Hong Kong Palace Museum | HKPM Special Exhibition Talk Series: Bronze Sacred Trees, Money Trees, and Buddha Images—Revisiting the Concept of Heaven, Cosmology, and Funerary Culture in Sichuan

Among the most mysterious archaeological discoveries at Sanxingdui are the bronze sacred trees, which have been re-created as holograms with meticulous details at the HKPM exhibition. These trees are commonly interpreted as symbolic representations of a “cosmic tree” connecting heaven and earth. Interestingly, a similar form of bronze tree emerged in other Sichuan tombs more than a thousand years later, engraved with a large quantity of intricate bronze coins and the earliest known Buddha images in China, appearing even more enigmatic than the earlier finds at Sanxingdui. Through a comparison of the structures, pictorial systems, archaeological contexts, and conditions of these bronze trees, the speaker will offer a fresh interpretation of the trees’ meanings, functions, and connections.

This talk accompanies the special exhibition “Gazing at Sanxingdui: New Archaeological Discoveries in Sichuan”, on view in Gallery 8 at the Hong Kong Palace Museum from 27 September 2023 to 8 January 2024. The exhibition features 120 remarkable bronze, jade, gold, and pottery objects from around 2,600–4,500 years ago. Nearly half of these were unearthed in the most recent excavations at the Sanxingdui site between 2020 and 2022, and many are being exhibited outside Sichuan for the first time. This exhibition is jointly organised by the Hong Kong Palace Museum, the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan, and the Jinsha Site Museum in Chengdu, with the support of the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Chengdu Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. Strategic Partner Bank of China (Hong Kong) is the Sole Sponsor of this special exhibition.

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