Half an hour and 8km beyond Xindu (minibuses ¥2, or ¥6 direct from the eastern side of Chengdu's train station), GUANGHAN is a small, mostly modern town on the south side of the Yazi River . Buses drop off on the highway immediately east of town, while the train station is 2km over on the western outskirts, serving the Xian-Chengdu-Kunming line; in the city centre you'll find Fanghu Park , a cramped collection of old ramparts, ponds and carefully arranged shrubs. You can stay nearby at the Xinxing Dajiudian (¥75-100) on Fanghu Lu, or head directly up to southbank Changsha Lu and catch a local bus #6 for the twenty-minute ride west to the isolated Sanxingdui Museum (daily 9am-5pm; ¥30). Excellently presented, this charts the discovery, between the 1920s and 1980s, of a colossal trove of jade, ivory, bronze and gold artefacts associated with a large Shang town on this site, many of which were found deliberately broken up and buried in rectanguar sacrificial pits . Evidence of the otherwise virtually undocumented Ba-Shu civilization which flourished around 1600 BC, it's not just the quality of the finds here that are startling, but the actual designs themselves, products of a very alien view of the world: a two-metre-high bronze figure with a hook nose and oversized, grasping hands standing atop four elephants; metre-wide, grinning masks with obscene grins and eyes popping out on stalks; a "spirit tree" covered in ambiguous swirls and motifs. Hundreds of smaller, finely detailed pieces are on show, too, along with comprehensive accounts of the excavations.

 

Heading on from Guanghan , catch Chengdu or Dujiangyan minibuses on the highway east of town until late in the afternoon; for Mianyang and points north, you'll need either the train or to seek out Guanghan's long-distance bus station , just south of the park on Zhongshan Dadao.