On the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of China's Institute of Archaeology, the author looks back to its origins, and recalls a short period, now almost forgotten, of dynamic and fruitful collaboration with the archaeologists of Soviet Russia. Soviet intellectual aims in the 1950s had a profound and lasting influence on the development of Chinese archaeology, including the design of its institutions, its theoretical basis, its research agenda and its field methods. The new emphasis on ancient life beyond the elite and the study of social and economic process seems to pre-echo some of the themes of Anglo-American processual archaeology that was to follow a decade later.