Gate from past opens new path to studies

Recently unearthed ruins of a buried Northern Song city reveal a fascinating saga, Wang Kaihao reports.

Probably one of the most famous Chinese landscape paintings, Along the River During the Qingming Festival is synonymous with the prosperous past of Kaifeng.

As portrayed in the milestone Northern Song (960-1127) scroll by Zhang Zeduan, who served at the imperial court, this city in present-day Henan province was then at its zenith.

A booming economy, vibrant culture, and ultimate political status, thanks to its role as the national capital, characterized this metropolis of more than 1 million. However, wars, the sands of time, and frequent inundation by the Yellow River, condemned that flourishing era to history.

Archaeologists have been working to uncover the long-buried stories of Kaifeng, which was also known as Dongjing ("the eastern capital") during the Northern Song period, and the recent study of the surroundings of the ruins of a city gate yielded crucial clues.

As attested to in many historical documents, Jinglong Gate, which translates as "the gate to worship the dragon", was originally set in Kaifeng's inner city wall.

According to the Dongjing Meng Hua Lu (Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendor), a nostalgic memoir written by Meng Yuanlao around the time when the Northern Song period ended, the square-shaped inner city had a perimeter of about 10 kilometers, and Jinglong Gate was the middle of three gates set in the inner north wall.

Beginning last year, researchers from the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology and the Kaifeng Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology focused on excavating the ruins, unearthing the city gate, whose front facade spans 60 meters, in the process.

This figure is equal to the dimensions of the Meridian Gate, or the southern entry to Beijing's Forbidden City, which visitors can see today.

"Jinglong Gate is the largest and highest-level city gate from the Northern Song period we've excavated so far," Wang Sanying, deputy director of the Kaifeng institute and leader of the project, told a National Cultural Heritage Administration news conference held to publicize the new findings in Beijing on Friday.