Feature: Finding a new path through China's ancient ruins By Yu Fei, China Features
BEIJING, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Just before dawn in a quiet village in north China, a short, middle-aged man hurries with a bundle of poles towards a clump of weeds to wait for sunrise.
The man busily measures and takes photos. He wants to prove that ancient astronomers were standing at the exact same place 4,100 years ago to determine the changing of seasons by observing the sunrise and discerning the best times for sowing or harvesting.
A researcher with the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), He Nu is head of the excavation team at Taosi relic site in Xiangfen County, north China's Shanxi Province.
Unlike his Chinese archaeological forebears, who carried their bedclothes, shovels and brushes to excavation sites, 46-year-old He is equipped with a four-wheel-drive vehicle, laptop computer, digital camera and mobile phone.
rolex replicaInfluenced by modern Western archaeology ideas, He sees and thinks farther and wider, to find a relevance to today in the remains of the past. Raising his eyes from the ruins below the weeds to the sun, He Nu discovered what is believed to be the world's oldest observatory.
Chinese archaeologists launched a project in 2001 to seek the origins of their 5,000-year-old civilization. Taosi is one of the most important sites in this project. Much evidence has been found to indicate the Taosi site might have been the capital of the legendary Yao and Shun period dating back more than 4,100 years.
In Chinese mythology, Yao and Shun were two sage emperors living on the middle reaches of the Yellow River. Many Confucian histories praised the two rulers as models of morality and benevolence, but skeptics in the early 20th Century challenged their existence.
"If you want to know where China wholesale colthing is going, you have to know where China came from. The excavation at Taosi will tell us where China came from, and whether Yao and Shun really existed," says He.
In his search for evidence of the lost, undocumented era at Taosi, He found the ruins of a mysterious semicircular building in 2003. He thought it important and excavated. He found indications that 13 stone pillars were originally erected at the site, forming 12 gaps between them.
"It reminded me of Stonehenge in Britain. Ancient Chinese believed the sky was round, and all buildings related to the sky were built in the shape of circles. So we suspected the site might be related to astronomical observation," He says.
If it proved to be an observatory, it would be of great importance. The Confucian history, "Shangshu", says the first official act of Emperor Yao was to observe the sky and improve the calendar.
In those ancient times, life revolved around agriculture. A tribal leader with an accurate astronomical calendar could reliably direct agricultural production, and the tribe would thrive, giving the leader supreme power.
Could the Emperor Yao have once stood in that place to observe the heavens?
He and his colleagues have attempted to recreate ancient observation techniques at the site since 2003. He plants the poles where the stone columns once stood and watches the gaps. If he can see the sun rise above the hills through the gaps according to the seasonal divisions of the traditional
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