The 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture is being held in Chaoyang, Liaoning from August 5 to 6, bringing together renowned experts and scholars from China and abroad.
"A ceremonial architectural system built around mountain platforms, gathering plazas, the goddess temple, stone tombs, and sacrificial altars demonstrates a highly specialized planning of sacred space."
At the 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture, Jia Xiaobing, director and research fellow at the Department of World Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, shared the civilizational value behind archaeological discoveries at the Niuheliang site.
At the 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture, Guo Dashun, a renowned archaeologist and honorary director of the Hongshan Culture Research Institute, highlighted the core values of Hongshan culture in his speech. He noted that the first is reverence and respect for nature, including communion with the natural world.
At the 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture, US Sinologist Elizabeth Childs-Johnson noted in her speech that Hongshan culture stands as a civilizational miracle of China's Neolithic Age.
At the 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture, Guo Zhan, former vice-president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, highlighted in his speech that world heritage designation is not about "protecting all that can be protected." Rather, sites must be evaluated within the global context of human civilization to select the best of the best.
"The celestial pole rests at the center of the universe, governing the motion of all stars." At the 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture, Li Xinwei, deputy director and research fellow at the Institute of History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and director of the Institute for Classical Civilizations of China, shared his insights on the polar cosmology of Hongshan culture and its relationship with social order.
"These structures looked like round, rectangular platforms with stone cladding." At the 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture, Alexey Anatolyevich Kovalev, a research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences, shared archaeological discoveries regarding ritual architecture in the Niuheliang area.
"The jade dragon of Hongshan culture marks another round of long-distance prehistoric jade diffusion in China, following the southward spread of northeast Asian jue rings." At the 2026 Conference on Hongshan Culture, Fang Xiangming, director and research fellow at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, shared his research on the spread and evolution of the Hongshan jade dragon.
A young vendor from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region has recently gone viral for baking fresh naan on the streets of Xi'an, Shaanxi province. Eager residents arrive hours before he starts selling each day.
