Unmasking China's Sanxingdui Ruins

The Sanxingdui Ruins is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, not only in China but all over the world. It was hailed as “The ninth wonder of the World”. Yet much about the historical site remains a mystery.

Behind the strange bronze masks is one of the origins of Chinese civilization. They were all unearthed from the Sanxingdui Ruins, located in Guanghan City of southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

It all began when a farmer came across jadewares while digging a ditch in the spring of 1929. This opened the door to an unknown culture between 3,000 to 5,000 years old.

In 1986, Archaeologists found two large-scale sacrificial pits dating from the Shang Dynasty some 3,000 years ago. Thousands of rare treasures were dug out. This made a quite a stir. It was hailed as “the ninth wonder of the World”. Experts dug out large numbers of strange bronze images and animals from the ruins. None of them are marked with characters.

To this day, discoveries at the Sanxingdui site continue to be an enigma. Still, no texts have been unearthed and no historical records of the Sanxingdui culture have been found in the annals of nearby areas, casting a cloud of mystery over the entire site. The culture that produced the artefacts continues to mystify archaeologists.