Liye Ancient Town Site Park opens in Hunan

After more than five years of archaeological research, planning, and construction, a new park has opened in central China's Hunan Province. It's the Liye Ancient Town Site Park.

To coincide with the opening, China's first Qin Bamboo Slips Museum went on display that were excavated from Liye township in 2002.

In 2002, in a well, researchers found, unexpectedly, 36-thousand wood and bamboo slips. The well contained 20 times the number of slips bearing Qin Dynasty records than previous discoveries.

On the wood and bamboo slips, more than 200-thousand characters were written clearly with brushes, in the ancient official script style. The characters provide an encyclopedic record of the dynasty's political, military and economic situation.

The discovery of the slips is being hailed as an archaeological breakthrough and compared to the uncovering of the terra-cotta warriors and horses in northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

The Hunan municipal government felt this was an important discovery and invested more than 16 million US dollars for the construction of the park and the museum, trying to keep the cultural heritage site.

36-thousand bamboo slips from the Qin Dynasty have been unearthed in "the No.1 Well of China" of Liye ancient town, acclaimed as the "most important archaeological discovery of China"

With an area of 36-thousand square meters and a building area of 65-hundred square meters, the Bamboo Slip Museum is only a kilometer from the well-known historic and cultural town of Liye.

This is an ideal place to preserve, display and study bamboo slips from the Qin Dynasty. It will also exhibit the culture, arts and other aspects of that period.