Pymamids of grand styles and obvious religious significances have been found in Egypt and South America. They are not so well known in China, but have been located in both the Northern and Southern parts of the eastern seaboard. The five diagrams below show three found in southwest Manchuria, two in the Hangzhou region. They are man-made mounds, the northern ones mainly piles of rocks, the southern ones of soil. The rock piling somewhat reminds us of the practice of ancient Hebrews and Tibetans, who are however a thousand years or more later than the Chinese pyramids, which were even earlier than the Egyptian pyramids, though lacking their sophstication and engineering precision.

The two maps below show the locations of important sites:

What are in those pyramids? The following pictures show tombs and altars found on top:

and examples of artifacts discovered in or near the tombs

As can be noted in the second diagram, the coffins were made by assembling stone plates. It is the human remains and other biological material that allow the tombs to be carbon dated. The northern tombs were more than 5000 years old, while the southern ones were somewhat later.

 In particular, the Manchurian sites include a temple complex with several wings that have fragments of bird, bear-dragon and other statutes, including a well preserved goddess head

the relationship between the temple/statues and the jade objects found in nearby and contempoerary sites is unclear: the manchurian jade objects, the most important burial artifacts with obvious shamanistic significance, were various versions of the dragon, with some birds and turtles as well, whereas the goddess figures found in the temple and other sites were clearly related to fertility worship.

Hongshan dragons 

Manchurian pig dragon (Yu-Zhu-Long); this rather mysterious object may have a connection to the Sumerian Uroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail, symbolizing infinity and eternity. Why it has a what looks like a pig’s head is not clear – some Manchurian and other ancient graves were found to have multiple pig jaw bones, so some form of pig worship was indicated. You can see how the pig-dragon evolved towards something closer to the modern form of the dragon – the C-type dragon shown in the lower left corner is less pig and more snake than the other three; these pictured figurings have been authendicated by archaelogists as ancient (i.e., over 5000 years old); as no metal tools were available at the time, the sculpting of these figurines depended on the use of strings, leather strips, bone pieces and stone instruments, grinding jade down with quartz and silicon carbide sand; modern imitations using electric drills and carving tools leave quite different marks, mainly because they work much faster so leave contrast of “too much” with “too little” depending on where the cutting occurred; the older jades show the work to be generally rather slow but even; pig dragon fakes usually also fail to capture the particular “feel” of the originals – dignified yet approachable, a divine animal that is the friend of your tribe and object of worship

the ancient jade buried in graves for 5000 years would come into contact with different minerals from the soil and coffin material, as well as body fluids, which penetrate the jade in various ways depending on its own texture and events in its surrounding such as rain, flooding, drought, even earthquakes; hence the many different tinges and stains. Whereas the original jade may be dark green, light green, green-yellow, sometimes beige white, it often turns chalky in combination with lime put into coffins, especially in the southern regions, to slow decay; ceremonial burning of the jade objects also occurred leaving smoky burn marks. Other stains may be due to mercury (usually in small but deep patches of very dark blue close to black), iron oxide (reddish brown), copper (green), crude oil (drippy dark brown – other impurities spread in patches while the highly viscous oil and some tree resins leave streaky stains). Faked ancient jade use various methods to bake colours into a newly carved piece, but it is difficult to get the same colour spread. With some experience gained from looking at authenticated museum pieces, one could detect signs of faking except for the really skilfully done ones, which however is not usually worthwhile for inexpensive pieces.

A related jade object, which were found in smaller numbers and in nearby Inner Mongolian locations, is the C dragon whose head and tail are further apart and the body more slender. An intriguing point about the C dragons: two raised patches are found, one on the forehead and one under the chin, made up of a diagonal grid of XXX; the same diagonal patches have been found on some Hongshan insect figure jade, eastern zhou jade dragons, and jade human figures dug up in central Hebei, not far from Inner Mongolia/Manchuria, dated to Eastern Zhou (Zhongshan State); on a human figure in the Hotung collection of British Museum (J Rawson, Chinese Jade, p. 283, fig 19.2), on various northern and western china ancient pottery, in particular on the Zaobaogou pottery urn with the pig/bird/deer headed snakes, and on Gansu pottery human faced fishes as well as some abstract figures probably representing frogs; such a grid is seen on the dancing girl and on the seated woman in the figure below, showing that the pattern was widely used and had some important significance, probably derived from fishing nets and fish scales as symbol of worship by fishing tribes, with particular connection to Fuxi who supposedly invented the fishing net. Note that while there are numerous Warring States and Han jade dancing girls with the same posture, they do not have the same skirt, indicating that after Zhongshan State’s demise, the meaning of the grid got lost. (There was however one dancing girl with the mesh pattern on her cuff! instead of skirt. Some west asian archaeological reports note the same pattern on ancient potteries, and consider it to represent the fertility goddess Astarte, which provides some explanation for the presence of the pattern on chinese dancing girls, who were presumably performing rituals honouring gods that take care of people interested in fertility. In a Tibetan story about a king at the time of arrival of buddhism, he was said to have build a temple with both the swatika and the mesh pattern “to please both buddhists and tibetans”, meaning that the swatika was a less traditional symbol for the tibetans, and they were less closely related to the indo-europeans and more agricultural than the nomadic Qiangs – the tibetans and qiangs traditionally did not eat fish so the mesh pattern could not represent nets and scales. Going more modern the dragon on the Qing imperial robes is covered in the mesh pattern, hinting that the grid’s meaningfulness was broadly traditional.)

