DgcityIn 1926 two young Chinese scholars drove a spade into the loess at Xiyin village in southern Shanxi and carried out the first modern field excavation ever led by Chinese archaeologists. One hundred years on, a new exhibition in Taiyuan revisits that dig and the science it helped launch, with more than 200 objects drawn from more than a dozen museums.
The show, Rereading Xiyin, opened at the Shanxi Museum on November 10, and roughly eighty per cent of its exhibits are being shown publicly for the first time. Xiyin, in Xia county, had been excavated by Li Ji and Yuan Fuli at a moment when the field in China was largely run by foreigners. A stone knife on display, dug from Yangshao village in Henan in 1921 by the Swedish scholar Johan Gunnar Andersson, sets the scene: Andersson had named the Yangshao culture and argued it had originated in the West, and the Xiyin dig was in part a Chinese answer.
Manuscripts and papers belonging to Li Ji, later regarded as a founder of Chinese archaeology and donated by his son Li Guangmo, are also displayed. The exhibition traces how work at Xiyin fed into a wider understanding of the Neolithic Yangshao world and the first broad cultural convergence that shaped early China.
The present is set against the past through the methods of the 2020s. The latest Xiyin excavations use drone aerial photography and modelling, three-dimensional scanning of the site, high-precision magnetic survey to read buried features, and satellite positioning for every trench and find. Curators say the show follows Chinese archaeology from its first uncertain seasons to a mature discipline with its own voice and methods.
Li Ji’s career bore out that promise. After Xiyin he went on to lead excavations at Anyang, the late Shang capital, where teams uncovered the royal tombs and oracle-bone archives that confirmed China’s earliest historically attested dynasty. He later trained a generation of scholars through the Institute of History and Philology, and his insistence on stratigraphic method and prompt publication set the standards Chinese fieldwork still follows. Yuan Fuli, his partner at Xiyin, went on to take part in the Sino-Swedish expeditions that mapped Xinjiang’s geology and fossil record.
