Liangzhu is a city that existed before writing. About five thousand years ago, on a marshy plain south of the Yangtze, a Neolithic people built a walled capital with a palace platform, canals, workshops and cemeteries, and they carved jade into ritual objects of astonishing skill. The city covered several square kilometres, and its walls, built of rammed earth on a base of stone, were up to sixty metres wide at the base. UNESCO listed the archaeological ruins in 2019 as evidence of an early regional state.
The most famous objects are jade discs, called bi, and jade tubes with square outer shapes, called cong, many carved with a stylised face that combines a human and an animal. The jade came from a distance, and the workmanship shows specialised craftsmen working under strict control. Burials of elite people contained dozens of jade pieces, while ordinary graves held little. It is evidence of a society with strong social ranks and a shared religion.
Today the site is an archaeological park on the edge of Hangzhou, with a museum designed by the British architect David Chipperfield, which holds many of the finds. The ruins themselves are low mounds and ditches that have been landscaped and marked, and visitors can walk or cycle through the park. It is easy to confuse a field with a city, so the museum is a good place to start. The excavations are still going on, and new finds come out regularly.
Hangzhou has more than six million people, with every kind of service, and Deqing is smaller but also has facilities. The area has rice fields, tea gardens and bamboo forest, and local food includes fish from West Lake and the tea called Longjing. The climate is humid, with a rainy season in early summer and typhoons in late summer. Autumn is best. Foreign riders usually face restrictions in China, so check the rules before you go, and take the museum and the park at an easy pace.