If your last visit to the ROM was on a sixth-grade field trip, you might consider returning this year. In addition to the bat cave and the terrifying but must-see life-size plastic dinosaurs, the museum is hosting its first major Chinese exhibition in nearly thirty years. Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is making its only Canadian stop at the ROM. For the most part these works of art have been stored in China’s Sanxingdui Museum since their discovery.
The collection includes 181 extraordinary artifacts found mostly in two large sacrificial pits at the 3,000-year-old ruin of Sanxingdui (pronounced “San-shing-dway”) from the Sichuan province in southwestern China. The treasures were excavated in 1986, unearthing evidence of a previously unknown Bronze Age and providing a new perspective on Chinese art and history. The objects discovered have shed light upon a mysterious lost culture, proving that a highly advanced group of people existed in Sanxingdui from as early as the 13th century B.C. Before this archaeological breakthrough, Sanxingdui was considered an isolated cultural backwater. No similar artifacts have been discovered anywhere else, and archaeologists still have little to no information about the people who created them. The largest of the artifacts is a life-size statue, the only one of its kind from the period before the unification of China in the third century B.C.
The exhibition displays many jade and bronze objects, including masks, birds, animal figures and pottery. There is a large assortment of almost identical heads (like a race of supernatural clones). It is not certain whether they represent gods themselves or if they were meant as offerings in sacrificial rituals. Archaeologists believe all of the figures together might have represented a hierarchy of religious leaders.
In sections two and three of the exhibit, art from the Zhou Dynasty (11th to 3rd centuries B.C.) and the Han Dynasty (2nd century B.C. to 2nd century A.D.) is contrasted with the art from the first section to emphasize the uniqueness of the Sanxingdui discoveries.
Even non-museum-going types will most likely be impressed. And for the whining, restless kid in all of us, there’s always the gift shop.
