Niuheliang is not a single site but a vast ritual landscape scattered across hilltops spanning 50 square kilometers, at elevations between 550 and 680 meters above sea level. Dating to roughly 3500-3000 BCE, it served as a burial and sacrificial center during the late Hongshan period. Remarkably, no residential settlements have been found here. People came to Niuheliang to bury their dead, to worship, and to perform rituals -- then they left. The site's north-south axis connects its temple complex with the central peak of the Zhushan Mountains, known as Pig Mountain, suggesting the entire landscape was organized according to cosmological principles that remain only partly understood.

The most striking discovery is the subterranean ritual complex that Chinese archaeologists named the Goddess Temple. Built on a ridge and decorated with painted walls, it sits on a loam platform alongside an altar and cairn complex covering roughly five square kilometers. Inside, excavators found the jade-eyed clay head that gave the temple its name, along with pig dragons -- curled jade figures combining porcine and serpentine features -- and enormous nude figurines structured internally with wood and straw. Six groups of stone cairns were found south and west of the temple, their graves yielding jade artifacts as the primary burial goods, though most had been looted long before modern archaeologists arrived.

Archaeologist Guo Dashun, who led the excavation, identified two distinct animals in the jade carvings: boars, with narrow eyes and flat snouts, and bears, with round eyes and short perky ears. He found similar symbolism at the nearby Xiaoheyan site, and noted that bear worship was widespread across Northeast Asia, practiced by the Ainu in northern Japan and various Siberian peoples. This connection places Niuheliang within a cultural sphere far broader than the boundaries of any single civilization, hinting at shared spiritual traditions that stretched across the forests and grasslands of the northern Pacific Rim thousands of years before recorded history.

A year after the temple complex was identified, researchers realized that a nearby hill called Zhuanshanzi was not entirely natural. Beneath its slopes lay a pyramidal structure built with earth and imported stone, more elaborate than the surrounding cairns. During the Han Dynasty, this ancient monument was incorporated into a section of the Great Wall, disguising it further. The pyramid's existence -- along with the temples, cairns, and platforms surrounding it -- demonstrates that the essential elements of Chinese ancestor worship were already present at Niuheliang five thousand years before the Ming emperors built their famous tombs. What emerged here in the hills of Liaoning was not primitive but precocious: a society sophisticated enough to build monuments that later civilizations would unknowingly echo.