Archaeological Finds May Rewrite Early Chinese History 6,500-Year-Old Artifacts On Display At British Museum

Relics of a Chinese kingdom that vanished 3,000 years ago and had been known to exist only from a poem have gone on display at the British Museum.

Officials from Beijing say the artifacts are the most remarkable finds in a decade of archaeological excavation in China. Some relics are so mysterious that experts will be arguing about them for years to come.

Centerpieces of the show include a bronze male figure more than 7 feet tall; bronze heads; a bronze mask with bulbous eyes and huge ears; bronze vessels; and fragments of bronze trees with birds perching in them.

The exhibit, “Mysteries of Ancient China: New Discoveries from the Early Dynasties,” opened Friday and continues through Jan. 5. It will go to Denmark and then back to the various Chinese museums that hold the relics.

The finds were dug up at Sanxingdui in Guanghan county, Sichuan province, from pits that also held tusks of elephants.

“These finds could be the start of rewriting our earliest history,” Chen Lie, archaeologist and senior curator of the China Cultural Relics Promotion Center in Beijing, said at a preview of the exhibition.

“It used to be thought that Chinese civilization developed in the valleys of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers but the Guanghan finds prove there were other tribal groups developing at the same level elsewhere.”

The larger-than-life bronze shows great technical skill and suggests it was made by an organized society with a long history, Chen said.

The kingdom disappeared from history and its existence was known only from an early Tang dynasty poem by Li Bai about 1,700 years later, he said.

The decoration on the bronze vessels is similar to that of China’s first great Bronze Age dynasty, the Shang, which flourished for about 500 years before 1000 B.C.

The exhibition begins with pottery and jade finds of the neolithic period starting about 4500 B.C. and continues through the Shang, Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties, ending in 220.

There are large stone carvings, necklaces, pieces of silk more than 2,000 years old, bronze bells, hair ornaments, and texts burned into the shoulder blade of an ox and the breastplate of a turtle.

A jade burial suit designed to aid the immortality of Prince Liu Sheng, who died in 113 B.C., is also on display. It consists of 2,498 small jade plaques.