From November 18, 2026, to March 1, 2027, the Guimet Museum is dedicating a major exhibition to the archaeological sites of Sanxingdui and Jinsha in China's Sichuan province. Conceived in collaboration with the Sichuan Provincial Museum, it brings together works from six museums and institutions in the province.

Three thousand years later, the masks still tell no story. In the 1920s, on the banks of a Sichuan river, a few jade pieces surfaced, and no one yet knew that an entire civilization had just revealed itself to the world. It wasn't until 1986, with the discovery of two pits filled with bronze masks with protruding eyes, oversized human figures, and metal trees, that it became clear that ancient China harbored an art form about which textbooks had remained silent.

Sanxingdui, then Jinsha fifteen years later, forced archaeologists to revisit the Chinese Bronze Age from the beginning, and the Guimet Museum unfolds this nearly century-old investigation in eight parts. Most of the treasures unearthed between 2020 and 2022 in six new pits are leaving China for the first time. Monumental bronzes, finely carved jades, beaten gold leaf, ritual objects, and ceramics are displayed in an immersive exhibition that restores the great statues to their ritual context and the bronze workers to their virtuosity.

The masks, however, continue to resist scrutiny, their features so exaggerated that specialists debate what they represented and the purpose of the pits where they lay. Nothing is settled, which leaves enough secrets in the kingdom of Shu to make the visit as much an investigation as a contemplation.

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GUIMET MUSEUM
From November 18, 2026 to March 1, 2027
6 Place d'Iéna, 75116 Paris - Metro: Iéna (Line 9) or Boissière (Line 6)
Open daily except Tuesdays, 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Admission: €15 - Reduced rate: €12 - Free for under 26s
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