China

The Sanxingdui Bronze Mask: A Face From Sichuan

In the summer of 1986, workmen digging clay for bricks at Sanxingdui, a village forty kilometres northeast of Chengdu in Sichuan, opened two rectangular pits. The bronzes inside had already been broken or burned. Among them were faces too large for any living head.

A Sanxingdui bronze mask is a cast copper-alloy face from that Bronze Age city: angular brows, a broad nose, oversized ears, and, on the most famous examples, pupils that push forward from the eye. The Metropolitan Museum of Art later showed one of those giants on loan from the Sanxingdui Museum. What the faces were for, and why they went into the ground around 1200 BCE, the pits still do not say.

Eyes that push out of a bronze shell

The masks are sculptures, not festival wear. A smaller bronze Mask in the same loan group stands only 26.6 cm high. The piece the Met named Mask with Protruding Pupils stands 66 cm high and more than four feet wide. A third type, Mask with Protruding Pupils and Trunk, reaches 82.5 cm. The three sizes share a late Shang date. They are not one standard model.

The protruding-pupil type is the face most people now mean. The Met's 2002 exhibition text picks out those pupils and that width even among other Sanxingdui finds. Next to the masks came bronze heads, some with gold foil. One Head shown in New York measured 42.5 cm high. A life-size Figure on Pedestal, the only large statue from either 1986 pit, rose to 260.8 cm and weighed 180 kg.

Heilbrunn's China chronology groups those humanoid bronzes with gold and jade fragments and with elephant trunks from the same 1986 discovery. The faces belong to a sculptural set, not to the wine vessels of Shang foundries in the Yellow River valley.

Two brick-clay pits northeast of Chengdu

Sanxingdui is the name of the site and of the Bronze Age culture named after it. The Met places the village forty kilometres northeast of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Heilbrunn treats the 1986 bronzes as a metalworking culture in western China that ran at the same time as the Shang in the northeast and north centre. Shang kings at Zhengzhou and Anyang left ritual wine and food vessels. Sanxingdui left faces and trees.

The exhibition overview dates more than sixty Sanxingdui works in the show to about the twelfth century BCE, and the burial of the two pits around 1200 BCE. Heilbrunn's key-event line is wider: about 1200 to 1000 BCE. The ranges overlap. They are not one birth year for each mask.

A four-metre bronze tree with birds on its branches came from the same pits. Portions of that tree travelled with the faces. The deposits also held gold, jade, stone, pottery, and elephant tusks. Sichuan had been treated as a cultural margin. The brick-clay pits showed a city with its own bronze industry.

Faces broken and burned before they went in

Most objects in the two pits had been broken, burned, or both, then laid down in a set order. The Met reads the shared features of the pits as two ritual performances: offerings damaged first, then buried. The function of the objects, and the reason for that burial, remain unknown on the museum's own page.

The press release for the same show calls the large masks images of supernatural beings. That is a curator's label, not a recovered name. No inscription on the bronze tells you who the face belongs to.

The rite, if that is what it was, treated the face as something you could wreck and still offer. A mask more than four feet wide was never going to sit on a dancer. It was made to be seen, then put out of sight.

After 1986: a Sichuan loan in New York

For years the faces stayed in Sichuan. Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan ran at the Met from 6 March to 16 June 2002. Seattle Art Museum organised the tour with Sichuan's Bureau of Cultural Relics. Jason Sun of the Met's Asian Art department curated the New York hang. Robert Bagley of Princeton edited the catalogue.

The exhibition overview lists 128 works and dates the Sanxingdui group to about the twelfth century BCE, with later Sichuan tomb goods into the Han period. The 2001 press release says 127 works and dates the whole show from the thirteenth century BCE through the third century CE. Six bronze masks from the pits were on view, including Mask with Protruding Pupils. The photo-gallery captions still name the Sanxingdui Museum as owner. New York never kept the bronze.

Mask with Protruding Pupils, sixty-six centimetres high

The clearest single object is the Sanxingdui Museum bronze the Met labelled Mask with Protruding Pupils, Late Shang period, twelfth century BCE. The photo-gallery card gives the height as 26 inches, 66 cm. The exhibition overview adds the width: more than four feet. In 2002 it hung in the Met's first-floor special exhibition galleries.

Set that height beside the smaller Mask at 26.6 cm and the trunked mask at 82.5 cm. Casters at the site worked a range of face sizes. The pupils are the trait the Met used to single this one out. The rest of the face follows the same angular programme as the pedestal figure: heavy brows, bulging eyes, a broad nose, a jaw built in planes. The bronze remains in Sichuan. The loan caption is still open.

Late Shang dates, and why Jinsha is not this site

Two Met pages already disagree by a century at the edges. The exhibition text prefers the twelfth century BCE and a burial around 1200 BCE. Heilbrunn writes about 1200 to 1000 BCE. Both ranges should stay in view.

A later Sichuan site, Jinsha, sits in a different century in the technical literature. A UCL study of Chinese ritual bronzes dates Jinsha to the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE, in the Shang to Western Zhou span, and treats Sanxingdui as a separate Sichuan assemblage with its own alloy groups. Gold ornaments from Jinsha are not the 1986 Sanxingdui masks.

Counts are also soft. The Met speaks of hundreds of objects from the two pits and of many bronze masks, six of which travelled. It does not publish a surviving-mask census. What is firm is narrower: a Bronze Age city northeast of Chengdu, two pits opened in 1986, and a 66 cm mask more than four feet wide, still Sanxingdui Museum's object, once seen in New York.

In your scene

A Sanxingdui mask reads as a ritual face too large for a wearer, set where a rite could see it before it disappeared. Give it wall or platform enough for the ears and the jutting eyes, and keep the metal in the same family as the other Chinese court and temple bronzes nearby. For a full set, see the Chinese Ritual Relics pack.

Sources

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