China has often bragged of having 5,000 years of history, but now it says it has the evidence to back that boast up.

An investigation into the origin and early development of Chinese civilization conducted by top Chinese archaeologists over a period of 15 years has discovered evidence of large cities with signs of social stratification that existed in China some five millennia ago, China’s official Xinhua news agency announced yesterday under the headline “5,000-year-long Chinese civilization verified.”

“These societies were most likely to have had the form of a state,” said Wang Wei, one of the researchers who worked on the project. “So we believe that the region where these states were located had entered the phase of primary civilization.”

The research team said that around 5,800 years ago signs of civilization had started to emerge in various regions of China (including on the Yellow River, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and the West Liao River in northeast China). 500 years later, these regions began to “embrace civilization” for the first time.

While “5,000 years of Chinese history” is a claim that has often been trumpeted by Chinese officials and state media, it has been viewed with more than a bit of skepticism by many experts for relying on legends and mythological figures like the Yellow Emperor, rather than actual historical/archaeological evidence.

In recent years, the claim has become a central part of propaganda efforts, portraying the Middle Kingdom as uniquely old among the world’s civilizations and therefore liable to working at a different pace than the rest of the world in areas such as democratic reforms.

In order to strengthen the case for this important 5,000-year-old nationalist narrative, a “comprehensive investigation” was formally launched back in 2001 into early Chinese civilization and culture led by the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the School of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University, with almost 70 Chinese universities and institutes contributing help.

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