Shortly after 3000 BC a young man was buried under a 65 ft (20 m) high mound with over 100 jade objects. His body had been partly cremated prior to burial, and some of the jades had also been scorched. The remains of a number of other people, possibly sacrificed when the young man was laid to rest, were interred around the main burial. The young man was one of the social elite of the Liangzhu culture that flourished in the lower Yangzi River valley.
This hierarchical society is famed for its jades, in particular 'bi' rings and 'cong' tubes, forms that continued to be of great significance into the Zhou period.
Over 2,000 sets of jades have been discovered in this region, comprising over 5,000 jades in all. Jade is one of the hardest materials to work and those from Liangzhu must have been made by craft specialists. Many of them are decorated with monster-like designs, prefiguring the fearsome 'taotie' (monster-face) motifs of the later Shang period.
