Yangshao Culture: 100 Year Research History and Heritage Impact
Project Overview
The Yangshao Culture: 100 Year Research History and Heritage Impact project analysed the historiography of the Yangshao Culture as an archaeological construct and its functioning as a heritage icon for the Chinese nation as well as its impact on and connections to various societal concerns.
The Yangshao culture refers to a cultural complex along the Yellow River in what is now central China (primarily Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi provinces) between 5000 and 3000 BCE, named after its type site in the Yangshao village, in Mianchi County. Many thousands of sites assigned to the Yangshao Culture are now known, and it has been granted a central role in the development of agriculture, pastoralism, and the invention of new material forms (including painted ceramics and polished stone artifacts) in Chinese prehistory. It has been allocated a seminal role in the formation of a multi-ethnic Chinese nation (both the terms ‘nation’ and ‘multi-ethnic’ are commonly used in discussions of this culture).
It was discovered in 1921 by the Swede Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874-1960) and Chinese colleagues, such as Yuan Fuli. The discovery of the Yangshao Culture is within China considered to mark the birth of modern Chinese archaeology including both the development of field methods and its significance for political agendas.This allowed us to analyse China’s early national history as an archaeological imagination.
The project consisted of three strands of analysis,which collectively add to insights into the Yangshao Culture as a national iconic heritage.
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The first was historiographical research into the Yangshao Culture, its discovery and the changes in interpretations since 1921. With the hundred year anniversary coming up during the project this was a timely study. With its distinct research history, the debates about the Yangshao Culture allowed us to observe detailed arguments about the origin of China’s deep past as an archaeological construction and to trace how it was used to energize Chinese archaeologists and historians. An additional question is whether and how European appreciation of the Yangshao sites as the first prehistoric sites recognized in China, influenced China’s appreciation of her own heritage, and how this has fluctuated over time.
- The second strand was concerned with investigating how the culture has been understood as heritage, especially its role in the formation of Chinese nationalism. This part of the project analysed the use of the Yangshao Culture at both the level of government institutions and museums and at more local popular levels, as expressed within social media.
- The third study focussed on the commercial exploitation of the branding provided by reference to the Yangshao Culture and how in turn this impacts ideas of the past. The ‘Yangshao’ logo has been used to promote products including wine, cement, glassware and pharmaceuticals, and to brand special local produce, such as fruit, millet, oil and tea, which are exported widely. This strand focussed on how branding ‘takes’ heritage into new levels of interaction and how within these new values are created.
The project ran from 2019 to 2025 and was generously funded by the Beifang International Education Group and Shanghai Academy of Guyewang Studies.
Andersson and team at the Yangshao village site, with Chinese members. From left to right: Chinese geologist and paleontologist YUAN Fuli, Johan Gunnar Andersson, Yangshao Village Chief Mr Wang and a Chinese Preacher Mr Wang, posing together for a photo at Yangshao Village in 1921, at the time of the first excavation. (Image provided by Mr HOU Junjie).
Yangshao Culture Project Logo
The project logo (designed by O. Antczak) is composed of several elements. The orange circle represents the land with the Yellow River running through it. The flower, considered by some scholars to be a symbol of ancient China, is derived from painted decoration on Neolithic pottery. The image of ‘Fish and Human Mask’ is borrowed from the ‘Pottery Bowl Decorated with Fish and Human Mask’, which was found in the Yangshao Culture site at Banpo village in 1955, and is now in the collections of the National Museum of China. This pot has become a representative example of the Yangshao Banpo type pottery.
