Witness Sanxingdui | The China That China Forgot for 3,000 Years

Sanxingdui is one of the great lost civilizations of ancient China, a Bronze Age city unearthed by archaeologists in Sichuan, absent from every written record for three thousand years. This is that history documentary. For seven centuries, a city of bronze rose on the Chengdu plain, as large as the capitals of the north, as skilled in metal, and unlike anything in the official record of China. Then it broke its own treasures, buried them, and walked away. For three thousand years, the history of China did not include it. This is the story of the civilization China itself forgot, and the archaeologist who, in 1986, knelt at the edge of a pit and watched a face with cylindrical eyes rise out of the ash. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Sanxingdui 00:20 The City That Buried Itself 03:06 The Plain That Waited 05:32 The World at That Moment 08:05 The Official China 10:45 Spring of 1929 13:14 Decades of Almost Nothing 16:08 The City Emerges 18:42 Pit One 21:12 Pit Two 24:50 What We Have So Far 26:29 The Strangeness Up Close 29:30 The Name in the Book 32:09 When They Broke It Themselves 35:47 The Plain Without Memory 38:21 The Forgetting That Was Not 42:13 Same Person, Same Mask 45:28 The Wrong Shelf 49:45 The Next Civilization ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The Long Thread is a history documentary channel about the people who carried civilizations across time, historians, archaeologists, scribes, survivors. Every empire ends. The thread does not. 🔔 Subscribe — the next civilization is being prepared. New to the channel? The decipherment and lost-civilization documentaries are the place to start: Witness China, Witness Sumer, and Witness the Maya. #Sanxingdui #AncientChina #Archaeology #LostCivilizations #BronzeAge #AncientHistory #HistoryDocumentary #ChineseHistory #TheLongThread