After that everything changed Fire Country– Sally, Han Empire – Attack.
Han came to power after a brief war with a rival dynasty known as Chu, triggered the collapse of Qin, and spent the wonders of calling Nanyue the state of vassals and sometimes demanding praise. Sometimes the Nanu rulers played together, but came to mind around 111 BC, in the wake of an attempted coup d’etat and a series of assassins. Emperor Han sent an army of 100,000-200,000 soldiers to invade Nanyue under a general named Lu Bode.
The army marched across the country from five directions and converged outside Panyu, the capital of Nanu, in the Pearl River Delta, near the modern city of Guangzhou. The commander of an enterprising company named Yang Pu got the bright idea of burning the city, and it ended badly.
“The fires not only destroyed the city, they also lost control over the surrounding forests,” Wang and colleagues wrote. The cypress trees were burned to the waterline, leaving only submerged stumps.
Brown dots mark known locations in buried forests, while orange diamonds mark those confirmed to be ancient. Two yellow diamonds are the research site of King and his colleagues.
Credit: Wang et al. 2025
After the war, fire and food came
At the time of the invasion, the land around Panyo was mostly marshed and covered in forests with cypress trees. People lived there for thousands of years, growing rice for about two to thousand years. Peat-base charcoal and coworkers’ charcoal pieces reveal that they practice slash and burn farming, but on a small scale, they spin the fields so that the Cypress forest begins to recover after a season or two seasons.
The small burns are not like the massive burning and reworking of the landscape that Forest Fire Yampur has been released or has come after.
The burning cypress tree stumps slowly disappeared under a few metres of peat, but life continued over the buried ancient forest. The Tigers, elephants, rhinoceros and green Peafoul are no longer walking here. Instead, pollen grains from the clay layer above the peat reveal a sudden influx of plants from the grassy Poaceae family, which contains rice, wheat and barley.
