Publications and Studies on Ritual Bronzes of Sanxingdui in European and Japanese Languages

Sanxingdui is a Bronze Age archaeological culture spread in the vicinity of Chengdu, an administrative centre of the Sichuan province of the Peoples Republic of China in the last quarter of the 2nd millennium BC. Bronze ritual objects found in 1986 in JK1 and JK2 sacrificial pits were specific for that culture. The first to respond to the news in Chinese media about the Sanxingdui finds were prominent specialists of the 1970–1980s on archaeology of Shang and Zhou periods R. Bagley, R. Thorp, N. Barnard, K. M. Linduff, J. Rawson. Western archaeologists usually complained about the incompleteness of data they had and doubted a number of statements of their Chinese colleagues. After the 1994 Chinese publication of a colour album of sensational Sanxingdui bronze finds from this site, they were included into the exhibits of a number of large archaeological expositions held in London, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney and the USA. Each of these exhibitions was accompanied by the publication of a catalogue, which included studies about the Sanxingdui ritual bronzes. After a number of foreign tours at the beginning of the 21st century, the exhibit of Sanxingdui finds outside of China stopped for a long time. Only in 2023 the Chinese held an exhibition in Hong Kong called “Gazing at Sanxingdui: New Archaeological Discoveries in Sichuan”. The reason was the resuming of archaeological excavations in the so-called “sacrificial region” of the Sanxingdui site which resulted in the discovery of six new sacrificial pits.