5. Jinsha Site Museum, Chengdu
Let’s now get off the beaten track for a while and travel inland to Chengdu. Here we can find a museum that sprang up in 2007 on the site of the first major archeological discovery in China in the 21st century, the Jinsha site. The site was the capital of the ancient Shu state, the center of the ancient civilization center in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River from the 12th century BC to the 7th century BC.
The site comprises large-scale foundations of the entire city, and a number of artifacts have also been found to add to that. Among the unearthed precious cultural relics are gold, bronze, jade, stone, ivory objects and lacquerware, tens of thousands of pottery pieces, tons of ivory, and thousands of wild boar tusks and antlers. Compared with other contemporaneous sites in the world, the Jinsha site might be the only one with such a quantity of gold and jade artifacts and the most bountiful amount of ivories.
Covering the remains of Jinsha site, the museum serves to protect, research, and display the Jinsha culture and ancient Shu civilization.