The City That Smashed Its Own Gods: The Eight Pits of Sanxingdui

2026-09-05 · Luoghi enigmatici · 7 min di lettura

In the summer of 1986, workers at a brickyard outside the town of Guanghan, on the Chengdu plain in Sichuan, were digging clay. The ground there is soft and yellow and had been dug for years without incident. Then a spade went through into a cavity, and the man holding it found himself looking at a jade blade.

Word reached the provincial archaeologists, who arrived and opened what turned out to be a rectangular pit cut into the earth. What came out of it, and out of a second pit found weeks later a few metres away, did not fit into anything anyone knew about Bronze Age China. There were bronze heads with square jaws and flat noses, some of them wearing gold foil over the face. There were elephant tusks, dozens of them, stacked in layers. There were jades, cowrie shells brought from the sea hundreds of kilometres away, and a standing bronze figure two and a half metres tall on a plinth, its enormous ringed hands held out as if holding something that was no longer there. There was a bronze mask so wide that a modern man cannot span it with both arms, with eyes that project from the face on stalks like the eyepieces of a telescope. And there was a bronze tree, close to four metres of it, with birds on its branches.

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