Site of the Qianzhong Commandery

　　Introduction       The Site of the Qianzhong Commandery is situated in Yaotou Village, twenty li west of Yuanling County. According to archaeological findings, the ancient city site covers an area of 110,000 square meters, where a large number of Qin bricks, Han tiles, as well as pottery items such as li tripods, bowls, dou stems, and jars, along with bronze weapons including ge halberds, swords, and arrowheads have been unearthed.     A joint expert team from the Changsha Institute of Geotectonics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Hunan Provincial Institute of Archaeology, using internationally advanced technologies such as ground-penetrating radar, has preliminarily discovered that over 40 massive tombs from the Warring States period to the Han Dynasty are clustered on the mountaintop southeast of the ancient city site. Each tomb is as large as a hill, with more than half being larger than the Mawangdui Han Tombs in Changsha. The largest tomb is about five times the size of the Mawangdui Tomb. In addition, there are over 1,000 smaller-scale civilian tombs from the Warring States and Han periods scattered around the area. This grand array of city ruins from the Qin Shi Huang era and the thousand-plus ancient tombs together paint a historical panorama of the Qin Dynasty.

　　 Huaihua City, Hunan Province