Salon explores Xiliaohe culture's role in shaping Chinese civilization

A salon, titled Xiliaohe Culture: Relation with Origins of Chinese Civilization and Modern Significance, was held in Beijing on Monday as part of the 2025 Beijing Culture Forum.

The event brought together archaeologists and experts from across the country to discuss the importance of the Xiliaohe, or the West Liaohe River, in nurturing prehistoric culture, and to introduce the latest archaeological discoveries related to the West Liaohe River basin.

Spanning across today's Hebei and Liaoning provinces and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, the West Liaohe River basin witnessed human activities from the Paleolithic period onward.

The basin is also home to Hongshan culture, a key Neolithic culture dating from 6,500 to 5,000 years ago.

In the 1980s, Niuheliang, a high-level sacrificial site of the late period of Hongshan culture was discovered in Chaoyang, Liaoning province, marking a milestone in the study of this culture. Archaeologists from Liaoning continue to study the surrounding area of this site and have found 37 Hongshan cultural remains from 18 nearby locations.

They have also preliminarily inferred that at its largest, the distribution range of Hongshan culture covered nearly 300,000 square kilometers.

Archaeologists from Inner Mongolia mainly excavated four Neolithic and two Bronze Age sites in this region, enhancing understanding of the cultural inheritance in this area.

"As the largest branch of the Liaohe River and an important river system of North China, West Liaohe River nurtured numerous ancient civilizations. They, together with many other ancient civilizations from other areas, joined to form the plural and integrated patterns of the Chinese civilization and left rich and diversified cultural heritage," says Sun Jinsong, director of the Inner Mongolia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.