A significant city of the Xiongnu culture — an Asian tribe of Huns — has been uncovered in northern China after being entirely covered with sand for more than a thousand years, China’s state news agency reported on Thursday.
The city was the only one built by the Xiongnu, primarily a wandering people which occupied a vast territory located in and around today’s Mongolia, according to Dai Yingxin, a Chinese archaeologist quoted by Xinhua.
But according to a National Geographic article published in July 2001 about archaeological discoveries in the north of Mongolia, Siberia and in the north of China, the Xiongnu had built several urban centres and practised sedentary agriculture.
Significant tombs of Xiongnu Kings had also been found in the Tsaaram valley on the Russo-Mongolian border, according to the magazine.
The city uncovered recently by Chinese archaeologists in the district of Jingbian, in the province of Shaanxi at the border of the Inner Mongolia — whose Chinese name is Tongwancheng — has a surface area of a square kilometre.
The walls that surround the city are between 16 to 30 meters wide and are made of sand and glutinous rice mixed with water which makes them hard ”like stone”, according to Xinhua.
Located at the edge of the Wuding River, a tributary of the Yellow River, Tongwancheng was built in 419 AD and at one point was occupied by more than 100 000 people and remained a significant political, economic and military centre for more than five centuries.
It gradually became depopulated as the river dried up over time, said Xing Fulai, another archaeologist.
The importance of discovery in terms of understanding Xiongnu culture, the origins of which remain largely unknown, could qualify the site for World Heritage listing with Unesco, Xing said. – Sapa-AFP