Then everything changed when the fire nation – sorry, the Han imperium – raised.
Han came to the power in the aftermath of the collapse of Qin, after a short war with a rival dynasty called Chu, and brought self -satisfied to Nanyue as a vassal state in the next century and occasionally a tribute. Sometimes the rulers of Nanyue played, but it all came to a peak around 111 BC, in the aftermath of an attempted coup and a series of murders. The Han -Keizer sent an army of between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers to invade Nanyue under a general named Lu Bode.
The troops marched over the countryside from five directions and came together outside of Nanyue's capital Panyou, who stood in the Pearl River Delta, near the modern city of Guangzhou. An entrepreneurial business commander called Yang Pu got the smart idea to set fire to the city, and it ended poorly.
“The fire not only destroyed the city, but also got out of the hand of the surrounding forests,” writes Wang and colleagues. The cypresses burned down to the waterline, so that only their immersed stumps were left behind.
The brown dots mark the well -known locations of buried forests, and mark the orange diamonds that confirm that they are old. The two yellow diamonds are the study sites of Wang and colleagues.
Credit: Wang et al. 2025
Fire and rice came after the war
At the time of the invasion, the country around Panyou was usually swamp, forested with cypress trees. People had lived there for thousands of years and rice had been coming for about 2000 years. Bits of charcoal in the Veenlagen who samples Wang and colleagues reveal that they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, but play their fields on a small scale so that the Cypress Bos could recover after a season or two.
The small burns are nothing like the forest fire Yang Pu unleashed, or the massive burning and editing of the landscape that came afterwards.
The stumps of the burnt cypresses slowly disappeared under a few meters, while the buried old forest was, life continued. Tigers, elephants, rhinos and green peerwl no longer walked here. Instead, grains of pollen from the clay layers above the peat reveal a sudden inflow of plants from the Poaceae family, including rice, wheat and barley.
