Bird's-eye View of the City of the Asian Games | Liangzhu: The Light of World Heritage Civilization

The site of Liangzhu Ancient City, located in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, was included in the The World Heritage List in 2019. A bird's-eye view of the city of the Asian Games. Today, we walk into the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City in Hangzhou.

CCTV reporter Liang Ye: Today we will fly to the Liangzhu Ancient City Ruins Park. The two words "Liangzhu" express "beautiful water and land", so how did our ancestors live in this "beautiful water and land"? Let's explore together from the air.

To explore the traces of the lives of our ancestors, we first need to take a look at this magnificent Liangzhu Ancient City Site Park. We also followed the tourists' perspective and flew in from the main entrance of the park. First of all, what we saw was this beautiful and dynamic statue, which is the iconic sculpture of Liangzhu Ancient City Ruins Park with the flowing light of the bright moon.

The base of the sculpture originates from the jade cong of Liangzhu, symbolizing the ancient city and water conservancy system standing on the land of Liangzhu. The circular jade bi in the middle represents both heaven and the transformation of the ancient Chinese character "liang". The three forked vessel connecting the jade bi and the jade cong represents the mutual resonance between humans and heaven. The top of the sculpture is a jumping and dynamic flame, symbolizing the flourishing and upward development of Chinese civilization.

Let's climb up and have a panoramic view of this ancient city ruins. Looking down, the most eye-catching is this 70000 square meter sandy square. A rectangular covered highland centered on the sandy square is the Mojiaoshan Plateau, which was also the main residence and activity site of the highest rulers during the Liangzhu period, and is the area of the palace.

There is a certain height difference between the top of the Mojiaoshan Plateau and the surrounding rice fields, with a height difference of approximately 9 to 15 meters. Archaeologists say that such a large building foundation was mainly built by human labor, which also reflects how hardworking and wise our ancestors were.

There are three protruding earthen terraces in the middle of the Mojiaoshan Plateau, and the largest terrace in this area is the Damojiaoshan Plateau, which is the power center of Liangzhu Ancient City. Its highest point of construction reaches 16.5 meters, far exceeding the height of the city wall. On the morning of June 15th, the spark of the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou was successfully collected on the platform of Mount Damojiao.

We flew away from the Mojiao Mountain Plateau and could see large rice fields. In fact, five thousand years ago, the ancestors of Liangzhu had already mastered rice farming technology, and the discovery of carbonized rice in the ancient city ruins is an important witness to it. And such developed prehistoric rice farming is also an important factor for Liangzhu Ancient City to be successfully selected as a World Cultural Heritage site in 2019.

One of the mascots of the Hangzhou Asian Games, "Congcong", is designed from the Liangzhu civilization. The pattern on its head is derived from the divine emblem on the jade cong unearthed from Liangzhu,

The ancient city of Liangzhu was built on wetlands, where the river network was dense and the water system was well-developed, so waterways were the main way of transportation at that time. The ancestors of Liangzhu rode canoes and bamboo rafts to and from the ancient city. They built a water conservancy system on the distant mountains and transported the wood from the mountains into the city through waterways, thus building this ancient city. Now in the park, we can also see many houses rebuilt based on the unearthed cultural relics from Liangzhu.

The Liangzhu civilization, like a trickle of water flowing into the long river of history, is a testament to the 5000 year history of Chinese civilization.

Director System | Xu Qiang

Producer | Gao Yaohou Jun

Producer | Xiong Bingwang Jun

Reporter | Liang Ye and Zhao Jing

Aerial Photography | Xiao Sa, Min Jiyuan, Wang Ze, Chen Jianbo

Editing | Shen Siwei, Wang Yue

Yuhang Station