About Jinsha Site Museum

Jinsha Site Museum

The Jinsha Site Museum in Chengdu, Sichuan, is an archaeological site museum built directly over one of the most important discoveries in modern Chinese archaeology. It preserves, studies and displays the Jinsha site, the capital of the ancient Shu kingdom and a centre of civilisation in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. The museum stands in the Qingyang District of Chengdu, at No. 2 Jinsha Site Road, on grounds of some 300,000 square metres between the city's second and third ring roads. Unlike a conventional collecting museum, its purpose is inseparable from the ground beneath it: the buildings shelter an excavation in progress and the objects found there, interpreted where they were buried some three thousand years ago.

Discovery in February 2001

The Jinsha site was discovered accidentally in February 2001 during construction work on Qingyang Avenue in western Chengdu. Workers uncovered concentrations of ivory, jade, bronze and gold objects, and archaeologists were called in to investigate what proved to be a major ancient settlement. The discovery was named among China's Top Ten Archaeological Discoveries of 2001, and it is widely described as the first major archaeological discovery in China in the twenty-first century. The Sun and Immortal Birds gold ornament itself was unearthed on 25 February 2001. The site as a whole spreads across about five square kilometres, a scale that immediately suggested a political centre rather than a village or isolated burial ground.

The Ancient Shu Kingdom and the Successor to Sanxingdui

Jinsha is dated to roughly 1200 to 650 BC, spanning the late Shang dynasty to the early Spring and Autumn period. It is regarded as the successor capital of the Shu kingdom after Sanxingdui, the earlier Bronze Age centre at Guanghan whose spectacular bronzes had transformed understanding of early China after the excavation of its sacrificial pits in 1986. The relationship matters because it shows continuity: after Sanxingdui declined, the political and ritual centre of the Chengdu Plain appears to have shifted to Jinsha, where the same traditions of gold working, jade carving and elaborate sacrifice continued in new forms. The museum therefore interprets not only a single site but a sequence of ancient Shu civilisation, from its rise to its later capital.

Excavation: Sacrificial Areas, Buildings and Cemeteries

Excavation at Jinsha revealed a complex ancient city. Archaeologists identified large-scale building foundations, residential areas, cemeteries and, most famously, a sacrificial area along the southern bank of an ancient riverbed. Sources on the museum describe 63 sacrificial spots, more than 70 building spots and three centralised cemeteries, with over 6,000 precious relics recovered from the sacrificial zone alone. The sacrificial area, covering about 15,000 square metres in the south-eastern part of the site, is described as the most complete and longest-lasting sacrificial site of its kind preserved in China. Objects were deposited in layers over a long period, suggesting repeated state rituals rather than a single burial event.

The Museum Building and Its Opening

Construction of the museum began in November 2004, and the Jinsha Site Museum opened on 16 April 2007. The total construction area is about 38,000 square metres. The museum is composed of a Relics Hall, an Exhibition Hall, a Cultural Relic Protection and Restoration Centre, a visitor centre, a theatre and garden areas including an Ebony Forest, a Jade Road and a Deer Park. Its official website is jinshasitemuseum.com. The design keeps the archaeology at the centre: the Relics Hall is built over the excavation itself, so visitors look down on the sacrificial deposits in place rather than on objects removed to distant cases.

The Relics Hall

The Relics Hall is a semicircular, large-span steel structure of about 7,600 square metres, supported so that the excavation area remains open and visible. About 90 percent of the unearthed cultural relic areas within it had not yet been excavated when the hall was described in visitor accounts, preserving the sense of an active archaeological site. Wooden walkways bring visitors within about a metre of the deposits. Here the grand sacrificial ceremonies of the ancient Shu, the palace foundations described as the largest of the pre-Qin period in southwest China, dwelling foundations and burials can be understood in their original spatial relationships, which no display case can reproduce.

The Exhibition Hall in Five Sections

North of the Relics Hall, the Exhibition Hall presents the finds in five thematic sections. The first, often rendered as Ancient Homeland or Private Homeland, reconstructs the ecological environment of three thousand years ago, including the animals of the Chengdu Plain. The second, the royal capital section, shows residences, tools, pottery, jade working and tombs, illustrating agriculture, craft production and social differentiation. The third recreates the sacrificial rituals of the Shu people and their understanding of heaven and earth. The fourth, Treasures of a Thousand Years, displays the finest objects, including the Sun and Immortal Birds gold ornament, the large gold mask and a ten-section jade cong. The fifth interprets Jinsha itself, setting out the development of ancient Shu civilisation and the historical value of Jinsha culture.

The Sun and Immortal Birds Gold Ornament

The museum's emblem is the Sun and Immortal Birds gold ornament, a ring-shaped disc of nearly pure gold. It measures 12.5 centimetres in outer diameter and 5.29 centimetres in inner diameter, is only 0.02 centimetres thick and weighs 20 grams, with a gold content of 94.2 percent. Its openwork pattern has two layers: in the centre a sun with twelve tooth-like rays, and around it four birds flying head to tail in a counter-clockwise direction, necks and legs stretched in flight. The piece was made by hammering, cutting and polishing; its front is polished bright while the back remains rougher. On 16 August 2005 the motif was declared the symbol of Chinese cultural heritage by the State Bureau of Cultural Relics, chosen from some 1,600 candidate artefacts, and in 2011 Chengdu adopted it as the core of the city logo. An embroidery of the design was carried aboard the Shenzhou VI spacecraft in October 2005.

Gold, Jade and Ivory: The Three Superlatives

Jinsha is noted for three superlatives among sites of its period. It has produced the most gold objects, more than 200 pieces, mainly foils and plates including gold masks, gold belts, box-shaped, horn-shaped, frog-shaped and fish-shaped ornaments. It has produced the most jade, more than 2,000 pieces — cong tubes, bi discs, dagger-axes, gui tablets, zhang blades, axes, chisels, knives, swords, spears, rings and bracelets — with the number of jade zhang alone exceeding the total found in all other parts of China. And it holds the world's most concentrated ancient ivory of its period, hundreds of tusks in tonnes of material, complete, cut and segmented, alongside thousands of wild boar tusks and deer antlers deposited in sacrifice.

Collections and Significance

The museum catalogues about 2,235 pieces and sets of cultural relics in gold, bronze, jade, stone, lacquer, pottery and ivory, including 366 first-grade relics, 374 second-grade and 1,429 third-grade items. Other highlights include a large gold mask, similar in spirit to those of Sanxingdui, and jade zhang blades and cong tubes that link Jinsha to ritual traditions known across early China. The site is listed among Major Sites Protected at the National Level and on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List together with Sanxingdui. For Chengdu, Jinsha extended the city's documented history dramatically, confirming it as a political, economic and cultural centre more than three thousand years ago, and the museum remains the essential place to encounter that history in situ.