Sanxingdui

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

In 1986 workers near Guanghan in Sichuan broke into a pit filled with thousands of objects of gold, bronze, jade and pottery that had been broken, perhaps ritually, burned and carefully buried, and less than a month later they found a second pit 20 to 30 metres away. Researchers were astonished: the art was in a style completely unknown in the history of China. There were bronze human figures and animal-faced sculptures, masks with eyes that protrude from the face, gold masks and belts, dragons, snakes and birds, and a great many ivory carvings, from a culture of the 12th and 11th centuries BC. Chinese archaeologists link it to the ancient kingdom of Shu, whose legendary founder Cancong was described in a later chronicle as having protruding eyes, and those masks may show him. The city had walls, canals 20 to 25 metres wide and a central axis along which the pits lay; a related site at Jinsha, 40 kilometres away, may be where the capital moved. The finds are in the Sanxingdui Museum beside the site.