Dongzhu Baoshan Site

Dongzhu Baoshan Site

The Dongzhu Baoshan Site is a cultural relic protection unit of Suzhou City.

The Baoshan Site is located on Yangbao Mountain in Baoshan Village, Dongzhu Town. This is a small hill with an elevation of just over 20 meters, situated to the west of Yangshan Mountain, also known as Tongding Mountain. An ancient cultural site was discovered here in March 1983. The site is distributed on the southern foothills of Yangbao Mountain, covering a range approximately 10 meters wide and 200 meters long, with a total area of about 2,000 square meters. The cultural layer is about 80 centimeters thick, rich in content. Stone tools such as polished stone adzes and oblique stone axes with sharpened edges were collected, along with fragments of pottery including sand-tempered red pottery jars, stamped hard pottery jars, and proto-porcelain. The decorations on the pottery are mostly stamped patterns, including cloud-and-thunder motifs, string patterns, mat patterns, zigzag patterns, grid patterns, and leaf-vein patterns, reflecting regional cultural characteristics from the Western Zhou to the Spring and Autumn periods.

Known ancient tombs on Yangbao Mountain include the tomb of Lu Su, one of the most important statesmen of the Wu Kingdom. There is also the tomb of Lu Ji, who created the Hun Tian Tu (Celestial Globe Chart), annotated the Book of Changes, and wrote the Commentary on the Tai Xuan Jing. The tomb of Zhu Derun, an official Confucian scholar during the Yuan Dynasty who served as the Head of Confucian Studies in the Eastern Pacification Provincial Administration and once built the Lion Grove rockery with Ni Yunlin, is also located here. Additionally, the tomb of Zhu Yongchun, a renowned Neo-Confucian scholar and educator from the late Ming and early Qing periods, can be found here. In 1928, Li Genyuan visited Yangbao Mountain twice to investigate Zhu’s tomb and learned that “the tomb is located at Beisanzitang, facing the mountain’s Hai direction, the land belongs to the Zhu family, and the epitaph of the master, consisting of over two thousand words, was composed by Peng Dingqiu.”