Some highlights from four and a half years in China - a 🧵 1. The extraordinary wonders of Bronze-age (founded c.1600BCE) Sanxingdui (三星堆) - possibly the legendary Shu Kingdom - with carvings and objects that looks more Peruvian than Chinese

Almost 2000 years old and one of the rarest forms of Chinese architecture: intricately carved Han Dynasty ‘Que’ (阙) - ceremonial ‘sacred way’ gate towers There are three pairs of Que in the sacred Song mountains. The most complete - the Shaoshi Que (c.123CE) - once led to a (long gone) Shaoshi mountain temple.

Songyue pagoda (嵩岳寺塔) in Henan, the oldest of its type in China, built in the Northern Wei Dynasty (523CE) Songyue is pretty iconic - sitting, as it does, at the top of Liang Sicheng’s famous “Evolution of Types of the Buddhist Pagoda”

Fascinating Tsinghua University exhibition on Liang Sicheng (1901-72) sets out how he cracked the codes of ancient Chinese architecture - including the evolution of Buddhist pagodas He used 1103CE Song Dynasty tome “Yingzao Fashi” (营造法式 lit: construction methods) and lots of field research - with his wife Lin Huiyin and a small team - to piece together the mysteries of ancient Chinese architecture

This weekend, @NishiDholakia @AntiokhosE and I explored the largest & most confounding #Neolithic site in China: #Shimao. A massive fortified stone city in an unexpected place, w/ objects from far afield, and grizzly human sacrifices. Vibrant until abandoned around 1800BCE 1/ This first mystery of #Shimao was the location: the city was built on the Northern Loess Plateau, relatively dry and far from the lush Yellow River “cradle of Chinese civilisation”. What might attract a large #Neolithic population to create a major city in such a place? 2/