TRACES OF TIME

Inside a conservation laboratory, the different parts of a bronze statue, after being roughly 3,000 years apart, were brought together in June to once again form a whole body. The parts had been excavated from Sichuan Province’s Sanxingdui site, hailed as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

Earlier that month, a large bronze figurine had been unearthed from the No.8 sacrificial pit of the Sanxingdui Ruins. It perfectly matched a bird-footed statue excavated 36 years earlier from the No.2 sacrificial pit. Fully assembled, the 1-meter-tall Y-shaped figure standing on its hands, as if striking a yoga pose, was an astonishing sight