Xianghu Lake

About this audio guide

This guide to Xianghu Lake in Hangzhou starts at a village brick factory in the early 1970s, where clay diggers hit waterlogged wood that the factory kept quarrying for years before archaeologists finally arrived in 1990. What they pulled from the mud over three salvage seasons was a dugout canoe hollowed from a single pine log, alongside two unused paddles, whetstones and stone adzes, and scorch marks from the burning used to hollow it. You'll hear how radiocarbon dating placed the find among the oldest boats anywhere on earth, and what the same mud preserved beside it about the people who worked there. Walk the lakeside path and that unfinished workshop still sits somewhere beneath the reeds.