Jinsha Site Museum

I Jinsha Site

1. Discovery

Jinsha Site was unearthed in February 2001 in Chengdu in an area spreading across about 5 square kilometers. It was the capital of the ancient Shu state, the center of the ancient civilization center in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River from the 12th century BC to the 7th century BC. The excavation of Jinsha Site marks the first major archaeological discovery in China since its first step into the 21st century, and it also reveals the existence of another historical relic in Sichuan Province following the famous Sanxingdui, wining itself the title of “Top Ten Archaeological Discoveries of 2001”.

2. Relics

Among the important relics unearthed at Jinsha site are large-scale building bases, sacrifice-offering area, general residential sites, large-scale cemeteries, etc. Among the unearthed precious cultural relics are gold, bronze, jade, stone, ivory objects and lacquerware, tens of thousands of pottery pieces, tons of ivory, and thousands of wild boar tusks and antlers. The site might be the only one in the world with the most copious quantity of gold and jade objects and the most bountiful coverage of ivory objects. It is clear now that the main cultural relics of Jinsha Site dates to the period from the late Shang Dynasty to the Western Zhou Dynasty. It was highly possible another political, economic, and cultural center rising on the Chengdu Plain after the decay of Sanxingdui civilization, the capital of ancient Shu state in the same period and one of the most important sites in the pre-Qin period in China.

In early 2001, when the wheel of times heralded the new century, in Jinsha Village Ruins west of Chengdu, a large quantity of precious cultural relics during the Shang and Zhou period were discovered by accident. Among them was an eye-catching piece of circular ornament hammered out with gold sheet. The center of this gold ornament is hallowed out into a vortex with twelve serrated tails, and surrounded by four carved birds flying in an anticlockwise fashion. The artifact will present the vivid pattern of four birds flying around a fireball when set on a red carpet. It embodies the Sun and Immortal Birds in ancient Chinese mythologies and is an invaluable material proof of such old legends.

In remote ages, the sun was definitely the most remarkable thing perceived by ancient people. The sun‘s rising and falling every day, its changing light and shades, overshadowing by the clouds and rains, among many other natural phenomena, were exerting great impacts upon people’s production and living. Therefore, people worshiped, celebrated, and deified the sun, making the sun god the primitive belief for many nations in the world.

The worship of the sun and the sun god is historically shared by many nations around the globe, though in different ways. The ancient Chinese in many regions expressed their understandings of the sun god in the shape of birds, which is distinctive of Chinese characteristics.

The Sun and Immortal Birds Gold Ornament is a combination of the essential idea shared by the ancient world and an appearance unique to pre-Qin China. It is designed in a manner to deliver a rotational sense of motion with outward radiation, as well as to show a balanced sense of rhythm. Its artistic design also represents the conciseness, simplicity and abstraction of the ancient Chinese art, giving a visual effect similar to traditional paper-cutting.