DgcityHidden on a river bend in the misty hills of western Hubei, the stone city of Tangya was the seat of a tribal chieftain whose family ruled under three dynasties, then abandoned and largely forgotten. The first complete archaeological report on the site has now been published, setting out years of survey and excavation in print.
The two-volume report, Xianfeng Tangya, presents fieldwork carried out from 2011 to 2014 by the Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology together with university partners and the site’s administration. Tangya lies in Xianfeng county in Enshi, the Tujia and Miao prefecture of southwest Hubei, and was one of the best-known tusi centres of the Yuan, Ming and Qing periods, when the court governed border peoples through hereditary local chiefs under the tusi system.
The city has stood essentially as a ruin since it was abandoned in the mid-eighteenth century, and its layout, monuments and setting survived unusually intact. Investigators found that most of what remains was built in the city’s heyday from the Wanli to Tianqi reigns of the late Ming, when the ruling Qin clan held its greatest power. The standing remains are dominated by a stone memorial archway, the Temple of the Prince of Zhang, and the chiefs’ tombs.
Tangya entered the World Heritage List on July 4, 2015, inscribed together with the Laosicheng site in Yongshun, Hunan, and Hailongtun at Bozhou in Guizhou as the cliff-palace and tusi-site series, recognised for the way imperial China managed ethnic borderlands. The full publication gives researchers the first consolidated body of evidence on how such a chiefdom’s capital was planned, built and eventually dissolved.
That dissolution came from above. In the 1720s and 1730s the Yongzheng emperor pressed the replace-tribal-chiefs-with-officials reform, abolishing hereditary tusi titles across the southwest and replacing them with appointed county magistrates and regular garrisons. Tangya’s line of chiefs lost their domain, and the city emptied, which is paradoxically why its walls, archway and tombs survived undisturbed for archaeology rather than being buried under later building. Today the moss-grown archway, carved with the phrase bestowed by a Ming emperor, still marks the processional way up to the chiefs’ burial ground.
