China's Pompeii | Ancient China From Above | National Geographic

This is an incredible scene. There's really no other way to describe it than to say it's a scene of mass death. A single family, frozen in time, buried in seconds almost 4,000 years ago. A lot of people refer to this as China's Pompeii. Could this tragedy hold clues to the collapse of one of China's very earliest ancient kingdoms? I'm Alan Maka, an archaeologist and expert in ancient civilizations. And I'm investigating China's distant past from a whole new perspective, space. Today, state-of-the-art satellites see the world in stunning detail and reveal hidden archaeology, enabling us to recreate a lost ancient world invisible to the naked eye. Working alongside leading Chinese experts, my team and I are traveling to some of the country's most remote and incredible landscapes. And with cutting-edge science, investigating previously unknown cultures, lost cities, and devastating cataclysms. This is ancient China as you've never seen it before. 300 miles west of Beijing in China's Shanxi Province and on the edge of barren desert are the hills of the Loess Plateau. I'm here to explore a revolutionary new discovery that's completely rewriting the earliest history of China. This is Shimao, a 4,000-year-old citadel at the heart of a lost ancient kingdom. Nothing prepares you to see this place in person. This is one of the greatest new discoveries in the archaeology of the world. This was clearly a massive, massive city. The significance of this discovery became clear just a few years ago. Shimao may have been the biggest city of its time anywhere on the entire planet. And Chinese archaeologists are only just beginning to reveal its secrets. Now, with new technology, I want to explore this extraordinary ancient society. Wow. Congratulations. What's behind its most chilling discoveries? I can tell that some of the bones are very young. And can the fate of China's other lost civilizations help me solve one of the greatest mysteries of all? I feel like I'm in the presence of something otherworldly. Why, after 500 years of living here, did the people of this great city seemingly just vanish? Before this discovery, this was just a grassy hill. The only sign of anything man-made was a simple line of rocks. When they first found this, they thought it was a part of the Great Wall. You can see why. So they began some excavations around here. And they found, no, this is 2,000 years earlier than the earliest phase of the Great Wall. These walls are incredibly well-preserved, yet they're over 4,000 years old. That means Shimao was built at the same time as Stonehenge in Britain and thrived more than 2,000 years before the Roman Empire. I've been to a lot of ancient cities. You don't actually feel like you're in a city because there are ruins. But this, this place, I feel like I am there. This would be an extraordinary discovery anywhere. But to understand why this is so groundbreaking, we need to see it from space. The step structure at the center of the city is built into a hillside high above the meeting point of two rivers. It's in dusty, rugged terrain that borders the sparsely populated Ordos Desert. Experts never expected to find a major ancient city here. It was long thought that Chinese civilization began much later and hundreds of miles to the south in the fertile plains of the Yellow River. A stone-walled settlement is totally unexpected at this time period in this place. I want to know what kind of society built something so large and so sophisticated. I'm lucky to have been invited to explore the latest discoveries with Xiao Jing, one of the lead archaeologists at Shimao. This is the path up to the giant central platform. This is an immense amount of labor here. This is not rammed earth. This is not mud brick. This is stone that had to be brought up here to the site. It looks like nothing I've ever seen. It's the first time in the history of Chinese archaeology we've found a 4,000-year-old structure built this way. I know that I had never expected to see anything like this, but it's amazing to hear that you all had never expected to find anything this far north at this time. This vast stepped structure is at the center of the city. The team is currently excavating the remains of buildings that once stood at the top. They're trying to figure out how this society worked. This is the top of the giant central platform. The whole area covers 20,000 square meters. In this prosperous city, the high-class people would live here. It included the king's palace, his administration, and the large-scale artisans' workshops. OK, so all of the elites were here living, working. The king was here. From the latest excavation data, we can recreate what Shimao might have looked like 4,000 years ago, a series of stone platforms with restricted access to each higher level. Right at the top, the palaces of the city's rulers. There's clearly a well-defined hierarchy here. In this huge structure, this palace dominates the entire area. It's