page_title: Sichuan
section_title: Ba and Shu Kingdoms
hierarchical_section_title: Sichuan / History / Ba and Shu Kingdoms
caption_attribution_description: English: Bronze head from the thirteenth or twelfth century BCE, excavated in 1986 from Sanxingdui Pit 1 near Chengdu in Sichuan province, China. Height 27 cm, greatest width 22.8 cm, width at top of head 15 cm, weight 7.66 kg. Kept at the Sanxingdui Museum. The description is from Jay Xu (2001), "Bronze at Sanxingdui," in Robert Bagley (ed.), Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 85.
context_page_description: Sichuan is a landlocked province in Southwest China occupying most of the Sichuan Basin and the easternmost part of the Tibetan Plateau between the Jinsha River on the west, the Daba Mountains in the north, and the Yungui Plateau to the south. Sichuan's capital city is Chengdu. The population of Sichuan stands at 81 million.
  In antiquity, Sichuan was the home of the ancient states of Ba and Shu. Their conquest by Qin strengthened it and paved the way for the Qin Shi Huang's unification of China under the Qin dynasty. During the Three Kingdoms era, Liu Bei's Shu was based in Sichuan. The area was devastated in the 17th century by Zhang Xianzhong's rebellion and the area's subsequent Manchu conquest, but recovered to become one of China's most productive areas by the 19th century. During World War II, Chongqing served as the temporary capital of the Republic of China, making it the focus of Japanese bombing. It was one of the last mainland areas to fall to the Communists during the Chinese Civil War and was divided into four parts from 1949 to 1952, with Chongqing restored two years later.
context_section_description: The most important native states were those of Ba and Shu.
  Ba stretched into Sichuan from the Han Valley in Shaanxi and Hubei down the Jialing River as far as its confluence with the Yangtze at Chongqing.
  Shu occupied the valley of the Min, including Chengdu and other areas of western Sichuan. The existence of the early state of Shu was poorly recorded in the main historical records of China. It was, however, referred to in the Book of Documents as an ally of the Zhou.  Accounts of Shu exist mainly as a mixture of mythological stories and historical legends recorded in local annals such as the Chronicles of Huayang compiled in the Jin dynasty (265–420), and the Han dynasty compilation Shuwang benji (蜀王本紀).  These contained folk stories such as that of Emperor Duyu (杜宇) who taught the people agriculture and transformed himself into a cuckoo after his death. The existence of a highly developed civilization with an independent bronze industry in Sichuan eventually came to light with an archaeological discovery in 1986 at a small village named Sanxingdui in Guanghan, Sichuan.  This site, believed to be an ancient city of Shu, was initially discovered by a local farmer in 1929 who found jade and stone artefacts. Excavations by archaeologists in the area yielded few significant finds until 1986 when two major sacrificial pits were found with spectacular bronze items as well as artefacts in jade, gold, earthenware, and stone. This and other discoveries in Sichuan contest the conventional historiography that the local culture and technology of Sichuan were undeveloped in comparison to the technologically and culturally "advanced" Yellow River valley of north-central China.
caption: Bronze head from Sanxingdui, dating from the Shu kingdom
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