Why Was This Ancient Chinese City Abruptly Abandoned?

In 1986, construction workers excavating a site in a mountainous region of southwestern China unearthed a pit containing hundreds of ancient artifacts that were interred more than 3,000 years ago. The trove included objects fashioned from jade and gilded in gold. But the most peculiar finds were several bronze masks and sculptures with otherworldly features like enormous ears that resemble butterfly wings, large almond-shaped eyes and pupils that popped out of their heads.

“These bronze masks and heads are so different from bronzes found elsewhere,” says Rowan Flad, an archaeologist at Harvard University who specializes in studying Bronze Age sites in China.

However, the masks’ peculiar proportions were far from the only puzzling aspect of the archaeological site, now known as Sanxingdui. Many of the artifacts were deliberately broken and burned before they were buried. Further, the area’s ancient inhabitants, who left behind no written record, appear to have abandoned the site shortly after the pit was filled.

Over the decades, scientists have uncovered multiple other pits at Sanxingdui containing some 50,000 artifacts. The site and the civilization that once flourished there remain among archaeology’s most perplexing mysteries.

Sanxingdui is located around 24 miles from Chengdu, the capital city of the province of Sichuan. The archaeological site sits around 745 miles southwest of the central plains, an area that was long-proposed to be the cradle of Chinese civilization. As a result, the region around Sanxingdui was once considered a cultural backwater, according to Flad.

However, the buried artifacts tell a different story. In 1929, a farmer digging a ditch in this area unearthed several jade artifacts. An initial archaeological excavation followed in 1934, but it would take another half-century for Sanxingdui’s true treasures to come to the surface.

The 1986 effort excavated a pair of sacrificial pits that contained around 1,000 objects, including weapons, charred animal bones and some 60 elephant tusks. Archaeologists also uncovered the towering statue of a robe-clad nobleman standing more than 8 feet tall.

Another monumental find was a nearly 13-foot bronze sculpture of a sacred tree brimming with bronze birds and flowers that might represent a ladder to the heavens. Most of these finds are housed at the Sanxingdui Museum, which is perched at the edge of the famous dig site.

Between 2020 and 2022, researchers at Sanxingdui excavated six more pits that contained an additional 13,000 artifacts, including another gold mask, ivory sculptures, seashells and bronzes portraying strange creatures like a tiger-dragon hybrid with black stripes. Researchers also discovered a bronze box with a lid shaped like a tortoise that contained green jade that was once wrapped in silk.

As more artifacts and ruins at the Sanxingdui site were uncovered, a mystifying metropolis took shape. The ancient city was enclosed by earthen walls (Sanxingdui translates to “three star mounds”) and perched along the Jianjiang River. The site is among the largest Bronze Age settlements known from southern China, and its 900 acres were subdivided into a palatial quarter, an area for craft production and ritual precincts, where sacrifices took place and the pits were located.

Relatively little is known about the ancient inhabitants of Sanxingdui, which appears to have been a significant city by around 1800 B.C. Archaeologists have yet to uncover any skeletal remains or writing from the site. However, the rich assortment of bronzes and artifacts they left behind provide some clues.

Many archaeologists posit that the Sanxingdui culture was part of the ancient Shu civilization, a kingdom that ruled over the mountain-ringed Chengdu Plain for several centuries before they were conquered around 316 B.C. Many scholars have proposed that the bug-eyed bronze masks and sculptures discovered at Sanxingdui represent Can Cong, the legendary first ruler of the Shu who is traditionally depicted with bulging eyes.

Based on the number of religious motifs and objects found at the site, Flad thinks it is possible that Sanxingdui served as an ancient pilgrimage site where people from across a large swath of southwestern China sporadically journeyed. “It is clearly the center of gravity in this region toward the beginning of the Bronze Age,” he says. The fragmented and charred artifacts suggest the site might have been a sacrificial ceremony area where objects were placed in the pits and ritualistically burned.

After only a few centuries, people appear to have stopped venturing to Sanxingdui, and the site was abandoned by 1000 B.C. Flad speculates that shifting religious beliefs might have diminished the site’s importance or that environmental changes made the city more difficult to reach. In 2014, other researchers proposed that a massive earthquake in the region and subsequent landslides severed Sanxingdui’s main source of water and isolated the city.

As Sanxingdui became less of a central destination, Flad thinks the local community might have moved toward the area around Chengdu, one of China’s largest cities. In 2001, archaeologists discovered a Bronze Age site near Chengdu called Jinsha. While the site lacked spectacular bronzes, it did contain a golden mask that exhibited several telltale features, including wing-like ears and exaggerated eyes, that hint at a connection with Sanxingdui, situated around 30 miles away.

New excavations are shedding light on other connections between Sanxingdui and the surrounding region. Between 2020 and 2022, archaeologists uncovered multiple bronze wine vessels called zun. According to Flad, these are reminiscent of vessels found in the Yangtze River Valley to the north. “At Sanxingdui, among all these completely different objects are these materials that show connections to other places,” he says.

These ancient connections extend outside of China and even Earth itself. In 2026, researchers described an axe-like artifact from one of Sanxingdui’s sacrificial pits that was fashioned out of an iron meteorite. It is the earliest known use of a meteorite from Bronze Age China.

With excavations continuing, the thousands of objects buried beneath Sanxingdui may yet reveal why this remarkable city was once abandoned.