A particularly interesting item was found in the British Museum in 1971, long before similar objects were unearthed in the 80s

 

the Hongshan C dragon

The C dragon was one of the most significant archaeological finds from the neolithic Hongshan area. Its precise meaning is even today unclear, and there is even some mystery about how it was found. It is believed that in 1971 a young peasant planting trees on a slope in a borderline area between Inner Mogolia and Liaoning Province noticed a hole in the ground, and putting his hand in he found what looked liked a big cast-iron hook. After taking it home, he realized it was made of dark green jade and could be an ancient artefact, and took it to the county archaeological office, which merely treated it as a ordinary find. A few years later in a routine visit, a team from the Liaoning Museum inspected it and thought it was from the Shang era (i.e., about 3500 years old), though realizing that it looked different from other artefacts from Shang sites in the area. However, in 1986 a major Hongshan era site was unearthed in a nearby location, yielding a pair of jade pig-dragons which bore noticeable similarities to the C dragon, thus allowing it to be more confidently placed into the late neolithic era.

Both the pig dragon and the C dragon bore a relationship to Uroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, which also relates to the human-faced fish painted on a pottery jar from the Gansu province, on the opposite side of ancient China. The similarty between these artefacts reveal a connection between ancient China and West Asia, in particular with ancient Hebrews. (Further discussion of this can be found in another article Round Heaven – Square Earth.)

It is highly likely that the C dragon was the tribal emblem of a branch of the Hongshan people. It is probably meant to be placed at the top of a wooden pole, which has a groove on top into which the sharp blade on the lower side of the “horn” would snugly fit, so that the back of the body, where the hole is located, fits along the pole, and a string is passed through the hole to bind the dragon securly to the pole. The combination might be held in hand by a tribal chief, or set up on an altar. (The object seems too small to be part of a building or flagpole.)

Only two C dragons were unearthed, both from the same county though in two different villages. However, whereas objects unearthed in tombs or dwellings can be pinned down in age by carbon dating bones or other organic material located in the same sites, both C dragons were single finds not allowing such precise dating. Their age was therefore a matter of archaelogical guesswork from similarity to other objects that do have a known age. .

compare later jade dragons:-

but neither bears an obvious relationship to the jades of the southern tombs: (note the bronzes are from Shang tombs)

The above picture shows three mysterious jade objects found in ancient tombs that are carbon dated to 5000 years ago, before there was any written history. Ancient books, mostly finished in the Han Dynasty but some already in existence in Zhou times and containing fragmentary legends that would have been orally transmitted before the invention of writing, obscurely mention jade objects used in some heaven and earth worship rituals. It is hard to make sense, first because the descriptions are so obscure, second because we are not sure which actual objects the mentioned names correspond to. After working through various possibilities, it is now commonly agreed that the cong 琮described in the books correspond to the rectangular block with round hole in the middle. The other two have so far not been identified with objects mentioned in the books, and are referred to by the modern names invented from their shape: the Horse Hoof Object and the Cylinder Shaped Object. They have the common feature that all have a hole in the middle, and at least for the cong, there is the idea that it “goes through to heaven”, thus allowing us to imagine that the other two also have the same function.

A seemingly unrelated obscure detail in history books was that in Zhou times, the state of Chu had the duty to provide the Zhou court with “holy reeds” for the purpose of “absorbing wine”. It is vaguely known that some ancient rituals involve a divine statue made from a bundle of reed; when wine is poured on the statue, it gets absorbed, as if the god has drunk it. Some believe this came from west asia: during the harvest, the last bunch of wheat from the field is bundled up and worshiped as the corn god.

A Japanese author connected the two obcure details together: he suggested that the sacred reeds are plugged into the hole in a cong to symbolize humans getting through to heaven with the help of the divinity represented by the reeds. I myself have suggested that the Horse Hoof Object was the original version, and later evolved into the more formal, artistically crafted cong and Cylinder Shape Object versions. Someone else suggested that the Horse Hoof Object symbolized the vagina, through which humans are born, arriving into the material world from another world that ancient humans imagined to be existing on the other side. Of course this is all just guessing, since we have nothing more concrete to work with.

The more concrete question is how long it took the ancient humans to learn the jade carving skills while at the same time working out the religious ideas. Before such fine objects could be produced with the necessary skills, they first had to produce more crude objects using easier materials and simpler tools. It is impossible to jump from pottery to fine jade; possibly the intermediary steps were wood and bone; while carved wood objects from over 5000 years ago would have rotted away, some bone objects ought to have survived.