Ancient Chinese bronzes recall lost civilization
SANTA ANA, CALIF. — 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.
For whatever reason these objects were made and then discarded, they themselves are moving now, just as their creators did three millenniums ago, and will go on display Sunday at Southern California’s Bowers Museum.
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 Houston’s Museum of Natural Science.
“You look at these figures and they’re really unworldly,” said the museum’s president, Peter Keller, as he stood in the shadow of a 2.5-metre tall statue of a man in bare feet, flowing robe and elaborate headdress.
Keller was waiting to uncrate a 57-kilogram companion piece — a floppy-eared, bug-eyed bronze “mask” about the size of a sofa.
“China is full of mysteries, but to me this is China’s greatest mystery,” Keller said. “Who were these people and where did they go?
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.
“Wow, 1200 BC people are doing stuff like that and we think we’re so technically evolved,” she said.
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 Sichuan province’s capital city of Chengdu.
But it wasn’t until 1986 that the country was awed by a find the Chinese would label one of the great wonders of the world.
That was when workers began pulling the gigantic head, now named Mask with Protruding Eyes, out of the ground.
Fifteen years later, more relics were found in another pit 40 kilometres away in Jinsha.
Little has subsequently been learned about these people, other than they abruptly vanished about 350 years after making the bronzes. “They certainly don’t look Chinese,” Cahill said of the bronze images of people. “They barely even look human.”