Then all the things modified when the Fire Nation—sorry, the Han Empire—attacked.
Han rose to energy within the wake of Qin’s collapse, after a brief battle with a rival dynasty known as Chu, and spent the following century smugly referring to Nanyue as a vassal state and sometimes demanding tribute. At instances, the rulers of Nanyue performed alongside, but it surely all got here to a head round 111 BCE, within the wake of an tried coup and a collection of assassinations. The Han Emperor despatched a military of between 100,000 and 200,000 troopers to invade Nanyue underneath a basic named Lu Bode.
The troops marched throughout the countryside from 5 instructions, converging outdoors Nanyue’s capital metropolis of Panyou, which stood within the Pearl River Delta, close to the fashionable metropolis of Guangzhou. An enterprising firm commander named Yang Pu obtained the intense concept to set town on hearth, and it ended badly.
“The hearth not solely destroyed town but in addition ran uncontrolled to the encompassing forests,” write Wang and colleagues. The cypress bushes burned all the way down to the waterline, leaving solely their submerged stumps behind.
The brown dots mark the identified websites of buried forests, and the orange diamonds mark these confirmed to be historic. The 2 yellow diamonds are Wang and colleagues’ examine websites.
Credit score:
Wang et al. 2025
After battle got here hearth and rice
On the time of the invasion, the land round Panyou was largely swamp, forested with cypress bushes. Folks had lived there for hundreds of years, and had been rising rice for about 2,000 years. Bits of charcoal within the peat layers Wang and colleagues sampled reveal that they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, however on a small scale, rotating their fields so the cypress forest may begin to get well after a season or two.
The small burns are nothing just like the forest hearth Yang Pu unleashed, or the huge burning and transforming of the panorama that got here after.
The stumps of the burned cypress bushes slowly disappeared underneath a number of meters of peat, whereas above the buried historic forest, life went on. Tigers, elephants, rhinos, and inexperienced peafowl not walked right here. As a substitute, grains of pollen from the layers of clay above the peat reveal a sudden inflow of vegetation from the grassy Poaceae household, which incorporates rice, wheat, and barley.