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WHEN the mysterious people of China’s Sanxingdui packed up and moved away 3,000 years ago, they left behind no written language and no indication of who they were, where they were going or why.
What they did leave was a gigantic cache of intricately fabricated, larger-than-life bronze art works — each created at a time during which historians doubted technology even existed to make a bronze on such a grand scale.
They also left several dozen elephant tusks, in an area where elephants were not believed to have been introduced yet.
Now the objects themselves are moving, just as their creators did three millennia ago, and will go on display today at southern California’s Bowers Museum, the first stop on a rare U.S. tour.
“China’s Lost Civilization: The Mystery of Sanxingdui” includes more than 100 ancient pieces, some never seen outside China. The exhibit will remain at the Bowers until March 15, after which they will move to the Museum of Natural Science in Houston, Texas.
That’s a mystery that’s been bugging archaeologists since Chinese bricklayers stumbled across the treasures in 1986, said Suzanne Cahill, an authority on ancient Chinese civilizations and the exhibition’s curator.
Although there is evidence of bronze works at that time in China’s Central Plain, some 1,200 km away, none come close to being this elaborate.
The Chinese first discovered they were on to something special in 1926 when a farmer uncovered a few relics in Sanxingdui, on the outskirts of Chengdu , capital of Sichuan Province. But it wasn’t until 1986 when workers began pulling the gigantic head, now named Mask with Protruding Eyes, out of the ground, along with the really tall man who has since been nicknamed “Standing Figure.” Fifteen years later, more relics were found in another pit 40 km away in Jinsha. Scholars suspect they were made by the same people, who also mysteriously abandoned that area.
Little has been learned about these people, other than they vanished abruptly about 350 years after making the bronzes. (SD-Agencies)
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