The Army of the Nation of Fire set fire to the enemy capital. Then things got out of control

2,000 years ago, a battle between two ancient China empires ended in fire – and a kind of tree never recovered from the followed ecological calamity.

The buried roots and stumps of an old forest in southern China are the charred remains of an old war and the fire of a capital city.

The conclusion is of one published last week in Science Advancesin which the investigators dated the stumps by carbon And they measured coal and pollen in the peat layers around them.

It may not be obvious today, but There is an old forest hidden Under the agricultural lands of the River of the Pearls Delta, in southern China. Scattered for 2,000 km²are thick layers of soaked peatnow covered by agriculture.

It is all that remains of what used to be a prosperous ecosystem of humid areas, home Chinese swamp forestsalong with elephants, tigers, crocodiles and tropical birds.

But The peat hides the buried stumps and roots and preserved from cypress trees; some of the largest stumps are almost 2 meters wide, and many have Burning marks at the top.

“These peat layers are known locally as’buried old forest‘, why Many of the buried trees look fresh and most stumps are still standing, ”writes Ning Wangresearcher at the Chinese Academy of Scientists and first author of the article.

This strange forest buried It is the last echo of the Han Army invasion During a war for about 2,100 years.

When the Fire Nation attacked

Wang and colleagues dated by radiocarbon the most external rings of the stumps to find out When the trees had stopped growingand the answer has been about 2,100 years ago – with a margin of error of about 70 years.

Apparently, the cypresses died approximately at the same time in a wide range of swamp, in a kind of ecological calamity. Based on the burns that heal the top of many of the stumps, the forest perished in flames.

By coincidence, The story records an incendiary calamity In the River Delta of Pearls around 111 BC, tells the.

The delta was the home of a old kingdom called Nanyuewho ruled most of what the Chinese provinces in southern Guangdong and Guangxi are now, along with what is now North Vietnam.

Nanyue ascended to power around 204 BCprecisely when the famous Empire Qinwho had united most of China under his domain, began to crumble.

An old qin general, Zhao Tuo, took advantage of chaos To transform an old Qin province into Nanyue’s independent kingdom, which his descendants ruled during the following century. However, everything changed when the Nation of the Fire – rather, the Empire Han –.

The Empire Han ascended following the collapse of the dynastyafter a short war with a rival dynasty called Chu, and passed the following century to refer arrogantly to Nanyue as A VASSAL STATE -and to occasionally ask him tribute.

Sometimes Nanyue’s rulers collaborated, but it all reached a critical point around 111 BC, following a attempted suddenly and a series of murders. Emperor Han sent an army between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers to invade Nanyue under the command of a general called Lu Bode.

As tropas marched through the field from five directionsconverging outside Nanyue’s capital city, Panyou, which was in the River of Pearls, near the modern city of Guangzhou. A bolder company commander, called Yang PU, had the brilliant idea of ​​burning the city – And it’s bad.

“The fire not only destroyed the city, but also came out of control For surrounding forests, ”write Wang and colleagues. The cypresses burned to the waterline, leaving only your stumps submerged behind.

War, Fire and Rice

At the time of the invasion, the earth around Panyou was mainly swamp, wooded with cypresses. People had lived there for thousands of years and cultivated rice about 2,000 years ago.

Pieces of coal in the pefa layers that Wang and colleagues analyzed reveal that the locations practiced cutting and burning agriculturebut on a small scale, rotating your fields so that the cypress forest (Glyptostrobus pensilis) could start recovering after one or two stations.

The small burns are nothing compared to the forest fire that Yang Pu triggered, or with the massive burning and landscape remodeling that followed.

The stumps of the burnt cypress trees disappeared slowly under several meters of peat, while above the old buried forest, Life continued.

Tigers, elephants, rhinos and green paws They no longer walked around. Instead, Clay layers pollen grains Above the peat reveal a sudden influx of grass family plants Poaceaewhich includes rice, wheat and barley.

This pollen, along with thicker coal deposits than usual, suggests that people were burning the remaining trees large scale for make room for more rice fields.

Supported by historical records, Wang and colleagues say that pollen and coal buried in these sediments point to a dramatic increase in the population place and the scale of its agricultural industry.

That was probably a effort to feed the huge invasive army at the beginning, but was followed by what the authors of the study describe as “a government action intended to consolidate the results of victory” – In other words, Move more people to the region and put them to work on Thursdays.

Nearby oceanic sediments reveal that, approximately at the same time, More copper and lead began to be dragged into the sea From the River Delta, suggesting that people were doing copper and coins agricultural tools and using lead in cosmetics and metal articles.

Thus, they conclude the authors of the study, the uncontrolled incendiary attack of the Han Army, followed by the years of burning and agriculture that followed, pushed the Chinese swamp cypress for the threshold of extinction.