 朝鲜 in plain view. The sites were inscribed in 2004, the same year as the kingdom's tombs across the river. A full day, a night in the town, and the survey notes that hardly any foreign visitor comes.

A note on the name. Goguryeo's heritage is claimed in both Chinese and Korean history, and this page keeps to what is in the ground: a capital, a fortress, a stone and the graves, dated by their own inscriptions.

11What Went to the Museum

Which ruins have their finds in a museum, and which should you see for the site itself?

Eight of the sixteen ruins on this page have a museum that holds nearly everything found in them, and for those eight the museum is most of the visit. This section says which, and what the museums page adds; the reservation rules are in the table.

The museum kind, in the order of the page. Zhoukoudian 周口店's museum on the hill has the casts of the skulls and the story of their loss; Shuidonggou 水洞沟's has the French tools and the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century finds. Liangzhu 良渚's museum, a low white building by a lake, has the jade and the reconstructed city. Erlitou 二里头's has the turquoise dragon and the bronzes. Yinxu 殷墟's, opened recently across the river from the site, has the oracle bones 甲骨, the queen's bronzes and the chariots, and the great cauldron itself is in Beijing. Sanxingdui 三星堆's, rebuilt recently, has the masks, the tree and the gold, and is the one that sells out; Jinsha 金沙's has the sun-bird disc and the ivory in the ground. Taosi 陶寺 and Shimao 石峁 have small galleries at the site and the best pieces in the provincial museums at Taiyuan 太原 and Xi'an 西安.

The shape kind. Jiaohe 交河故城, Gaochang 高昌, Weiyang 未央宫, Daming 大明宫, Xanadu 元上都, Guonei 国内城 and Wandu 丸都山城 each have an exhibition at the gate or in the town, but nothing there will make up for not walking the ground; go for the shape, and read the finds in the regional museums, Turpan 吐鲁番's for the two desert cities, Shaanxi 陕西's for the two palaces, the Yuan museum at the site for Xanadu, and Ji'an 集安's for Goguryeo 高句丽.

The division with the museums page. That page has cards for the museums at Yinxu, Sanxingdui, Jinsha, Liangzhu, Erlitou and Zhoukoudian as buildings with collections, opening hours and their own reservation systems; this page has the ground they came from. If you have one visit, and the site is of the museum kind, the museums page is the one to read; if the site is of the shape kind, this page is.

What the tombs page has. The terracotta army 兵马俑, the marquis of Haihun and the Goguryeo pyramid are ruins by any definition, and they are on the tombs page because what was buried is the point; the cross-references on each card take you there.

12PreeChina, and What It Is Not

What does PreeChina arrange at China's archaeological sites?

• A ruin is a day with a car, a museum ticket that sells out, and someone who can read the ground with you. Those are what we do.
• The pairs. Xi'an 西安's two palaces in a morning, with the pagodas after lunch; Erlitou 二里头 and Yinxu 殷墟 in one day with the train between, as the beginning of Chinese history; Sanxingdui 三星堆 with its reservation and Jinsha 金沙 the same afternoon, in the order the people moved; Jiaohe 交河故城 and Gaochang 高昌 with the caves in one Turpan 吐鲁番 day, spring or autumn only.
• The single days. Liangzhu 良渚 from Hangzhou 杭州 with the museum first; Zhoukoudian 周口店 from Beijing on any day but Monday; Xanadu 元上都 from Beijing or the Bashang 坝上 grasslands between June and September, with the daily limit booked; Shuidonggou 水洞沟 from Yinchuan 银川 with the tunnels.
• The far ones. Ji'an 集安 for two days with a night in the town, the four Goguryeo 高句丽 sites on the three-day ticket and the river; Shimao 石峁 and Taosi 陶寺 by car for anyone who wants to stand in the fields where the histories begin, with a guide who knows which ridge is which.
• The bookings, as the survey has them. Sanxingdui required and sold out in season; Jinsha, Yinxu, Liangzhu, Zhoukoudian and Shuidonggou advised or real-name; Xanadu limited daily; Erlitou, Weiyang 未央宫, Shimao, Taosi, Jiaohe and Gaochang open. We check each rule the week you go.
• What this page is not. It is not the museums page, which has the buildings and the collections. It is not the tombs page, which has the terracotta army 兵马俑, the marquis's tomb and the Goguryeo pyramid. It is not the grottoes page, where Turpan's painted caves are, or the Great Wall page, where the Ming fort above Shuidonggou belongs, or the architecture page, which has the Forbidden City 故宫 that these palaces are measured against. And it takes no view on the claims that gather around ruins: which site proves how many thousand years, which dynasty was real, whose kingdom Goguryeo was. We give the date on the stone and the size of the wall, and leave the rest to the reader.