The Lost City at Jinsha

Today we are going to look at a documentary about a mysterious Chinese civilization: the Shu.  This documentary is called the Lost City at Jinsha.  The run time for this documentary is 49:52.

Sichuan China is home to a mysterious kingdom.  It was found in the Jinsha suburb and was one of the most important finds of the century.  Archeological finds include thousands of graves and their grave goods.  Who were these people?  Why were they left with such fine grave goods?  Why did this civilization disappear?  Agnes Hsu-Tang, director of the China Institute of New York investigates this lost civilization.

The Yellow River was considered the backbone of Chinese civilization.  The Qin Dynasty unified China in 221 BCE.  However, One thousand years before that, the Shang Kings ruled the plain of the Yellow River.  For years it was thought that the Yellow River plains were the center of Chinese civilization.  Discoveries have been made cast questions on this assertion.

These discoveries have been made that hint at a society that thrived at the same time as the Shang and they were locked in mountain valleys.  This culture did not leave any written records behind.  However, their neighbors wrote about them.  They were called the Shu people.  The civilization was found in Jinsha.  Hsu-Tang wants to unravel the mystery of the Shu people.  How did they flourish?  Why did they disappear?

The discovery of the Shu people happened by accident.  There was construction work being done to lay a new road.  All of a sudden workers found evidence of an old civilization.  The police called the archeologists and they headed to the site.  The archeologists were shocked by what they found.  There were thousands of relics on the site.  It was a sensational discovery for the archeologists.  There were jade daggers found, elephant tusks, and other gold objects.  Based on the number of graves, did these construction workers and archeologists stumble upon the Shu sacrificial grounds?  Agnes is surprised at the size of the site.  She has more questions about the site.

There were ten areas discovered including a palace area, a burial area, and a sacrificial zone.  Over 2,000 tombs were discovered however these tombs do not hint at human sacrifice.  Agnes will have to do some further investigation.  She walks through the museum where the Shu artifacts are displayed.  Some statues seem to hint at human sacrifice.  These statues are of people kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs.  What was the message of these statues?  Why were these statues made?

Agnes travels to Anyang, the ancient Shang capital.  It is in Anyang where human sacrifice was a well documentary.  She examines a full chariot that was buried in a tomb with a horse and an occupant.  The Shang dynasty was a slave society, and so when the master died his slaves died with him and were buried with him so they could serve him in the afterlife.  However, does this mean that the Shu people practiced human sacrifice?  The Shang people and the Shu people were in contact with each other, and would this contact lead to an exchange of certain ideas?

Agnes goes back to Jinsha and talks with other experts about her theory that the Shu people would have gotten their ideas about human sacrifice from the Shang.  Find out more about the Shu people and human sacrifice by watching the rest of this episode.

This documentary was way too fast pace to keep up with because I had to keep rewinding to points in the documentary to get the point.  Additionally, it did not have much context to it.  I still do not understand who the Shu people were.  I also did not need a monologue on why she got into archeology.  It left me feeling disjointed at times.  The obsession with human sacrifice was over the top?  I could not believe that the Shu people could be boiled down to people who participated in human sacrifice.  Perhaps Agnes could have talked about what was known about the Shu people up to the point of the discovery of the tombs and other artifacts.  Due to its speed, disjointedness, and obsession with human sacrifice, I will not recommend showing this to a history classroom.