No photo availableLinfen · CN
Observatory
On the loess plateau of southern Shanxi, a few kilometres south of the city of Linfen, lies one of the most quietly astonishing pieces of ancient engineering on Earth: the Taosi Ancient Observatory. Built around 4,100 years ago from rammed earth, this semi-circular platform of pillars and narrow sight-line gaps tracked the rising sun against the saw-toothed skyline of a distant mountain range to fix the solstices, the equinoxes, and the turning of the agricultural year. It is the oldest known purpose-built astronomical observatory in China — and, by the dating of its construction, an older sky-watching monument than Stonehenge's famous stone circle. Part of the vast Taosi archaeological site — once the largest walled town in prehistoric China and, tradition holds, the capital of the legendary Emperor Yao — the observatory turns a flat wheat field into a window onto humanity's earliest attempt to measure time from the sky.