Niuheliang, a major Neolithic ceremonial and burial site in Chaoyang, Liaoning province, is one of the most important large-scale sacrificial and burial centers of China's Hongshan culture, dating back roughly 5,000 to 5,800 years. A newly revised Liaoning Niuheliang Site Protection Regulation took formal effect on January 1 this year, giving this archaeological site — often described as a birthplace of the “dawn of Chinese civilization” — stricter and more systematic legal protection, and standing as one of the key recent policy measures supporting conservation work at this major site. The revised regulation was adopted on November 27, 2025 at the 19th session of the Standing Committee of the 14th Liaoning Provincial People's Congress, announced the following day, and took effect on January 1, 2026.

The Niuheliang site straddles the border area of Lingyuan city, Jianping county and the Kharchin Left Wing Mongol Autonomous County, all within Chaoyang. It was discovered by archaeologists in 1981, formal scientific excavation began in 1983, and in 1988 the State Council listed it as a Major National Historical and Cultural Site. The site consists of three components — a large altar, a goddess temple and clusters of stone-piled burial mounds — summarized by scholars as an integrated “altar-temple-tomb” spatial layout: the altar was used for sacrifices to heaven and earth, the goddess temple enshrined ancestral deity figures, and the stone cairns served as burial grounds for high-status individuals. This layout is regarded as an early ritual center that emerged in the late Hongshan culture, showing that more than 5,000 years ago the western Liaoning region had already developed a highly organized social structure and a systematized primitive religious belief system. Scholars consider Niuheliang the largest and most functionally complete large-scale sacrificial site complex known from China's Neolithic period, and a key piece of evidence for the Hongshan culture's transition from primitive settlement society toward an early state form.

To date, more than 60 individual site locations have been confirmed within the Niuheliang protection zone and surrounding area. At the core Locus 1, archaeologists have identified nine large platform foundations and associated structures, with the overall building complex covering about 100,000 square meters and dating back roughly 5,800 years — a scale and complexity extremely rare among Neolithic remains found elsewhere in East Asia from the same period. The Goddess Temple site yielded a life-size clay head of a goddess figure along with fragments of several other human-form statues, considered the earliest known physical evidence in China of a temple-type structure and deity figures. The site has also yielded large numbers of finely crafted jade artifacts, including jade pig-dragons and hook-cloud-shaped jade pendants, pointing to a sophisticated ritual jade system. In 2023, the National Cultural Heritage Administration announced the latest findings of the Project to Trace the Origins of Chinese Civilization, designating Niuheliang as the representative site of the first stage of China's “ancient state era” (roughly 5,800 to 5,200 years ago), ranking it alongside the Liangzhu site in the lower Yangtze (inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019) as one of two key reference sites for research into the origins of Chinese civilization. In 2024, related archaeological findings were formally incorporated into the People's Education Press seventh-grade history textbook, becoming part of standard school history education.

This revision stems from the fact that the original Liaoning Niuheliang Site Protection Regulation, in force since March 2010, had struggled to keep pace with new circumstances and problems in site conservation and management, with some of its provisions no longer suited to current practical needs. Liaoning's provincial Department of Justice sought public comment on a draft revision in 2025, and the provincial government's standing meeting reviewed and approved the draft in principle on September 1 of that year before submitting it to the provincial people's congress standing committee for deliberation. After being passed at the 19th session of the Standing Committee of the 14th Liaoning Provincial People's Congress, the revised regulation was published on November 28, 2025 and took formal effect on January 1, 2026. The revision is intended to thoroughly implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's key statements on cultural heritage protection and inheritance, carry out central government decisions on the protection and use of cultural relics, strengthen the legal framework for the site's protection, management, research and use, promote efforts to “bring cultural relics to life,” and provide institutional support for a future UNESCO World Heritage nomination for the Niuheliang Hongshan culture site.

Beyond the legislative safeguard, Niuheliang has in recent years received a series of national-level designations. In February 2025, it was included in China's first national list of major archaeological sites, marking it as one of the flagship large sites receiving priority national support for protection and public display. In July 2026, to mark the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the Party's Publicity Department named a new batch of National Patriotic Education Demonstration Bases — 77 in total nationwide, spanning 31 provincial-level regions and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps — with the Niuheliang Site Museum becoming one of three such bases newly designated in Liaoning province. On the World Heritage front, the Hongshan culture sites were jointly placed on China's Tentative List for World Cultural Heritage as early as 2012, together with the Hongshanhou and Weijiawopu sites in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia; Chaoyang (Liaoning) and Chifeng (Inner Mongolia) signed a memorandum in November 2022 establishing a regular consultation and academic exchange mechanism to keep advancing the joint nomination, and in 2024 the joint project was again included in the National Cultural Heritage Administration's updated Tentative List for World Cultural Heritage.

On the ground, the Niuheliang site management office is continuing several concrete conservation projects, including a first-phase security and surveillance upgrade, a protective-facilities improvement project, preliminary survey and research for reinforcement work at Locus 2, and protection-and-display projects at Loci 3, 4 and 5, aiming for full coverage of site patrol work combining human patrols, physical safeguards and technological monitoring. A museum exhibition renovation and a comprehensive site-park improvement project, both completed in 2024, have further improved the visitor experience. During this year's National Day holiday (October 1–7), the Niuheliang Site Museum specially announced the temporary reopening of the Locus 1 “Goddess Temple” protection and display hall — normally closed for renovation work — with tickets priced at 60 yuan per person and online reservations required, using the holiday travel surge to showcase this core Hongshan-culture relic to the public. The Niuheliang Site Museum has also used short videos and other new media channels to promote a “tracing the roots of Chinese civilization” theme tied to the National Day holiday, drawing more visitors into the site park to experience the Hongshan culture remains in person.

In the view of observers, the revised protection regulation for Niuheliang, together with the string of national-level designations that have followed, reflects a broader effort by China to deepen its Project to Trace the Origins of Chinese Civilization and strengthen systematic protection of major archaeological sites tied to the country's early civilization. Scholars broadly agree that the Hongshan culture represented by Niuheliang is a key link in demonstrating the multi-ethnic, integrated origins of Chinese civilization and its more than 5,000-year history, with the jade artifacts and temple-altar remains unearthed there still serving as crucial physical evidence in discussions of the origins of early state forms and religious belief. As legal protection, national honors and the joint World Heritage nomination advance together, this Neolithic sacred site on a ridge in western Liaoning is gradually moving from a purely academic archaeological discovery toward a central place in public cultural memory and the national narrative of civilization.