San Xing Dui: Mysterious Museum

#museums In 1929, a Chinese peasant from the town of Sanxingdui in Guanghan County, Sichuan Province, was digging a well and came across jade products. Most of them have gone to private collections, but this area has attracted the attention of archaeologists who have repeatedly excavated there. The first researchers were the Englishman Donningthorne and the American Graham, who headed the museum at West China University in the 1930s. Snce the 1950s, excavations have been resumed. However, for a long time no major finds appeared, until a sensational event occurred in 1986. This time, too, the laymen were lucky. On July 18, workers at a local brick factory stumbled upon a cache in the ground containing ancient objects made of bronze, jade and ceramics. Archaeologists began an intensive search around, and after less than a month, on August 14, finally, they were lucky. A second cache was found just thirty meters from the first one. The artistic style in which bronze products, ivory and gold objects were made turned out to be completely unknown to connoisseurs of ancient Chinese art. The contents of the caches turned out to be so unusual that from that moment on, the name of the Sanxingdui area was forever inscribed in the history of Chinese archaeology. In total, there were 1,720 items in the Sanxingdui sacrificial pits. Among the bronze items were a full-length statue of a man, a bust, 54 human heads, 20 masks, vessels, bells, figurines of animals and people, a tall bronze tree, small ornaments, a wooden rod sheathed in gold and a structure called an altar. The bronze weapons are represented by axes, peckers and one sword with a length of 28 centimeters. Many findings are the parts of museum expositions, which was built here to represent these mysterious cultural relics. Definitely, must see!