Editing Chinese architecture (section)

===Neolithic and early antiquity===
{{Further|Yangshao culture#Houses}}
[[File:Jiangzhai settlement model, Yangshao culture, Lintong, Shaanxi.jpg|thumb|300px|left|A model of [[Jiangzhai, Xi'an|Jiangzhai]], a [[Yangshao culture|Yangshao]] village]]

Chinese civilizations and cultures developed in the plains along China's numerous rivers that emptied into [[Bohai Bay|Bohai]] and [[Hangzhou Bay|Hongzhow]] bays. The most prominent of these rivers, the [[Yellow River|Yellow]] and the [[Yangtze]], hosted many villages. The climate was warmer and more humid than today, allowing [[millet]] to be grown in the north and [[rice]] in the south. However, Chinese civilization has no single "origin". Instead, it featured a gradual multinuclear development between 4000 and 2000 BC – from village communities to what [[anthropologist]]s call cultures to states.

Two of the more important cultures were [[Hongshan culture]] (4700–2900 BC) to the north of Bohai Bay in [[Inner Mongolia]] and [[Hebei]] Province and contemporaneous [[Yangshao culture]] (5000–3000 BC) in [[Henan|Henan Province]]. Between the two, and developing later, was [[Longshan culture]] (3000–2000 BC) in the central and lower [[Yellow River]] valley. These combined areas gave rise to thousands of small/proto-states by 3000 BC. Some shared a common ritual center that linked them to a single symbolic order, but others developed more independently. The emergence of [[Defensive wall|walled cities]] during this time is a clear indication that the political landscape was often unstable.<ref name="Ching_p8">{{cite book |last=D. K. Ching |first=Francis |author-link= |date=6 June 2017 |title=A Global History of Architecture, 3rd Edition |url= |location= |publisher=Wiley |page=8 |isbn=978-1118981337}}</ref>

The Hongshan culture of Inner Mongolia (located along the Laoha, Yingjin, and [[Daling River|Daling]] rivers that empty into [[Bohai Bay]]) was scattered over a large area but had a single, common ritual center of at least 14 burial mounds and altars over several ridges. It is dated to around 3500 BC, or possibly earlier. Although no evidence suggests village settlements nearby, its size is much larger than one clan or village could support. In other words, though rituals would have been performed there for the elites, the large area implies that audiences for the ritual would have encompassed all the villages of the Hongshan. As a sacred landscape, the center might have attracted supplicants from even further afield.<ref name="Ching_p8" />