visible for miles. So this thing is a constant reminder of the power of the people who governed here. One of the crazy things is that archaeologists have only excavated a fraction of this, which makes me wonder how much is out there in the surrounding area. Chinese researchers are discovering ruins spread all over the rugged terrain by combining drone sensing with excavations. Now, my tech specialist, Ryan Kastner, and drone pilot, William Luo, are going to create a photogrammetry model so I can understand just how large this city was. Ideally, what we want to do is we want to pop it up. We want to try to see where the wall is going. My team engineer, Eric Luo, combines thousands of images to create a 3D view of the terrain called a digital elevation model, or DEM. Let's have a look at the data. So these are the three multispectral flights that we did this morning. And then we can see hints of the wall here, but let's switch over to the DEM so we have a bit of clearer view. It's a lot easier to see on this, huh? So we can see the wall. We were focusing it right on the ridge, which makes a lot of sense. The 3D reconstruction clearly brings out the remains of a city wall that follows the ridge line. In all, six miles of these walls have been identified hidden in this landscape. They mark out an enclosed inner city, and an additional ring of outer wall surrounds a 1,000-acre site, an area the size of about 200 New York City blocks. That means that 4,000 years ago, this could have been the biggest city on the planet. The scale of this place is unprecedented. But even the smallest artifacts being found here are transforming our understanding of how civilization develops in China. Wow. This is a lot of material here. You guys have been busy. This incredibly fragile jade scepter is a symbol of power carried by rulers of Shimao. Oh, it's very light. It's very lightweight. It would sit on a stuff, right? It's amazing to me how thin they could cut it. I mean, you can see my hand behind here in the light. Only the son of the god, the emperor, held this. He held this to pray to the god, to tell the god that he was the rightful ruler. This is the earliest example of a jade scepter ever found. Even the most ordinary-looking objects are groundbreaking. These burn holes show that these are what's known as oracle bones, a means of divining the future. The very first Chinese writing will later appear on just this kind of fortune-telling device. And one crucial find gives its name to an entire age of human development, bronze. This is a knife. This would have been the edge, huh? We only have a few dozens. These date to around 2000 BC. They are some of the earliest bronzes ever found. Wow, this is incredible. All these amazing finds are revealing that many of the foundations of Chinese civilization appear here at Shimao centuries earlier than anyone ever expected. But the team has just made an astonishing discovery like nothing ever seen in China before. I'm one of the first outsiders allowed to see it. This is a very important discovery. The people of Shimao have left us a gift from 4,000 years ago. Wow. Archaeologists excavating the ancient megacity at Shimao have just discovered incredible 4,000-year-old carvings in the central palace area. Congratulations. This is unbelievable. This looks like the ancient Maya city of Copan in Honduras from the 6th century AD, 2,500 years later. As an archaeologist, does it get better than this? Not that I know of. There are faces that look half human, half animal. Strange hybrids and familiar creatures are all carved into the walls of the giant platform. It's a unique insight into the beliefs of the people who built this city. These aren't images of people. They are all representations of gods. This is amazing, and that there's also such variety. So for example, what is this? I mean, it almost looks like maybe some kind of a sea creature. This is similar to a find called the Green Pine Dragon from Alitou City, the home of a later dynasty, the Xia. This later dynasty of the central Yellow River Plains was thought to have founded Chinese civilization. But Shimao is rewriting history. So far, the team here have excavated just one side of the giant central platform. Much still remains buried. But already, the skill and complexity of this lost society is vividly emerging. The carved stone facades of this building are incredible. I mean, this is 4,000 years ago. And you've got images of gods, images of animals like snakes. You even have a dragon, which becomes a formative symbol in Chinese dynasties. Everything about Shimao is more advanced, much earlier, and far bigger than anyone thought possible. And all in this unlikeliest of places. Yet there is a huge mystery here. Archaeologists have dated artifacts found here to between 4,300 and 3,800 years ago. But after that, there's nothing. This means that after 500 years of occupation, the entire city of Shimao seems to be abandoned. Something happened here that forced these people to relocate or wiped them out entirely. The