Artifacts had been turning up in the area since the 1960s, but nobody suspected what lay below. The 1999 discovery revealed walls of pounded earth forming an approximate square, oriented 13 degrees east of north, enclosing an area of 470 hectares. Within those walls, a palace-temple complex occupied 41 hectares. The city's scale was staggering for its period, placing it among the largest Bronze Age urban centers in East Asia. Part of the site lies beneath Anyang's airport, which has limited the scope of excavations and means that a significant portion of this ancient city may never be fully investigated.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Huanbei was occupied for roughly fifty years before being burned to the ground. The destruction was thorough and appears to have been deliberate, though whether it resulted from invasion, civil war, or some form of ritual destruction remains debated. What happened next is perhaps more telling than the fire itself: shortly after Huanbei's destruction, the Shang rulers established a new capital on the southern bank of the Huan River, at the site now known as Yinxu. This sequence suggests that Huanbei was the immediate predecessor of Yinxu, placing it in the "Middle Shang" period and filling a gap in the archaeological record that had puzzled scholars for decades.

Yinxu, the site across the river, is famous as the source of China's earliest written records: oracle bones inscribed with divinations relating to the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty. Huanbei, by contrast, is a city of silence. No inscriptions have been found in its ruins. Whatever its inhabitants knew, whatever their scribes recorded, went up with the flames or was carried to the new capital. The relationship between the two sites is one of destruction and continuity. A dynasty burned one city and built another within sight of the ashes, carrying forward its traditions while starting fresh on the other side of the river.

Since its discovery, Huanbei has been excavated by an international team drawn from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of British Columbia. The collaboration has applied modern archaeological techniques including remote sensing and archaeometric analysis to a site that challenges conventional periodization of the Shang dynasty. The pounded-earth walls, the palace complex, and the evidence of organized urban planning at Huanbei demonstrate that the Shang were capable of building major cities before Yinxu, pushing the origins of Chinese urbanism further back than previously understood.