Qin Shi Huang

CHANGSHA, April 30 ( tasteallchina ) -- A 2002 archaeological discovery brought Liye, then an obscure small town, into the spotlight, due to unearthed bamboo and wooden slips that reveal details of life during the era of Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Liye belongs to Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. The prefecture, located in the westernmost part of central China's Hunan Province, is considered a remote place where four provinces converge. Even traveling via the expressway from Changsha, the provincial capital, takes over five hours. During the 2002 emergency archaeological excavation conducted in conjunction with the construction of a hydropower station, over 36,000 Qin Dynasty (221 BC-207 BC) slips, containing more than 200,000 characters, were unearthed from an ancient well. These are the administrative documents of Qianling County in the previously unrecorded Dongting Prefecture, spanning from the year before the nation's unification to the year before the fall of the Qin Dynasty. Long Jingsha, a veteran archaeologist and the lead excavator of the well, said he had been searching for the ancient city site in this area since the nearby discovery of tombs and accompanying artifacts from the Warring States period (475 BC-221 BC) in the 1980s. When the upper…