DgcityArchaeologists working in the Changqing district of Jinan, Shandong Province, have pushed back the known origins of China’s oldest surviving Great Wall by roughly three centuries. Excavations near Guangli village indicate that the earliest stretches of the Great Wall of Qi were laid down in the late Western Zhou Dynasty and the opening years of the Spring and Autumn Period, rather than during the Warring States era as long assumed.
The dig, the first proactive excavation ever carried out on a section of the Qi wall, ran from May to December 2024 and opened up about 1,100 square meters of terrain. Researchers from the Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology combined conventional artifact recovery with the collection of animal bones, plant silica and samples for both radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating, building a layered chronology of how the fortification grew.
What emerged from the soil was a record of repeated rebuilding across hundreds of years. The team uncovered rammed-earth platforms, roads, embankment slopes, house foundations, trenches and ash pits, together with wall segments from several construction phases. The earliest walls, about ten meters wide, date to the Spring and Autumn Period and may reach back into the Western Zhou. Later Warring States phases show a far grander barrier, with the best-preserved sections widening to more than 30 meters at the height of Qi State power.
Beneath the early wall in the northern trench, excavators found two dwellings with square, rounded-corner foundations characteristic of semi-subterranean Zhou homes, evidence that a small community occupied the ridge before it was fortified. About 1.5 kilometers to the north, the team also traced remains of Pingyin City, a settlement recorded in early texts, tying the wall directly into the political and transport geography of the period.
The Great Wall of Qi runs for 641 kilometers across Shandong and is counted as the earliest and longest component of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Great Wall. Researchers say the new dating makes it the oldest confirmed Great Wall in China and clarifies how rival eastern states turned earthen ramparts into instruments of frontier defense long before the country was unified. Further excavation and dating work at Guangli and nearby sections is expected to refine the sequence and test how much of the original Western Zhou line survives under later Warring States construction.