Nan Yue Palace plus plus

Archaeology, slap bang in the middle of town.

This (the Nan Yue palace) is pretty impressive for the simple reason that in a development-minded city it must have taken extraordinary strength of character from someone to prevent this site being turned into a carpark and/or a foundation for a shopping centre. And leaving aside its impressive value as a symbol of political sensitivity - I guess it also has symbolic value as the South seeks to re-assert its story as being equally as valid as the North's - it's a pretty impressive site. There is a lot going on.

The map above roughly indicates the boundary between Qin and Nan Yue in 219 BCE, just minutes before the successful Qin invasion created the first China ("q" is pronounced similarly to "ch"). The Qin established a commandery in Guangzhou (then called Pan Yu, at least the bit with the commandery in it) and started importing Han nationality farmers/soldiers to settle the area, whilst simultaneously - I assume - handing out dukedoms and earleries to those of the locals they thought might have influence. The map is not contemporary to that period though. It's just illustrative.

Not for the first time I wish my hands were steadier so I didn't have to carry a tripod around to get pictures you can read (because I DONT carry a tripod around, so the fine print on this is beyond me), but this gives you an idea of how central this is to Guangzhou - the road running through the centre from East to West is Zhong Shan Road, which you can comfortably see on Google Earth & any decent map of Guangzhou. Beijing Lu, one of the major shopping districts runs down one side. Somewhere is a developer weeping tears of rage.

The dark red line is the site & the orange line is the wall of the old Panyu commandery/city. Liz and I have walked around that wall looking for signs, but they are long gone. It's still a nice walk though. You can see that the palace
took up a pretty fair chunk of the city - probably not surprising given the newness of the settlement and the importance of the army. This, I guess, was more of a military city than anything else.

The layout of the dig is roughly discernible from this schematic - the olive green is Nan Yue, the purple is Song, the green is Southern Han. On the right you can see a reservoir/drainage pit, with an articifical stream running into it. There are walkways dating back to the same period, suggesting a garden. Judging from the pillar footings, someone in the Song dynasty stuck a couple of quite large buildings down in the middle of the garden.

Not labelled here are the Ming and Qin areas, which mean that the site covers a minimum of 1700 years.



The site is roofed for protection & the light is really not very good, nor is photography encouraged. To be honest, a good book or a decent documentary can give you a much better iea of what is going on.

I like this artefact though - as they've dug down the archaeologists have left a pillar remaining undug & labelled each of the layers to give you an idea of how archaeology works, and also to give you an idea of how many layers of activity are on the site. From the top, 2 layers of modern, 1 layer unlabelled, 2 layers of Qing (the lower being a fairly massive chunk) - switching to the left side the 7th layer is Yuan (Mongol) so we might hypothesise the 5-6th are Ming, then the 8th & 9th layers are Southern Song, the 10th (moving back in a little towards the middle) is Northern Song, below that Southern Han, below that is the Tang dynasty, followed by 2 I don't know, the Nan Chao & the Tong period. All of this rests on a layer called Han Dynasty (the real one) and the whole pillar is therefore resting on the Nan Yue level. (If you had studied archaeology in North China you might be tempted to call that the Qin Dynasty...) So that is 1700 years in a 2 meter pillar of dirt. There is a difference between knowing something is true becasue you read it in a history book, and seeing tangible physical evidence of it. You really have to ramp up the scepticism beyond anything plausible to dismiss this; when I look at it I have to think about the 100-odd generations and the millions of people that this can represent. We live in a constructed world - and the construction is not only ours.