Yesterday was the third “Liangzhu Day in Hangzhou”. As the only site in Liangzhu Site showing the profile structure of water conservancy system, Laohuling Ruins Park was officially opened to the public. Before July 12th, you can make an appointment to visit the park for free through the “Liangzhu Ancient City” WeChat WeChat official account.
Laohuling Dam Ruins Park will reveal to the world the creativity and scientificity of the ancestors of Liangzhu in using and transforming the natural environment with the most “authentic” appearance, which is of great significance for the world to understand the emergence and development of Liangzhu ancient country and even the origin of Chinese civilization.
The water conservancy system around Liangzhu ancient city is an important part of Liangzhu ancient city site heritage area, which is located in the northwest of Liangzhu ancient city. The whole water conservancy system covers an area of about 100 square kilometers. It consists of 11 artificial dams, such as Gukou high dam, plain low dam and piedmont long dike, and natural mountains and spillways. It is the earliest large-scale water conservancy system discovered in China and the earliest flood retaining dam project discovered in the world.
Laohuling Dam belongs to the Gukou high dam system of the water conservancy system outside Liangzhu Ancient City. The dam itself is 140 meters long and 100 meters wide. From a distance, the outer shed for protection is like a huge water drop, lying in the narrowest position between two small mountains.
It is understood that the sites of Liangzhu ancient city site have taken into account the follow-up protection work from the moment of archaeological excavation. In order to meet the needs of protection and exhibition at the same time, the Laohuling dam site has innovatively built a “water drop” protection shed with high sense of science and technology on the dam body. The structure adopts the form of space reticulated shell to deal with the stress problem of irregular terrain on site, which ensures the stability of the structure. At the same time, it adopts the combination of strip foundation and independent foundation to protect the original topography of the dam body and avoid the damage of the building to the dam itself as much as possible.
At present, the park mainly displays the section of Laohuling dam site. It is confirmed by archaeology that the section here has obvious grass-wrapped mud structure and the paving method is staggered horizontally and vertically. The reason for using grass to wrap mud, like the straw bag for water conservancy, belongs to a kind of reinforcement technology, which is also commonly used in the construction of earth platforms, dams and other facilities near the water in Liangzhu period, which can speed up the consolidation of the dam body, increase the tensile strength and prevent it from collapsing.
In addition, the profile of the grass-wrapped mud in Laohuling also shows obvious zoning, which shows that the grass-wrapped mud was transported from different places when it was piled, and it was paved as soon as it arrived. There was no unified stacking process, and such a process needed the concerted efforts of the ancestors of Liangzhu.
In addition to grass wrapped in mud, the construction of Laohuling Dam needs a lot of soil. Relevant research shows that the total earthwork volume of Liangzhu water conservancy system is about 2.88 million cubic meters, which was a huge and extraordinary project designed and built under the productivity conditions at that time. The planning, design, material collection, transportation, production and construction of the project need considerable management and organization ability, and need to be supported by a regional national level public power. It can be seen that the social structure of Liangzhu ancient city has already possessed the ability of social organization and management to cope with complex needs.
The ancestors of Liangzhu began to build large-scale water resources management projects before choosing the construction of the city. The sites preserved to this day not only reveal the scale and construction technology of early human water resources management projects, but also reveal the inseparable and significant relationship between water resources management and urban civilization and early countries.