question is, what? I'm heading across China to see if the latest discoveries about the collapse of other ancient societies can offer clues to what happened at Shimao. First, I'm heading to the mountainous upper reaches of the Yellow River to the site of an ancient apocalypse. This horrible event took place 3,900 years ago. But being here and seeing it myself, there's an immediacy, like this just happened. The village of Lajia was home to a thriving early Bronze Age community that developed at the same time as Shimao. There's at least 14 individuals here. They all died at once. You can see women with their children, as young as perhaps two or three or four years old, huddled together around a cooking fire. And clearly, this was a family. It's clear to me that the people here had no time whatsoever to get out. All they could do was huddle the young together and hope and pray that they would survive. This frozen cataclysmic moment has been compared to Pompeii near ancient Rome. But this family is not entombed in volcanic ash, but thick mud. This is such a striking moment of death here at Lajia. This adult protecting the child from harm while seemingly looking up. What happened here? Archaeologist Ye Mao Lin and his team first discovered the bodies. And they've spent years trying to piece together how this tragedy unfolded. And they've found a vital clue. Look at the big crack here. It's from an earthquake. A crack this big shows how powerful the earthquake was. OK. Wow. So this whole thing is just completely cracked open. The massive earthquake demolished these houses, trapping the families. But these people are buried in mud. Where did it come from? The latest Chinese earthquake, the Great Earthquake, Chinese research suggests the earthquake triggered a cataclysmic chain of events. I'm investigating what happened to an ancient village known as China's Pompeii that left its people buried in mud and frozen in time. The answer could be visible from space, even after almost 4,000 years. My team's satellite archaeologist, Sarah Klassen, is looking at data from a mountainous gorge 25 miles upstream from Lajia. She's been told about a mysterious gap in a mountain ridge overlooking the Yellow River. There's this one large area that looks like it's been erased. It's almost as though someone's come through and wiped it off the landscape. What we're looking at here is actually a landslide. The devastating earthquake that hit Lajia would have set off landslides across a huge area. Some experts believe one of them buried the people of Lajia in mud. But the latest research suggests a new theory, that this landslide further upstream was so massive that it set off a chain reaction that led to disaster on a biblical scale. To understand what happened, I'm heading high above the gorge. Geoarchaeologist Wu Qinglong believes the landslide caused one of the biggest disasters ever to hit China, and that it's linked to a phenomenon known as a quake lake. The landslide happened over there. We can see there is a huge part missing from the ridge. At the end of the Neolithic period, there was a terrible earthquake here. It was so destructive that this entire ridge fell down, and the rocks blocked the Yellow River. The massive shockwaves send an entire mountain tumbling into the gorge, creating a 200-meter-tall dam across the river. Its remains are still visible nearly 4,000 years later. The dammed river begins to form one of the biggest quake lakes ever discovered. Dr. Wu calculates that after several months, it would have stretched 50 miles upstream, holding over 12 billion cubic meters of water. The pressure builds as the waters continue to rise until the dam breaks. Within 12 hours, 90% of the water burst out. That's insanely fast. That's catastrophic. No question. Yeah. If Dr. Wu is right, this is one of the biggest freshwater floods ever studied and bigger than any in China's recorded history. It would have brought devastation for hundreds of miles downstream. So back at Shimao, might this city have been hit by a similar cataclysmic natural disaster? The city is surrounded on two sides by rivers, but it's hundreds of feet above the valley floor, which rules out catastrophic flood. What about an earthquake? Devastating quakes have struck China throughout its history. One of the deadliest of all time ravaged this part of China 500 years ago. But Shimao's amazingly preserved walls show no sign of earthquake damage. So what did happen here? I'm heading to investigate the disappearance of another remarkable ancient civilization, 600 miles southwest in Guanghan in Sichuan province. 