Archaeologists may have found a 5,000-year-old funeral hall beside China’s ‘royal tombs’
Beside the most important graves of one of China’s oldest known cultures, archaeologists may have found the building where people honoured the dead. At Fanshan in Hangzhou, traces of three wooden buildings sit next to the 5,000-year-old Liangzhu tombs. If experts read them correctly, Liangzhu people may have run a tomb system, with a dedicated hall for rituals, about 5,000 years ago.
Why Fanshan matters
Fanshan lies in Yuhang district, Hangzhou, in eastern China. Archaeologists found the site about 40 years ago, and it holds the highest-ranking Liangzhu tombs discovered so far. People often call it the Fanshan “royal tomb,” a nickname for its rich burials. Tomb 12 alone gave the world the famous “Liangzhu Jade Cong King” and “Liangzhu Jade Axe King.”
The Liangzhu culture flourished in the Yangtze delta. Settlers built raised-mound homes in the wetlands there, and around 5,000 years ago the culture built a large city with a water-control system. Fieldwork at Fanshan restarted in 2024 with approval from China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration.
A wall and three buildings
The new team first found a rectangular enclosure wall along the east and south sides of the site. Carbon-14 dating places it in the same period as Tomb 12, about 5,000 years ago. Wang Ningyuan, who leads the Liangzhu city and water system project at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, said the wall may be the remains of the outer wall of a tomb garden.
East of the tombs, the crew then uncovered 120 post holes. The holes show where wooden posts once stood. Researchers measured their width, depth and spacing, and used those numbers to reconstruct three buildings on paper. The team announced the findings at the 4th Liangzhu Forum on 20 October 2026, and Xinhua reported them the same day.
What the largest building may have looked like
The biggest building, called F1, has an oval floor plan. It measures about 25 metres east to west and 16 metres north to south, or roughly 82 by 52 feet. Li Songyang, who studies ancient architecture at the same institute, carried out the reconstruction. His model puts F1 on stilts, with three rings of posts and a roof in two tiers that rises about 15 metres (roughly 49 feet). The floor sits about as high as an adult’s waist, which suits the sloping ground.
Two smaller buildings stand to the east. One has a nearly round plan and the other a square plan. The model shows both as simple thatched houses.
The stilt design is an inference. The team drew on large timber pieces from the nearby Zhongjiagang site and on scratched drawings of buildings on some Liangzhu pottery. Xinhua notes that the reconstruction is not unique, so other designs could fit the same post holes.
A hall for honouring the dead
Researchers suggest the buildings may have formed a xiangdian, a hall for offerings and ceremonies. Wang Ningyuan said the buildings might be a hall used only for rituals. If the wall encloses a tomb garden and the hall served the dead, Liangzhu people may already have had a mausoleum system 5,000 years ago.
That idea fits a wider picture. Fang Xiangming, the institute’s director, has pointed to a full ritual order behind the Liangzhu jade objects. Wang sees the jade ritual system as a sign of an early state, and he argues that shared belief, not family ties alone, helped organise the large workforce that built the city.
What we still do not know
This is a conference presentation and a news report, not a peer-reviewed study. The buildings no longer stand, and the model rests on post holes and comparisons with other finds. The team has not shown that the oval building held funerals, and the “tomb garden” reading of the wall remains tentative. Future digs and a published paper should show how well the evidence holds up.
Even so, the find gives Fanshan something new to study: not only who lay in the graves, but how the living may have honoured them.