Sanxingdui site in Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, because of its excavation of the three-layered nine-branched bronze sacred tree, human face gold mask, bronze standing portrait in the shape of too strange, and the Central Plains of the same type of cultural relics have a big difference, so in the minds of netizens is very mysterious, known as "alien visitors".
When archaeologists temporarily stopped large-scale excavation of Sanxingdui in the 1980s, it was rumored on the Internet that scientists had discovered an undisclosable secret, which was enough to subvert the worldview of existing Chinese, so in order to protect the cognition of the Chinese people, they chose to stop excavation.
So is Sanxingdui really so mysterious, so mysterious that experts dare not announce the results and cannot dig down? Judging from the image before the excavation, the three-star pile is shaped like its name, and it is really 3 piles. "Sayings" pile, gather soil. Therefore, Sanxingdui can also be intuitively understood as three dirt bags.
As for why the 3 mounds should be named Sanxing, this is related to the romanticism that we Chinese ancients named. Li Bai's romance can shout out a small Lushan Waterfall that "the flow is three thousand feet straight down, and it is suspected that the Milky Way has fallen for nine days".
The romance of the people of Guanghan is to see these 3 neatly arranged three earthen bags, plus there is a crescent-shaped earthen platform not far away, thinking of the celestial phenomenon of "three stars with the moon", which is both romantic and profound.
However, the first people who discovered the unique shape of Sanxingdui and tried to develop it were not our modern people, nor were they newly Chinese after liberation. It is a Guanghan people living in the Qing Dynasty. According to the records of the "Hanzhou Chronicle", as early as the Qing Jiaqing period, there was a local saying of "three stars with the moon pile".
However, because before excavation, on the surface, Sanxingdui is really only 3 earthen bags, there is nothing around, so in the Qing Dynasty as a scenic spot, there was no large-scale development, there are many tourists who have been, but to see the three earthen bags arranged in a strange way, did not think that under the soil bags, hiding an ancient civilization of more than 3,000 years, until 1929, a farmer named Yan Daocheng, in the accidental Taogou operation, found a pit of jade tools, Sanxingdui ruins only broke through the soil and saw the light of day.
However, out of the selfish desire to monopolize the treasure after digging up the treasure, Yan Daocheng did not report to the local government, but organized his own family to secretly take home all the "ancient Gui, Bi, Chun, Jade Circle, and Stone Beads" in the pit as his own private property.
However, there is no impermeable wall in the world, the Yan Daocheng family, who became rich overnight, may be too ostentatious in consumption, and the fact that his family dug up the treasure soon spread in the surrounding villages, and then under the "efforts" of a large number of followers, the earliest excavated cultural relics of Sanxingdui began to flow into the market and were discovered by Dong Yi, a British missionary in Guanghan.
During the Republican period, the Western world has begun a large number of archaeological actions to explore human history. Therefore, Dong Yi noticed the value of jade at a glance and deduced that there should be large sites at the jade excavation site. Therefore, while informing the local government to send troops to protect, Dong Yi wrote a letter to Ge Weihan, the director of the West China University Museum and an American, to calculate and put forward his own calculations.
In 1934, Ge Weihan led his own archaeological team, with the help of Luo Yucang, the county magistrate of Guanghan County, to carry out the first bright and upright archaeology of Sanxingdui, after the incident, Ge Weihan sorted out the "Hanzhou Excavation Briefing", according to the data of the briefing, this archaeology has unearthed more than 600 cultural relics, including pottery, stone tools, jade beads, jade pestles, jade bi, jade gui, etc., the cultural relics time is also roughly inferred to be 1100 BC, the entire excavation site is inferred to be the remains of the ancient Shu civilization.
However, it is worth noting that the Sanxingdui culture at this time is not called Sanxingdui culture, but is identified as "Guanghan culture".
During the Republic of China period, China was either a warlord melee, or a war of resistance against Japan, the war of liberation, the whole country was turbulent, the excavation of Sanxingdui stopped after Ge Weihan left, the local government was unable to further develop, tired of dealing with the war, until the 1950s, the founding of New China, China restarted archaeological work, it is this archaeology, three dirt bags were officially named Sanxingdui site.
From 1980 to 1981, after a long period of archaeological excavation, the interior of Sanxingdui was cleared of a fragment of Neolithic housing site remains, confirming that Sanxingdui was not a small place of worship, but a large city, and Sanxingdui changed from a site to a "Sanxingdui culture". In 2002, the bronze sacred tree and jade bianzhang excavated from Sanxingdui were included in the "Catalogue of The First Batch of Cultural Relics Prohibited from Going Abroad (Border)" issued by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.
In April 2019, Sichuan issued the Implementation Opinions on Strengthening the Reform of the Protection and Utilization of Cultural Relics, and Sanxingdui and the Jinsha Site jointly applied for heritage. Sanxingdui has gradually become China's business card to the world.
As for netizens saying that after 80 years, Sanxingdui stopped digging, and the research institute was frightened. From 1989 to 1995, the Sanxingdui workstation has carried out six test excavations of the "earthen mound" outside the Sanxingdui to find out the nature of the city wall that was artificially built, and delineated the ancient city area of Sanxingdui with an area of 3.6 square kilometers.
At the same time, about the research of Sanxingdui, experts are not only not frightened, but also work hard. In 1992, Zhao Dianzeng published more than 1800 professional papers such as "Archaeological Discoveries of Sanxingdui and The Study of the Ancient History of Bashu", in 1997 Yu Weichao published "The Relationship between Sanxingdui Culture and Sanmiao Culture and Its Worship Content", and in 2020, Ran Honglin and Lei Yu jointly published "Excavation of Qingguan Mountain H105, Sanxingdui Site, Guanghan City, Sichuan Province", all of which revolve around Sanxingdui.
On March 20, 2020, the new results to be announced are also derived from further excavations of Sanxingdui, and it can be said that from the attitude of seeking truth from facts, although Sanxingdui is mysterious, archaeologists have never given up working on it.