Liu Junjie, a shutterbug in central China’s Henan Province, was out shooting pictures in the mountains one day when he came across a large number of symbols carved on stones in the shape of a map or drawings of irrigation works. The Juci Mountains, where Liu made this surprising discovery, is where the legendary Da Yu (Yu the Great) is said to have led the people in fighting floods and establishing water conservancy projects. Liu was curious: did the ancient symbols mean that Da Yu actually lived?
Liu first happened upon the carvings in the spring of 1988. “I noticed several round holes on a stone arranged in order. When I looked around, I saw more strange marks on stones nearby and groups of rocks with larger signs of various types, although some of the rocks had been eroded by the wind,” Liu says.
During the next 15 years, Liu visited the Juci Mountains many times to search for the symbols and photograph them. “I have found more than 3,000 stones with such symbols,” he reports. “They are scattered among five valleys in the mountains, covering a total area of 400 to 600 square kilometers.”
Many of the marks appear in lines or within set borders. They are mainly geometric figures, including dots and circles, some of which resemble the battle maps of ancient times.
Liu has copied nearly 1,000 of the symbols, and made rubbings from some of the rocks. One of these is nearly two meters long and more than a meter wide. Experts he has consulted say that the long, narrow lines in the rubbing probably indicated a river, and the square images likely meant a settled community.
Liu talked with several archaeologists in Henan Province about his find. Some of them concluded that the symbols might be inscriptions made by early human beings, or a very early version of what eventually became Chinese pictographs. However, they bear virtually no resemblance to the early characters found on ancient pottery. Other specialists believe the symbols are cliff paintings of a later-stage primitive society.
A water conservancy worker surnamed Zhang, who wishes to remain anonymous, says he believes the discovery is highly significant. “In the history of water conservancy, Da Yu is always thought to be a legendary figure, but the area where these mysterious symbols were found was part of Da Yu’s domain. What’s more, some experts who worked on the recently finished Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project also believe that Da Yu was a real historical figure.”
However, Zhang does not believe that the symbols relate only to the legend of “Da Yu Harnessing the Flood.” He is more inclined to think that they were created during an era that might be called the “Da Yu period.”
Deputy Director Wang Wei of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says that Da Yu is believed to have established water conservancy and flood control projects in the areas we know today as Henan and Shanxi provinces. But he points out that Da Yu is also thought to have traveled over a wide area. It would be premature to assume the carvings are directly connected with him.
To date, no conclusive evidence has been found to prove Da Yu’s existence, says Wang. The earliest record of the story of his fight against the floods appears on a bronze from the Western Zhou Dynasty (c. 1100 BC - c. 771 BC) found a number of years ago.
Wang points out that archaeology requires extreme precision and scientists cannot make a conclusion based on just a few materials. The symbols discovered by Liu Junjie need to be studied at length to determine what and how old they are, and how to decipher them. Moreover, says Wang, “We need a lot of field work to study the relationship between these rocks and nearby ruins and their chronology. Also, the discovery calls for further textual research.”
Liu Junjie’s discovery may not have solved any mysteries about Da Yu--in fact, it has created some new ones--yet it has provided some interesting new paths to explore.
(China.org.cn translated by Li Jinhui, March 24, 2004)
