Once upon a time in Liyang

Long, long ago, there was a city state called Jijiaocheng, "crowing rooster city", so named because it was said to have been built at dawn.

The square city was situated on the fertile Liyang Plain. Its deep moats were connected to an expansive network of waterways, which irrigated vast paddy fields, and provided for the dozens of settlements inside and outside of it.

The rulers of Jijiaocheng encouraged their people to log in the mountains. Massive timbers were transported to the city on the waterways for the construction of a tall complex. Standing in it, the city's rulers would be able to overlook the settlements and paddy fields between the waterways.

During the harvest, rice was brought to the city for processing and storage. Piles of rice husks accumulated in the northwestern area.

This is not the beginning of some bedtime story, but the story of something that actually took place in a Neolithic rice-growing culture around 4,500 years ago.

Millennia later, the once prosperous Jijiaocheng, which is located in modern-day Lixian county, Changde, Hunan province, came to the notice of the modern world, following many years of excavations.

With the help of archaeologists and historians, ink artists painted re-creations of life in Jijiaocheng in the traditional scroll format.

It was part of an ambitious project that took two years for a group of Hunan-based artists to complete, which includes eight scroll paintings, totaling 140 meters in length, that visualize early human activities on the Liyang Plain and the prehistoric culture in Hunan.