

Bronze Mask with Protruding Eyes

(c.1100 BCE) Sanxingdui Museum.

Introduction Sanxingdui, now seen as an important centre of Shang Dynasty Art (1700-1050 BCE) - notably monumental bronze sculpture - is the site of an ancient Chinese town near the modern city of Guanghanin, in today's western province of Sichuan. Since 1987, archeological excavations have uncovered a wealth of Bronze Age art dating back to the 12th century BCE. The culture responsible for casting this extraordinary hoard of plastic art is now known as the Sanxingdui Culture, and archeologists have associated it with the ancient Chinese kingdom of Shu. The reason why the discovery of Sanxingdui Bronzes is so important to the evolution of Chinese art, is that it contradicts the conventional narrative that the sole cradle of Chinese civilization was the central plain of the Yellow River. Because of Sanxingdui, plus other finds like the Xingan tombs in Jiangxi, historians and archeologists have begun to acknowledge the existence of "multiple sources" of Chinese civilization. History Sanxingdui, a walled city on the banks of the Yazi River, occupying an area of some 3.5 square kilometres, was part of the Sanxingdui Culture, dating to about 1600 BCE, and is situated near Nanxing Township in Chengdu Prefecture, Sichuan. This mysterious Sanxingdui Culture, which spread across western and southern parts of China, was contemporary with the Erlitou culture centred on the eastern province of Henan, and the later part of the Shang Dynasty based at Anyang. What caused its demise remains unclear: likely culprits include natural disasters (evidence of massive flooding has been found), or military conquest by a rival culture. In any event, its somewhat remote geographical position meant that its influence on the evolution of traditional Chinese art - including Chinese pottery as well as bronze sculpture - was unknown until 1986, when labourers stumbled upon a number of sacrificial pits containing thousands of objects made from bronze, jade, gold and ceramic clay.