Bohai State Site (Shangjing Ruins)

The Bohai State ruins at Ning'an, about 40 kilometres south of Mudanjiang city, preserve what remains of Shangjing — the Upper Capital of the Bohai Kingdom, which dominated northeast Asia from the 7th to the 10th century CE. The Bohai were Tungusic people who built a sophisticated state modelled partly on Tang dynasty China, controlling trade routes that connected the Chinese interior with Korea, Japan, and the steppe civilisations to the north. The capital was a proper planned city with palaces, grid streets, and a population in the tens of thousands.

The Khitan destroyed Shangjing in 926 CE and the site gradually disappeared under farmland. Archaeological excavations have revealed the foundations of palace complexes, city walls, and Buddhist temples. The on-site museum is one of the better provincial archaeology museums in northeast China — it puts the Bohai Kingdom in proper regional context and displays artefacts that illustrate a level of material culture that surprises most visitors who have never heard of this kingdom. The site itself, with its grassy mound foundations and explanatory markers, rewards a couple of hours.

things to do sight museum
A story
The Bohai Kingdom controlled much of northeast Asia from its capital near present-day Ning'an for nearly three centuries, connecting China, Korea, and Japan in a trade and cultural network that scholarship is only recently recovering. When the Khitan destroyed Shangjing in 926 CE, they erased a sophisticated state so completely that it was largely forgotten for a thousand years.