The Erlitou culture is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the middle Yellow River valley in Henan, China, dated to roughly 1900–1500 BCE and centered on a large planned city near modern Luoyang. It was one of the earliest state-level societies in the Central Plains, though earlier candidates such as Liangzhu and Taosi complicate any claim that it was the first. Its monumental palace foundations, enclosed bronze workshops, and early Chinese ritual bronze vessels have been interpreted as evidence of centralized coordination. Whether it corresponds to the Xia, the semi-legendary first dynasty of Chinese tradition, is a genuine and unresolved scholarly question.
In the summer of 1959, a team of archaeologists set out across the Henan countryside to find a dynasty that might never have existed. The old chronicles began Chinese history with the Xia, a royal house that had ruled, they said, before the Shang; yet not one spade of proof had ever been turned. Near a village called Erlitou, the searchers found their city: rammed-earth palaces, a bronze foundry, a tomb holding a dragon of two thousand turquoise stones, all of it nearly four thousand years old. It was unmistakably the seat of an early state. And yet, half a century of digging later, no one can prove whose it was.