Sanxingdui Museum Opens a New Building for Its Bronze Age Finds

The Sanxingdui Museum opened its new building on 27 July 2023 in Guanghan, about 40 kilometres north of Chengdu. With a floor area of 54,400 square metres, the building is about five times the size of the previous museum and gives the site’s Bronze Age finds the space they had lacked.

A civilisation without texts

Sanxingdui is one of the major archaeological discoveries of the 20th century in China. In 1986, workers at a brick factory uncovered two pits filled with bronzes, jades, gold and elephant tusks that had been deliberately broken, burned and buried around 3,000 years ago. The objects looked like nothing found elsewhere in China: bronze heads with angular features and protruding eyes, masks more than a metre wide, a standing figure 2.6 metres tall and a bronze tree nearly four metres high with birds on its branches.

The culture that made them, usually identified with the ancient Shu kingdom, left no writing. From 2019, archaeologists found six more pits beside the first two, and their excavation produced thousands of new objects, including a fragment of a gold mask and bronze altars of great complexity.

The new building

The new museum shows more than 1,500 objects or sets in bronze, jade, gold and pottery across 22,000 square metres of galleries. Nearly 600 are on public display for the first time, and more than 300 come from pits three to eight, the recent excavations. The displays also use 3D projection without glasses to reconstruct the moment of discovery in the pits.

The building stands beside the old museum in the archaeological park. Its three low, sloping volumes covered in earth and grass refer to the three mounds that gave Sanxingdui, “three-star mound”, its name. A conservation centre lets visitors watch restorers at work on objects still being reassembled.

Visiting

Guanghan is under an hour from central Chengdu by car, and the museum is a half-day trip that pairs naturally with a dawn visit to the giant pandas on the same side of the city. Tickets are sold by timed reservation and sell out in holiday periods; book several days ahead. In Chengdu, The Temple House is the most convenient base in the centre.