INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
war with a rival dynasty called Chu, and spent the next century smugly referring to Nanyue as a vassal state and occasionally demanding
At times, the rulers of Nanyue played along, but it all came to a head around 111 BCE, in the wake of an attempted coup and a series of
The Han Emperor sent an army of between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers to invade Nanyue under a general named Lu Bode.The troops marched
the modern city of Guangzhou
The cypress trees burned down to the waterline, leaving only their submerged stumps behind.
The brown dots mark the known sites of
buried forests, and the orange diamonds mark those confirmed to be ancient
The two yellow diamonds are Wang and colleagues' study sites.
Credit:
Wang et al
2025
At the time of the invasion, the land around Panyou was mostly swamp, forested with cypress trees
People had lived there for thousands of years, and had been growing rice for about 2,000 years
Bits of charcoal in the peat layers Wang and colleagues sampled reveal that they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, but on a small scale,
rotating their fields so the cypress forest could start to recover after a season or two.The small burns are nothing like the forest fire
Yang Pu unleashed, or the massive burning and reworking of the landscape that came after.The stumps of the burned cypress trees slowly
disappeared under several meters of peat, while above the buried ancient forest, life went on
Tigers, elephants, rhinos, and green peafowl no longer walked here
Instead, grains of pollen from the layers of clay above the peat reveal a sudden influx of plants from the grassy Poaceae family, which
includes rice, wheat, and barley.
