Sanxingdui Museum
Bronze Age treasury of shattered ritual masks and gold, unearthed from pits of a vanished kingdom with no name in written history.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Sanxingdui Museum near Chengdu opens with a question: how does a whole civilization vanish leaving no name, no writing and no bodies? It follows the 1986 discovery of a brickyard pit packed with bronze, gold and elephant tusks, all deliberately smashed before burial, and the almond-eyed heads, towering bronze face and gold mask that came out of it. Historians now call its makers the Shu, a kingdom that thrived here roughly three thousand years ago, with no script anywhere to say who they were.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Jinsha Site Museum （North Gate）
Bronze Age riverside altar site where a golden sun and bird ornament, ivory tusks and jade cong were unearthed by chance.
Wangcongci
Twin earthen tomb mounds honoring two legendary Shu kings, one a farmer, one a flood-taming engineer.
四川大学博物馆
University museum of archaeology, ethnography and natural history, with roughly eighty thousand catalogued artifacts.
Ming King Shu Tomb Museum
Ming-dynasty underground palace tomb of a princely dynasty, its coffin chamber carved with lotus motifs and Tibetan script.
Chengdu Museum
Han dynasty stone reliefs of feasts, wine cups, and games line galleries spanning the Neolithic era to the twentieth century.
Chengdu Sichuan Tapestry Woven and Embroidered Museum
Reconstructed Han-dynasty drawloom where two weavers still coax silk into intricate brocade by hand.