Sanxingdui

This may be China's top tentative site, culturally. The main reason it's taking a backseat it probably because there are still lots of discoveries to be made. There are three sites to this place: Jinsha Museum in the west part of Chengdu, Joint Tombs of Boat-shaped Coffins are in Chengdu as far as I understand but I did not try to visit them, Sanxingdui in the nearby city of Guanghan. I have only been to the museums because they seem worth checking out.

Jinsha, easily reached by metro, nowadays only opens at 9am (I say this because a lot of info online is wrong because I think they used to open at 8am) and costs a whopping 100 entry (again, wrong/outdated info online everything). It's still worth the large ticket price considering you get to see the legendary Golden Sun Bird which now stands for the city icon. Hard to imagine it was only discovered in 2001 and has already made such an impact on the town. The Jinsha museum is right on top of the site and thus you would feel you have really "been" to the place. More no that later. The second highlight is the Golden Mask. Trivia: the metro station symbol uses the golden sun bird.

Whereas I found the museum in town nice, I was more taken by the one in Guanghan, easily reached by high-speed train (~20min) plus a taxi (~15min) or bus (1h!). The museum is in a large park costing …

I hold a long fascination for China, which hit an early peak when I choose to study Sinology at University when I was 18. The course didn’t really work out for me and I quit after 2 years – I did not have the discipline at the time to put in the hours to master the language. But I have always stayed interested, do speak ‘basic Chinese’ and have now visited China 5 times. In 2007 I embarked on a 3 month solo trip across China, one of my best journeys ever. On that trip I managed to visit 20 new WHS; later WHC meetings added another 2 retroactively. 

I started that journey from the Sichuan capital of Chengdu with a day trip to Sanxingdui. This Bronze Age archaeological site is now part of the Archaeological Sites of the Ancient Shu State TWHS, but wasn’t when I visited. It had rained overnight and I changed my program for the day from the WHS of Dujiangyan to the more indoor experience of the archaeological museum in Sanxingdui. There was a daily direct bus from Chengdu’s southern bus station to Sanxingdui. Unfortunately, despite a last minute taxi effort through the dense traffic, I missed that one. On to the northeast bus station then, from where buses left every few minutes to the town of Guanghan. A local bus would take me the final few kilometers to Sanxingdui. When I wanted to disembark after 45 minutes at the bus station in Guanghan, …