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cities: Asia and the Pacific 215 on excavations and the analysis of their data, it is believed that the first cities in Asia were in China Urbanism developed next in South Asia, particularly Pakistan, followed by Southeast Asia and, finally, Korea and Japan CHINA’S MOST ANCIENT CITIES Not only are China’s cities the oldest in Asia, but they also most readily lend themselves to definition The Chinese word for city, cheng, is the same as the word for wall, and evidence of Chinese walls is at least as old as the evidence of cities The first-known walled settlement in China is a Neolithic village of the sixth millennium b.c.e in Li County in Hunan Province An earthen wall 19.5 feet wide at the base that narrowed to about feet at the top, roughly rectangular in shape, enclosed an area of 35,888 square yards A ditch associated with the wall was also discovered Several thousand miles to the north, in Aohanqi, Inner Mongolia, a ditch, but without any remains of a wall, enclosed a settlement of 28,700 square yards Its date was determined by carbon-14 testing to be between 6200 and 5400 b.c.e Houses in the Aohanqi settlement were arranged in rows Remains of a cemetery dated to the mid-seventh millennium b.c.e., associated with a residential settlement but with no evidence of a wall or ditch, have been found in Wuyang County in the province of Henan By the fift h millennium b.c.e a settlement in Shaanxi Province included houses of at least three sizes, three cemeteries, a pottery workshop, and animal pens Walled settlements of the fourth millennium b.c.e have been found in every region of China A nearly circular wall surrounded by a moat enclosed a settlement in Zhengzhou, Henan Also circular, enclosed by both wall and moat, was Chengtoushan, in Li County At 95,680 square yards in area, it is more than twice as large as any other settlement known in Asia at the time Both Zhengzhou and Chengtoushan had walls that were made using the rammed earth technique, associated with Chinese wall construction for the next four thousand years (In the rammed-earth technique, walls are constructed of earth mixed with sand, gravel, and clay The dampened material is poured into a form and then compacted, and the process is repeated until the desired height is reached.) By the fourth millennium b.c.e Chinese cities were defined by walls, moats, residential architecture, cemeteries, and sometimes workshops It has been said that China experienced an urban revolution in the third millennium b.c.e., which was still nearly a thousand years before China entered the Bronze Age or had a written language Cities from this period were huge in comparison to earlier times, sometimes between 1,195,990 and 3,587,970 square yards and serving a population that spread as many as 60 miles in either direction It has been estimated that medium-size cities served a population of between 1,250 and 3,750 households, whereas the largest cities may have serviced as many as 50,000 Wall shapes appear to have become predominantly quadrilateral, in contrast to the more circular configurations found in the fift h and fourth millennia b.c.e Jade ritual reaping knife, from Henan province, northern China, during the Erlitou Period (17th-16th centuries b.c.e); a large number of items made of such materials as bronze, jade, lacquer, and bone attest to a complex urban life at this site (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
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