Chinese Book Publications and Studies of 1989–2009 on Ritual Bronzes of Sanxingdui

Studies on Sanxingdui ritual bronzes are hard to enumerate, even if only scientific articles are taken into account. Monographic publications devoted to this subject are so numerous that an overview of them all cannot be contained to one article. The subject of this overview are science and scientific-popular books printed in China in the first two decades after the publication of preliminary reports on the discovery of Sanxingdui ritual bronzes. In 1992, the first album, including Sanxingdui ritual bronzes was published. In 1991–1993, two collections of articles containing results of scientific conferences were published. One of them was devoted to Sanxingdui culture, and the other attempted to connect the site with a later Ba-Shu culture, spread in Sichuan province in the Eastern Zhou period. One year later, a colourized album containing much of Sanxingdui ritual bronzes was published. Scientific-popular literature appeared later. In 1999, a book report on the excavation of sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui with compete scientific descriptions of all artifacts found was published. In the first decade of the 21st century, numerous scientific-popular books followed. Serious scientific monographs as well as paper collections resulting from scientific conferences were also published. In the second half of the decade, the writing of a continued edition “Sanxingdui Research” (“Sanxingdui yanjiu”) commenced. The research of Sanxingdui in the first decade of the 21st century was summed up by a three volume complete collection of relics excavated at Sanxingdui site since its discovery in 1928. The first volume of this publication was devoted to ritual bronzes.