30 years ago, a discovery was made here that stunned the world. I've been given special access to one of China's most extraordinary archaeological treasures. Incredible. Could this amazing find help answer the mystery of what happened at Shimao? I've been allowed privileged access to an amazing relic of an ancient Chinese civilization that I hope could hold clues to the abandonment of Shimao. When I see this, when I'm confronted with this, I feel like I'm in the presence of something otherworldly. This astonishing bronze mask is evidence that there was another completely unknown Chinese civilization that existed about 500 years after Shimao. This is like nothing else I have seen in China. And when this was found, this was like nothing anyone had ever seen in the world. It's just one of a treasure trove of precious objects found at the site of an ancient city called Sanxingdui. There are scores of giant faces, striking bronze heads with golden masks, and human-like sculptures performing mysterious rituals. I just can't believe how many bronze objects there are. And the variety is extraordinary. The world's leading expert on Sanxingdui believes the giant masks depict gods, and the bronze heads represent the rulers of the city. We've found many bronze heads in Sanxingdui, but we can divide them into two types. Some of them have long braided hair, and some of them don't. They tie their hair up instead. Professor Sun believes these masks, with two distinctive hairstyles, represent the two different clans who ruled the city. And his theory could help answer Sanxingdui's most puzzling question. Just like at Ximao, the city seemed to suddenly disappear. The clue to what happened lies 30 miles south in Chengdu, the site of another ancient city called Jinxia. It emerged around the same time as Sanxingdui's demise, and archaeologists have found hundreds of objects here, evidence that the two cities belonged to the same culture. But Professor Sun believes there's one crucial thing missing. Archaeologists here have only found figures from one of the two clans, those with braided hair. The people who had braids became the rulers of Jinxia. So what happened to the people that had no braid, the people with their hair pinned up? My theory is that at the end of Sanxingdui, there was a great conflict between the clan without braids, and those with braids, and the whole city was destroyed. Professor Sun's theory of a city torn apart when one clan destroys another in a violent civil war would explain why Sanxingdui was suddenly abandoned. So could something similar have happened at Ximao? It seems possible, because excavations are uncovering grisly evidence of brutal killing. Wow, look at this. It's just heads. Yeah. Looking at the skulls, I can tell that some of the bones are not yet fused, so they're very young. Teenagers. Teenagers? Yeah. OK. We can tell these heads were cut off, because on many, we found incision marks here. But these are not the victims of a power struggle within the city. Examination of the skulls shows they are all young women, and chemical analysis of their teeth reveals they're not from here, but from more than a hundred miles away to the northwest. So how did their remains end up here? It could be because Ximao was involved in some violence, like wars with other territories. It seems these young women were captives, victims of human sacrifice. It appears to be gruesome evidence of conflict with a rival enemy kingdom. So could Ximao's downfall have been caused by war? I'm investigating the abandonment of the colossal ancient city of Ximao. There's no evidence here for the natural disasters and internal conflict that destroyed other ancient civilizations. I want to know, could war with undiscovered rival kingdoms have caused its downfall? To find out, I'm going to analyze the city's defenses and investigate if they were ever breached, starting with the main gateway through the city's outer wall, the formidable East Gate. My tech experts Ryan Kastner and Eric Lowe So what the LiDAR is going to produce is a 3D model that we can move around, look at from different angles and take measurements of as if we had it in real life, but we can do it on the computer. Hey guys. Hey Al. We've got some good stuff to show you, man. All right. East Gate? Yeah, so we've been LiDARing around the East Gate the past couple of days. We were able to scan the entire thing. Wow. Yeah, this is a combination of about 100 different scans. The scans reveal advanced defenses. The outer walls include bastions, protrusions at regular intervals that allow archers to fire on the flanks of an enemy attack. And the gateway itself is also ingeniously designed. This is the main entrance to the gate here, but the entire structure is built on the edge of a steep cliff. Now, if an invading army had managed to climb all the way to the top of the cliff, they're confronted first by this U-shaped structure, which means they're going to have to divide their force to get in through the gate entrance. And what would be waiting for them here? Probably hundreds of soldiers as the first line of defense. The main gateway is protected by guard houses and two massive towers overlooking an L-shaped passageway. It forces attackers through a right-angled turn and into more concealed defensive positions. And these fortifications are just protecting the outer city. There's a further inner wall and a mile of jagged terrain to cross even to reach the