Zhoukoudian: The Place Where it all Started

Make your own free website on Tripod.com

Home

History

importance

Peking man

Zhoukoudian: The Place Where it all Started

a bust of Peking man out front of the museum.

Zhoukoudian is a unique site 50km south west of Beijing. It is kind of hard to get to as it is not a very popular tourist site, but taxis can be rented for a day to take you there. If you are the adverous type and do not mid public transit you can take either one of three busses that stop at Liangxiang where you have to transfer to a mini bus that will take you to the Peking Man Site. Once you turn off the highway there are lots of signs directing tourist to the site hidden in the mountains of the country side. It was hard to know what to expect from a site so plain, yet so important to the paleoanthropology community.

This site has been well laid out with nicely groomed trails leading you around from locality to locality, and a museum that holds all the information and artifact a tourist could want to see. The museum nicely lays out the artifacts that have been found, their significance and how they fit into the larger picture of human evolution. Behind the museum there is a memorial garden for the scientists who spent their life working here and uncovered many major elements of this site. After spending so much of their life excavating this site they gained the honor of being buried here and will always be remembered for their contribution to the field of paleoanthropology.

It is interesting to imagine what the caves and landscape would have been like thousands of years ago and what it would have been like living in those caves, hunting with the tools now housed in the museum and listening to the wild dogs howling at night with a big fire at the front of your cave keeping you safe and warm.

memorial garden

Even thought it takes a bit to get out to this site, it is well worth the trip. Zhoukoudian is a nice relaxing tourist site after all the busy overwhelming sites scattered throughout Beijing. It is quite different and a nice change of pace with skyscrapers being replaced by tree covered mountains, highways and roads being replaced by fields full of corn, wheat and other vegetables, and where people and bicycles become a rare site. If you are lucky you may even get a glimpse of some of the wild life that still populates the area.

Zhoukoudian is a very important site not only for China’s history but for all of mankind giving more information about our evolution and how we can to populate the earth.

All information on this site has been gathered from; Michelle Hertzfeld book "The World Culture Heritage in Beijing: Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian" (2004), the Zhoukoudain museum, or lecture notes taken from classes at Simon Fraser University for the 2007 field school going to China taught by Dongya Yang and a guest lecture by Mark Skinner. All photes were taken by the author, other then the one specified.