Side story: A sky full of stars
Let me start by singing the praises of Liangzhu Civilization. Several years ago, when I wrote my interpretation of the "Classic of Mountains and Seas," I mentioned that many Liangzhu Culture artifacts also corresponded to things in that book, possibly relating to Emperor Jun.
Back then, its World Heritage application had not yet succeeded, and it was not called a civilization. But I had been following Liangzhu for a long time, waiting for the excavations to finish.
The same went for Sanxingdui. I waited ages, hoping they would uncover writing. Unfortunately, that never happened.
Some people joked that they excavated the Bronze Divine Tree by following The Grave Robbers' Chronicles. Give me a break... Sanxingdui had already undergone thirteen excavations, and the Bronze Divine Tree was unearthed in 1986.
Liangzhu's Jade Cong King was also unearthed in 1986. Later excavations uncovered dams and an ancient city. At first, they thought the city walls were ditches, but those ditches were filled with stones. Only after studying them did researchers realize they were wall foundations, and only then did they recognize it as a civilization.
Now that Liangzhu had become a sacred site of five-thousand-year-old civilization, I was delighted.
Bi discs, cong tubes, yue axes—ritual objects like these were absolutely part of Huaxia Civilization. Its bird worship and sun worship corresponded very closely to Emperor Jun, Xi He, and the Kingdom of Shao Hao.
Even if that identification was wrong, it did not matter. The later "Eastern Yi tribes," as well as the Shang Dynasty, certainly absorbed a great deal of Liangzhu's bird culture and its intense worship of spirits and deities.
Liangzhu accounted for nearly half of Chinese civilization, or at least a third.
But some people could not praise one thing without disparaging