towering walls of the palace area itself. There's something fundamentally important about the idea of defense at Xiamen. The city was prepared for an attack on a massive scale. But archaeologists have found no evidence of destruction or any sign that these magnificent defenses were ever breached. So war did not destroy this city. But perhaps there's just one more possibility that might finally explain Xiamen's downfall. My team archaeologist Sarah Klassen is heading 800 miles southeast of Xiamen to the Yangtze River Delta. She's investigating some recently discovered ancient structures that succumbed to a final destructive force. She starts by examining a digital elevation model, or DEM, a relief map made from multiple satellite images. With the DEM, I'm looking for things that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see in nature because it's too perfect or too engineered. To the north up here, this is really interesting. There are two kind of linear embankments with a depressed area in the middle. Archaeologist Wang Ningyuan leads a team revealing that these banks are ancient man-made earthworks. You can really get a sense of how big this feature was and how many people would have been necessary to build it. From there to there, it's about a hundred meters across. This massive earth wall is built between two hills to create an ancient man-made dam and reservoir. And from the satellite data, Wang Ningyuan's team have discovered this is just one tiny part of a massive water control system. Miles of artificial waterways that provided transport and control of agriculture over an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan Island. Amazingly, the ongoing excavations here have dated this to over 5,000 years ago. It's the oldest evidence of humans harnessing water ever discovered. Chinese experts believe it allowed an earth-walled city of more than 30,000 people to flourish in these flood-prone coastal lowlands. That means that this new discovery, called Liantou, is the oldest city ever found in China. But like Ximao, this city was also abandoned after 800 years. And here, the latest excavation is finding evidence of why. In my quest to find out why the ancient stone city at Ximao vanished 3,800 years ago, I've ruled out the earthquakes, floods and wars that destroyed other ancient civilizations. But Sarah's investigating one more possibility. She's looking for answers in the demise of the oldest city ever found in China. Here, Wang Ningyuan and his team are finding evidence that the city's agriculture was hit by an unstoppable force. Climate change. The layers below here belong to the final period of Liangzhu. This is all man-made. The thick layer on top has accumulated from repeated seawater floods. The team's evidence suggests that prolonged heavy rains destroyed the city's agriculture, dwindling food supplies forced the population to move away, and then silt, left by centuries of rising sea levels, buried what remained. It's amazing that Liangzhu could support such a big city. But when the climate changed and big floods came, the city was helpless in the face of nature. So the environment forged this civilization, but also somehow decided its end. If a dramatic shift in the climate could destroy a city the size of Liangzhu, could something similar have happened at Ximao? Recent analysis of ancient pollen grains found across northern China reveals that when Ximao was at its peak, it was much warmer and wetter. But 3,800 years ago, just when the city declined, the monsoon weather patterns changed abruptly. This area became drier and colder. The climate change evidence makes perfect sense. And if you look at the landscape and look at the soils, it just doesn't seem like this area could have sustained such large numbers of people in ancient times. This is the best explanation so far for the demise of Ximao. That sudden climate change transformed this region into a cold semi-desert, ravaging the civilization with famine and drought. All the things that sustained life were no longer possible. And when you've got people that aren't satisfied, you get flight and you get abandonment. The people of Ximao deserted their once great city, leaving it to disappear beneath the windblown silt. Lost for millennia, until now. It's so exciting. These discoveries are changing everything. The where and when of how it all began has typically been lost in the mists of time. But now we have real evidence. Right now, all across China, cutting-edge archaeology is uncovering an entirely new chapter in the story of human civilization. Now, I'm amazed to learn how these lost cultures have struggled to survive in the face of earthquakes and landslides, floods and war, like catastrophes with the power to destroy. It's a reminder that great empires rise and can be wiped out again in the blink of an eye. But what they've left behind has laid the foundations for all the wonders to come. New beliefs, architecture, art and hierarchies that would lead to thousands of years of civilization in China.