DgcitySeven metres below a Beijing construction site, archaeologists have raised three wooden river boats about 1,800 years old, the first physical evidence of ancient inland shipping ever found in the capital area. The flat-bottomed vessels lay in a bend of an old river channel in Fengtai district, all three bows pointing the same way, toward the southwest.
The boats came to light during rescue excavation from November to December last year, ahead of redevelopment at Wanquansi village in the bed of the former Yongding River. The best-preserved hull is 14 metres long and about 2.5 metres across, with ten crossbeams dividing it into nine compartments. Bow and stern boards, rudder boards, outer planking, decking, a mast seat and timbers for towing all survive. Investigators believe the damaged vessels may have been gathered near a repair yard before a flood buried them in silt.
What sets the find apart is a mark stamped in several places on the best hull: the seal-script character guan, meaning official. It ties the boats to government transport rather than private trade, offering rare material evidence for state-run grain shipping and supply management during the Han and Jin periods, when armies and courts in the north depended on river logistics.
The construction is already sophisticated. Bottom planks were joined with mortise-and-tenon joints locked by wooden pegs, side planks interlocked with hooked seams, and iron nails secured the upper works. A small wooden oar model was recovered inside, along with pottery, tiles and the bones of horses and cattle. Waterlogged, sealed sediment starved the timber of oxygen and kept the hulls intact. Investigators call them the largest and most complete ancient inland boats yet found in northern China.
The discovery also rewrites a chapter of Beijing geography. The boats sit in what is now dry ground in a busy business district, proof that the Yongding River once ran along a very different course and that shallow craft could be built, moored and repaired close to the walled settlements that preceded the medieval capital. Investigators are now running radiocarbon dating alongside pollen and phytolith analysis of the river silts to narrow the vessels’ dates and reconstruct the vanished waterway, once known in this stretch as the Yushui.
