Treasures Froichuan

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2001 by Mary Hirsch

Surrounded by a barrier of high mountains and plateaus, the Sichuan Basin of southwestern China was long considered a cultural backwater that developed only after travel to and from China's central region became easier.

So it was all the more exciting and confounding when, in 1986, brickyard workers digging for clay in Sanxingdui, in western Sichuan, discovered several ancient jade objects. Archaeologists working nearby rushed to the scene and eventually exposed a rectangular pit thirteen feet long containing more than four hundred artifacts dating to the end of the thirteenth century B.C. They included elephant tusks, bronze heads and masks, large rings, tools, stone and jade objects, pottery vessels, and a few gold objects. A second pit, a few decades later in date, was excavated thirty yards away a month later. It yielded a cache of 1,300 objects far richer than those in the first pit.

In the years since these remarkable discoveries, cultural historians have struggled to make sense of the objects unearthed in Sanxingdui. The techniques for producing the enormous bronze objects and the ritualistic way in which they were broken and burned before burial indicate a highly developed Bronze Age civilization previously unknown and unrecorded in texts. The realization that in 1200 B.C. artisans in the fortified city of Sanxingdui were producing their own distinctive bronzes has dictated a revision of Chinese history. [1]

Historians have long been aware that intricately cast bronzes were created in central China as early as the sixteenth century B.C. Robert W Bagley, a professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University, has written:

To a far greater extent than in other ancient civilizations, the metal industry in China is a revealing index of cultural development...In fact, large-scale metallurgy supplies a workable criterion for identifying the earliest civilized societies in China. [2]

Partly due to the huge quantity of bronze objects previously excavated in the central plains region near the Yellow and Wei Rivers, historians have always considered that area to be the cradle of China's venerable civilization, with far-flung regions only flourishing under the Shang dynasty (c. 1500-1050 B.C.) centered there. Sichuan was thought to be a late bloomer, primarily because of its forbidding geography. In fact, in the eighth century A.D. the famous Tang dynasty poet Li Bo (also known as Li Bai and Li Po; 701-762) wrote of the region (referred to as Shu):

Terrifying road, inaccessible mountain peaks lie ahead,/Where one sees only dismal birds howling in ancient woods.../The mad to Shu is hard, harder than climbing to the heavens. [3]

Actually the fertile Chengdu Plain in the Sichuan Basin nourished ancient cultures dating to Neolithic times, some five thousand years ago. According to a popular Chinese saying, the Chengdu Plain is "the land of heaven," a phrase that describes both the region's fertility and its inaccessibility within its ring of mountains. A network of rivers laces the rich alluvial land, including the Yangzi River, which was the most likely early trade route to the world beyond Sichuan. Gold found in the Sanzingdui pits indicates access to a gold-bearing region very likely to the south. Recently unearthed ritual vessels demonstrate the influence of other areas. Yet even though travel to and from Sichuan certainly took place in or before the thirteenth century B.C., the region developed in relative isolation, as is documented by the Bronze Age works found in the Sanxingdui pits, which have a distinctive sculptural style not seen elsewhere in China during the period.

The artifacts in the two pits that brickyard workers discovered in Sanxingdui contain evidence of rituals vastly different from those practiced elsewhere in China at the time. There is no evidence of fire within the pits, but the jade and bronze artifacts clearly show that they were burned and broken before being placed, or thrown into the pits. The curator and organizer of the exhibition noted at the end of this article, Jay Xu, suggests that burning and breaking these man-made objects prior to burial served to "kill" them to facilitate their passage from this world to a supernatural realm. While Shang dynasty kings in central China specified sets of elaborate bronze vessels for their rituals to the ancestors and sacrificed animals and humans as part of the burial practices, human bones have not been found in the Sanxingdui pits, indicating that tombs or burial sites have yet to be located for the Sanxingdui civilization.

Instead of sacrificing humans, the people of Sichuan may have offered bronze sculptures of humanlike heads to the deities. Several of the heads are embellished with gold masks. No other sculptural replicas of humans from this period have been found in China While the bronze heads have a dull green-blue patina now, they were shiny when they were created, making the gold attachments almost redundant at first. This suggests that the heads were used ceremonially from the beginning and were brightened up with gold when the bronze had dulled. The scholars in China and Seattle who recently inspected the heads noted that the method of applying the gold was quite advanced: a piece of thin gold foil was pressed against the bronze face over a layer of lacquer-based adhesive.