Sanxingdui: The Mysterious Bronze Masks of Ancient Sichuan

Sanxingdui is a Bronze Age site near Guanghan in Sichuan province, south-west China, famous for giant bronze masks with protruding eyes, life-size bronze heads, a 2.6-metre standing figure and towering bronze trees. Most of these objects were buried in pits around 1200–1000 BC, at the same time as the late Shang dynasty in the north, but their style is unlike anything else in China. The discovery of the first two pits in 1986, and six more in 2019–2022, revealed a powerful and previously unknown civilisation.

A civilisation in the Sichuan Basin

The Sichuan Basin is a fertile lowland ringed by mountains, separated from the Yellow River valley by the Qinling range. People lived at Sanxingdui from about 2800 BC, in the late Neolithic Baodun period. During the second millennium BC the settlement grew into a walled city of about 3.5 square kilometres, with rammed-earth walls up to about 40 metres wide at the base, enclosing palaces, workshops and residential areas.

Later Chinese texts describe an ancient kingdom of Shu in this region. The Huayang guo zhi (Chronicles of Huayang), compiled by Chang Qu in the 4th century AD, names legendary early rulers including Cancong, whose eyes were said to protrude. Many scholars link Sanxingdui with early Shu, but because no deciphered writing has been found there, the people’s own name for their state is unknown.

Discovery and the 1986 pits

In 1929 a farmer named Yan Daocheng and his family found a cache of jade and stone objects while digging a ditch near their home. The finds came to the attention of David Crockett Graham, an American missionary and curator of the museum of West China Union University in Chengdu, who carried out a small excavation in 1934 with the archaeologist Lin Mingjun.

Systematic work began in the 1980s. In July 1986 brick-factory workers digging for clay struck the first of two pits, and a second was found about a month later, a short distance away. The excavations were directed by Chen De’an and Chen Xiandan of the Sichuan provincial archaeology institute. The pits were rectangular and packed with layers of objects, many of them deliberately broken and burnt before burial.

What the pits contained

Pit 2 held the most spectacular pieces. They include a bronze standing figure about 2.6 metres tall including its base, barefoot, wearing layered robes and holding its hands in a ring as if gripping an object now lost. There were dozens of life-size bronze heads, some covered with thin gold foil masks, and large bronze masks. The largest mask is about 1.38 metres wide, with cylindrical eyes projecting from the face and huge flaring ears.

The excavators also found bronze trees with birds perched on their branches. The largest, restored from fragments, stands almost 4 metres high, and many scholars connect it with myths of sacred trees and sun-birds found in later Chinese literature. Pit 1 contained a gold-covered staff about 1.4 metres long, decorated with fish, birds, arrows and human heads, often interpreted as a symbol of royal or priestly power.

What these images represent is still debated. The standing figure is usually interpreted as a king, a priest or a priest-king leading a ritual. The heads, which vary in hairstyle and headgear, may stand for ancestors, deities or the leaders of different groups within the society. Many were probably once fitted onto wooden or clay bodies that have since decayed, and the holes on some masks suggest they were attached to buildings, poles or larger statues.

Alongside the bronzes were jade blades and discs, gold leaf, and dozens of elephant tusks. Elephants lived in parts of southern China in the Bronze Age, and the tusks were evidently valuable ritual offerings.

The new excavations of 2019–2022

Between late 2019 and 2022 archaeologists found six more pits, numbered 3 to 8, close to the first two. Working under climate-controlled shelters with modern equipment, the team recovered more than 10,000 objects, including fragments. In March 2021 the finds were announced to the public and attracted great attention in China. The excavation was a joint project of the Sichuan provincial institute and several universities, and it used methods rarely applied on this scale before, including laboratory analysis on site, micro-excavation of fragile pieces and detailed digital recording of every layer. Textile traces on some objects showed that silk had been present, which suggests that silk was used in rituals in the region at this early date.

New discoveries included a fragment of a large gold mask, more bronze heads with gold foil, an ornate bronze altar, and strange composite figures. In 2022 researchers showed that pieces from different pits fitted together into a single sculpture, a figure with a snake-like body supporting a vessel on its head, suggesting that the pits had been filled at the same time or from the same broken collection. Radiocarbon dates published in 2022 placed most of the pits at about 1200–1000 BC.

Connections with the wider world

Sanxingdui was not isolated. Its jade blades, called zhang, follow a form that spread from the Yellow River region and ultimately from Erlitou. Large bronze wine vessels of the zun and lei types found in the pits are close to vessels of the Shang dynasty and the middle Yangtze region. Earlier jades, including the square-tubed cong, echo forms developed by Neolithic cultures such as Liangzhu.

Yet the human figures, heads and masks have no parallels in the Shang heartland around Anyang, where human images are rare. The people of Sanxingdui adopted Shang bronze-casting techniques but used them to express their own religion. Studies of the metal suggest that some ores came from distant sources, showing wide trade networks. Thousands of cowrie shells in the pits, which came from warm coastal waters, point the same way.

The casting itself was highly skilled. The largest pieces were made in many separate sections and then joined with additional castings or rivets, a method that allowed the craftsmen to produce objects far taller than a single mould would permit. Some parts were cast separately from different alloys, and lead isotope studies are being used to trace where the raw materials came from.

Why were the objects buried?

The most widely held view is that the pits were ritual burials. The objects were broken, burnt and carefully arranged in layers, which suggests a ceremony rather than a hasty hoard. Some scholars think the pits record a sacrifice to gods or ancestors; others suggest the destruction of a temple’s contents after a change of rulers or religion.

The city’s end is equally debated. Proposed causes include flooding, an earthquake, a shift in the course of the nearby rivers or a political move. Whatever the reason, the centre of the culture moved around 1000 BC to Jinsha, in what is now western Chengdu, where a site discovered in 2001 has yielded gold, jade and ivory in a style clearly descended from Sanxingdui. Jinsha’s best-known object, a thin gold foil disc showing four birds circling a sun, became the official emblem of Chinese cultural heritage in 2005.

The later history of the region is better documented. A kingdom called Shu existed in the Sichuan Basin until 316 BC, when it was conquered by the state of Qin, which later unified China. How directly that kingdom descended from the people of Sanxingdui is uncertain, but many scholars see a continuous regional tradition.

Myths and facts

Sanxingdui is often called “mysterious”, and some online claims suggest the bronzes were made by aliens or by visitors from distant continents. There is no evidence for this. The bronzes were cast in clay piece-moulds, like other Chinese bronzes, by local craftsmen whose workshops and tools are being studied by archaeologists.

Another common claim is that Sanxingdui had no writing. It is true that no deciphered texts have been found, but a few symbols on objects have been noted, and their meaning is unknown. A further misconception is that the pits are tombs; no human burials were found in them.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 2800 BC: First settlement at Sanxingdui in the late Neolithic period.
• c. 1700–1100 BC: The walled city flourishes as a regional centre.
• c. 1200–1000 BC: Most of the sacrificial pits are filled.
• c. 1000 BC: The cultural centre shifts to Jinsha in Chengdu.
• 1929: A local farmer finds a cache of jades.
• 1934: David Crockett Graham and Lin Mingjun carry out the first excavation.
• 1986, July–August: Pits 1 and 2 are discovered.
• 1997: The Sanxingdui Museum opens.
• 2019–2022: Six new pits are found and excavated.
• 2023: A large new museum building opens at Guanghan.

Why it matters

Sanxingdui shows that Bronze Age China was not a single culture centred on the Yellow River but a network of regional civilisations with their own beliefs and art. Its bronzes are among the most striking works of the ancient world, and the ongoing research continues to change how historians understand early China.