8:00 – 17:00

Free admission

Northern end of Beixin Village, Guanqiao Town, Tengzhou City

The Beixin Cultural Site is located in Guanqiao Town, Tengzhou City. Late spring, early summer and autumn are the ideal seasons for a visit.

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Take the medium-sized coach running between Tengzhou and Xuecheng, and alight at Beixin Village, Guanqiao Town. The ride takes approximately 20 minutes.

The Beixin Site lies on the southern bank of the ancient Xue River at the northern end of Beixin Village, southeast of Guanqiao Town, covering an area of around 50,000 square meters.

The site was first discovered during a provincial cultural relics survey in 1964. Excavations were carried out from the winter of 1978 to the spring of 1979 by the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, unearthing more than 2,000 cultural relics including a large quantity of pottery and stone implements.

Scientific dating confirms the site dates back 7,300 to 8,400 years, making it the earliest Neolithic site discovered in the Yellow River-Huai River region of China. The unique cultural features embodied at this relic site led the state to formally name this ancient civilization Beixin Culture. It was introduced to the world and included in national textbooks in 1982. In 1992, the Shandong Provincial People’s Government designated the Beixin Site a Provincial Key Cultural Relic Protection Unit.

Agriculture constituted the primary economy during the Beixin period. Complete sets of farming tools and foxtail millet grains were unearthed here. The relics range from stone shovels for ploughing soil and deer-horn hoes, pointed horn implements for sowing, clam-shell sickles for harvesting, to stone grinding slabs and rollers for threshing grains. These artifacts provide vital evidence for research on agricultural production in that era.

Meanwhile, excavated pottery shows relatively primitive craftsmanship. Two types of clay were used: sand-tempered pottery and plain clay pottery, decorated with applied relief patterns, incised lines, nail indentations and other ornaments, marking the budding of handicraft industries in the Beixin age. Skulls of domesticated pigs were also unearthed at the site, rewriting the history of pig breeding in China.

The excavation of the Beixin Site and the naming of Beixin Culture represent a landmark Neolithic discovery in the Haidai cultural region. As the origin of the Dawenkou Culture of Shandong, it pushes forward the timeline of prehistoric archaeology in Shandong by a significant margin and bears immense historical significance.