Two archaeologists work on a tomb
nearby the Olympic Forest Park with special arrangment that represents a
turtle.The six bricks that strech out of the hexagon pit are the head,tail
and four feet of a turtle, its tail pointing to the north.[China
Daily]
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When the world's top athletes
gather at the 31 newly-built arenas for the Beijing Olympics to compete for
gold, silver and bronze, many might not realize that right beneath where they
stand were buried mounds of "gold, silver and bronze" treasures, some dating
back 2,000 years.
A: Five-color Porcelain Jar.
B:
Jade Belt;Crane-and-cloud pot; Gold Gawu
C: Jade Fish;Terra-cotta
Jar;Terra-cotta pot.
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Archaeologists
surveyed about 1.6 million square meters of land at about 17 under-construction
Olympic venues between April 2004 and last November, and unearthed 700 ancient
tombs with 1,500 artifacts, according to Kong Fanzhi, head of Beijing
Administration of Cultural Heritage.
Fittingly, Kong's briefing was held at the reconstruction sites of two
ancient temples, one next to the National Aquatics Center and the other near the
neighboring Olympic Village.
"Beijing has inherited a rich collection of cultural relics, so the
construction of Olympic venues had to take their preservation into
consideration. This is part of the government's promise to host a 'Cultural
Olympics'".
As most of the city's relics rest inside Beijing's ancient city walls - a
fortification built around 1435 in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and now replaced
by the city's second ring road - and the city wall of the Yuan Dynasty
(1279-1368), which is located a little north of the North Third Ring Road, none
of the Olympic venues were built inside or nearby these relics-rich city walls.
The foundation of the Water Cube, the aquatics center, was laid 100 meters
further north to its original chosen site so that a nearby 500-year-old Taoist
temple dedicated to the fertility goddess, could survive.
Yet due to unavoidable construction at the chosen sites, Kong's team had to
excavate 9,787 square meters of land, about 0.6 percent of the total area they
surveyed. The artifacts unearthed from the mostly-civilian tombs will be used
for research and displays.
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