Name: Sanxingdui Museum 三星堆
Address: 广汉市南兴镇, Guanghan, Sichuan, 618300, China
Telephone: 85500349

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Sanxingdui Museum 三星堆博物馆

Sanxingdui is one of the Southwest’s coolest recent discoveries, showcasing a major Bronze Age dig site in modern Guanghan, just 40 kilometers from Chengdu. It has helped us understand a lot more about how people would have lived back then – displaying a rich collection from this lost civilization, including 1,000 artifacts featuring abundant bronze wares – like the Bronze green/gold alien-like mask, that has become very famous after its discovery in the last few years.

The museum lies in a quiet setting among the hill in Guanghan, but it is thought that several thousand years ago, these same hills were part of the city wall that surrounded a Bronze Age city. The discovery at Sanxingdui challenges the traditional narrative of Chinese civilization spreading from the central plain of the Yellow River, and Chinese archaeologists have begun to speak of “multiple centers of innovation jointly ancestral to Chinese civilization.

The new museum (measuring five times the size of the old) became the largest single museum building in Southwest China when is was completed at the end of 2023. Yay!