Sanxingdui

Bronze faces with protruding eyes, from an art nobody knew existed

In 1927 a farmer dredging an irrigation ditch near Guanghan in Sichuan turned up a stash of jade, and much of it drifted into private collections. The missionary Vyvyan Donnithorne heard of it in 1931 and brought in a magistrate and the geologist Daniel Sheets Dye of West China Union University, and in 1934 the university museum's director, David Crockett Graham, ran the first dig. The real discovery came by accident in 1986, when local workers broke into a pit packed with gold, bronze, jade and pottery that had been broken, burned and carefully buried. A second pit, holding about 800 objects, turned up on 14 August, only 20 to 30 m away. Researchers were astonished: the style was unknown anywhere in the history of Chinese art.

Sanxingdui, Three Star Mound, was a walled city founded around 1600 BC on the Yazi River. Its earthen walls ran 40 m thick at the base and 8 to 10 m high around 3.6 square km, ringed by canals 20 to 25 m wide used for irrigation, boats, defence and flood control. Palaces, workshops and temples were laid out along a central axis, and the pits lay along it on four terraces. The pits themselves date to the 12th and 11th centuries BC, the time of the Shang dynasty to the north, and the bronze style is utterly unlike the Shang's.

The finds include the oldest life-sized standing human statue in the world, a bronze figure 2.6 m tall weighing 180 kg; a bronze tree almost 4 m high hung with birds and flowers, which some read as the Fusang tree of myth; and dozens of great bronze heads and masks with almond eyes, oversized ears and, on some, pupils that jut out from the face. Several heads still carry gold-foil masks, and traces of paint survive, black on the eyes and brows and vermilion on lips and nostrils. The city traded for bronze from Yin and ivory from South Asia.

Chinese archaeologists identify the culture with the ancient kingdom of Shu, which Qin conquered in 316 BC. A Jin-dynasty chronicle says Shu was founded by Cancong, a king with protruding eyes, and the staring masks may show him. The city's end is still argued: there is evidence of a great flood and an earthquake, and an invasion is possible. Jinsha, 40 km away near Chengdu, may be where the capital moved.

Renewed digging between 2020 and 2022 found six more pits, with more than 500 relics announced in 2021 alone, among them a gold mask of about 280 grams. The Sanxingdui Museum opened beside the site in 1997, and the site is on UNESCO's tentative list with Jinsha.