Sanxingdui

Sanxingdui was found by accident in the Sichuan countryside and has produced objects that fit nothing else known from Bronze Age China: bronze heads with sharp angular features and protruding eyes, a life-size standing figure with enormous ringed hands, hammered gold masks, and a bronze tree several metres high hung with birds. They came out of pits where they had been broken, burnt and buried, alongside elephant tusks and jade. The culture that made them left no readable writing, so interpretation stays open. A large modern museum displays the finds, with the trenches from more recent excavation visible in a separate hall.

History

In 1927 a farmer dredging an irrigation ditch here turned up a hoard of jade, the first sign of an ancient culture, and in 1986 the great pits were found, with objects radiocarbon-dated to the 12th and 11th centuries BC. Digs showed a walled city founded around 1600 BC, its walls 40 metres thick at the base enclosing 3.6 square kilometres on the Yazi River, comparable to the Shang city at Zhengzhou; many archaeologists link the culture to the ancient kingdom of Shu, whose legendary founder Cancong was said to have protruding eyes like the bronze masks, and the site is on UNESCO's tentative list (Wikipedia, Sanxingdui).

The main sights

• The bronze masks - angular faces with protruding cylindrical eyes and wide flat ears.
• The standing figure - a tall bronze man on a plinth with outsized ringed hands.
• The bronze tree - a branching sacred tree several metres high, hung with birds and ornaments.
• The gold foil pieces - a hammered mask and a gold sheathed staff from the same pits.

When to go

Any time outside the wettest summer weeks; the museum is indoors and air conditioned, which makes it a good rainy day option from Chengdu. Weekday mornings are quietest. Tickets are timed and sell out at weekends and during holidays, so book online a day or two ahead rather than turning up at the gate.

Good to know

The archaeological ground itself is a field with almost nothing to see; everything is in the museum. Lighting is dramatic and low, which suits the objects and frustrates photography. Crowds around the star pieces are dense and there is a lot of queuing to get near the glass. English labels cover the highlights and not much more.

Nearby

The Jinsha site museum in Chengdu holds related finds from the same region.

Key facts