Cantilevered Plankways—A Remarkable feat of Ancient Chinese Engineering

To this day, the Qinling mountains in Shaanxi province, which separate the basin of the Yellow River from that of the Yangzi River, constitute a formidable geographical obstacle to interregional traffic.  Along their almost unimaginably vertical cliffs, cantilevered plankways (zhandao 棧道) were constructed under state auspices since shortly after the middle of the first millennium BC.  The late Joseph Needham called them the “endoskeleton of the Empire.”  Similar thoroughfares were also constructed in mountainous regions elsewhere in China, and they were maintained more or less continuously until the early 20th century.  The lecture will present some of the currently known archaeological remains of these extraordinary achievements of ancient Chinese engineering, and it will attempt to trace the origins of the techniques involved in their construction.

Lothar von Falkenhausen is Distinguished Professor of Chinese Archaeology and Art History at UCLA, where he has taught since 1993.  He is also on the faculty of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, of which he served as Associate Director from 2004 to 2014, and he holds a concurrent part-time appointment as Visiting Professor (formerly Changjiang Chair, 2017-20) at Xibei University in Xi’an (China). Falkenhausen was educated at Bonn, Peking , Kyoto , and Harvard Universities, receiving his PhD in anthropology from Harvard in 1988.  His research mainly concerns the archaeology of Bronze Age China, focusing on large interdisciplinary and historical issues on which archaeological materials can provide significant new information.  His major books are Suspended Music: Chime Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China (1993) and the award-winning Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000-250 BC): The Archaeological Evidence (2006; also published in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese translations).  A new monograph on the economic archaeology of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age China is in press.  Falkenhausen was co-Principal Investigator of an international archaeological project on ancient salt production in the Yangzi River basin (1999-2004) and has been serving as Instructor of Record of the International Archaeological Field School at Yangguanzhai (2010-).  He has served on the Scientific Council of the French School of Far Eastern Studies (2005-2011) and on the US President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee (2012-2020). He is a Full Member of the German Archaeological Institute, an Honorary Research Fellow of the Shaanxi Archaeological Academy, an Honorary Professor of Zhejiang University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, and a Corresponding Member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Institute de France).