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The enigmatic art of Sanxingdui: bronze trees and masks evoke the spirit worlds of a lost civilization in China
Natural History, Nov, 2001 by Jay Xu
The Red Basin, which falls mostly within southwestern China's Sichuan Province, is an isolated land of plenty. Since antiquity, its fertile soil, mild weather, and abundant water from tributaries of the Yangtze River have made the area rich in vegetation and game and hospitable to human settlement. Yet the basin is surrounded by mountains and high plateaus. "The road to Shu is harder than the road ascending to the blue sky," the eighth-century A.D. poet Li Bo famously said, describing the journey there from the north (Shu was then the common name for the region, now known in China as the Sichuan Pendi). Even today, despite highways and railroads, land travel to and from the basin is not always easy.
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When I first visited the Red Basin in 1988--as a student of early China and a young assistant curator then working in the Shanghai Museum--I, too, traveled there from the north. The train ride was sometimes excruciatingly slow; on occasion the train all but ground to a halt as it climbed up a mountain. In places the tracks were laid on narrow paths hewn along precipitous slopes that overlooked river torrents below. Tunnel often followed upon tunnel. In earlier times, the challenging topography was a barrier to contact with other regions, especially the middle Yellow River Valley, 600 miles to the northeast, home to China's first two historic dynasties, the Shang (ca. 1500-1050 B.C.) and the Zhou (ca. 1050-221 B.C.). The period of the Shang and Zhou dynasties largely defines what archaeologists call the Chinese Bronze Age (ca. 2000-300 B.C.). These two powerful societies cultivated such crops as millet, rice, and wheat; established large cities; practiced warfare; and manufactured jade implements and bronze vessels used in making offerings to ancestors. The Shang also developed writing, which the Zhou refined and made more extensive use of, but the records they left behind barely mention Sichuan. Among the surviving examples are inscriptions incised on "oracle bones" (the shoulder blades of cattle and the bottom shells of turtles, used in divination) and dedications to deceased ancestors, impressed on bronze vessels.
The early people of the Red Basin left no written record of their own, further shrouding the region in obscurity and creating a common perception that it was a cultural backwater for most of the Bronze Age. In the last century, however, mainly the past few decades, this impression has gradually been changing, thanks mainly to findings at an archaeological site called Sanxingdui. Located in the Chengdu Plain on the western edge of the Red Basin, the site is surrounded by lush but rather nondescript farmland, far from the bustle of modern life. On the April day when I first saw the site, the yellow rape flowers were in full bloom, and the place made me feel vibrant and sleepy at the same time. Little did I know that the striking objects that had been unearthed there would become a major focus of my professional life.
Hints that the locale was important in the past had surfaced as early as 1929, when a local farmer found a pit containing several hundred jade and stone artifacts. An archaeological field survey in 1951 revealed that such ancient cultural remains were distributed over a considerable area. Between 1980 and 1985, researchers unearthed jade implements, a pottery kiln, and extensive house foundations, indicating that a settlement of substantial size existed there from about 2500 to 1000 B.C.
Beginning in 1985, archaeologists uncovered remnants of what seemed to be the boundaries of a city--pounded earthen walls from 20 to 30 feet high, 130 feet thick at the base, and narrowing to 60 feet at the top. These had been constructed starting in about 2000 B.C. Evidently the city once had at least three walls--on the east, south, and west sides--surrounding an area of at least one and a half square miles, huge for the time. Some archaeologists think that a wall once also existed on the north side but that it was washed away after the settlement was abandoned.
While such formidable walls may suggest a defensive purpose, functional weapons are conspicuously absent at Sanxingdui (by contrast, the weapons found at the Bronze Age sites in northern China testify to the Shang and Zhou concern with military defense). With their gently sloping sides, Sanxingdui's walls may instead have been dikes for flood control. Among the cultural deposits found near the walls (which contained pottery fragments and other broken artifacts) are layers of blackish silt: possible deposits from floods.
Investigations both inside and outside the city walls have revealed the foundations of a number of buildings. The largest--a 2,000-square-foot complex with several rooms--might have served as a gathering place and ritual center. Elsewhere the remains of workshops and kilns suggest a large population requiring the services of specialized artisans. At its height, in about 1200 B.C., the entire settlement covered almost five square miles.
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