Shangshan Culture exhibition opens in Kenya

The exhibition 10,000-Year-Old Shangshan Culture: Origin of Rice Farming Light of Illumination opens in Nairobi, Kenya. [Photo/Tide News]

The exhibition 10,000-Year-Old Shangshan Culture: Origin of Rice Farming Light of Illumination opened in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 21.

Organized by the government of Pujiang county in Jinhua, Zhejiang province — where the Shangshan site was discovered — alongside the Shangshan Culture Site Alliance and Jinhua Shangshan Culture Site Management Center, this exhibition marks another step in the China-Africa cultural exchange. Following the archaeological exhibition of Shangshan Culture in Egypt in 2023, Shangshan Culture came to Africa again.

The exhibition features significant discoveries of the Shangshan Culture, dating back approximately 11,000 to 8,500 years. Multimedia displays of ancient pottery fragments, remnants of early rice cultivation systems, and village ruins offer visitors an immersive glimpse into the Neolithic era.

Kenya, as a cradle of East African civilization and one of the birthplaces of humanity, has unearthed human skull fossils dating back roughly 2.5 million years, which is of great significance for the study of early human activities and evolution.

A cultural scholar from Kenya described the exhibition as a trans-temporal-and-spatial dialogue between China's 10,000-year-old farming heritage and Africa's early human history. Wu Yongtao, from Pujiang and a longtime businessman in Kenya, expressed pride in seeing his hometown's culture represented. "I hope more cultural exchanges will deepen the friendship between China and Africa," Wu said.