Site of the Mobi Shop Ruins

　　The Site of the Mobi Shop Ruins is located to the north of Mobi Shop Village, Dalian Township, in the southeastern part of the county, 0.5 kilometers south of the Xincai River. Local residents also refer to it as the “Huang Chao Fort.” According to the New Book of Tang – Biography of Zhao Chou, in the 11th year of the Qianfu era of the Tang Dynasty (83 AD), Huang Chao and Qin Zongquan joined forces with hundreds of thousands of troops, dug five concentric moats totaling a hundred trenches, and besieged Chen for three hundred days. Legend has it that ancient armies used the act of “waving flags” (磨旗, mōiqí) as a signal to communicate when uniting. Based on the village’s name and local folklore, this site is believed to have been the military camp where Huang Chao raised his banner to besiege Chen, as well as the meeting point where Huang Chao and Qin Zongquan combined their forces.

　　The ruins consist of a raised terrace on which the Dongyue Temple once stood but has since been leveled. The current terrace is 1 meter high, covers an area of 540 square meters, and has a cultural layer about 3 meters deep. Artifacts unearthed include painted red pottery, flat tripod feet, duck-billed tripod feet, and pottery fragments from the Dawenkou Culture period; as well as closed-mouth jars, flat-bottomed bowls, and shallow-dish tripods from the Longshan Culture period; there are also pottery fragments from the Shang and Zhou dynasties. This is a site where the strata of Dawenkou and Longshan cultures overlap with those of the Shang and Zhou cultures. It was designated as a county-level cultural relics protection unit in 1988.

　　Source: Huaiyang Government Website