Sichuan historical timeline

Sichuan has repeatedly been its own world, protected by mountains and periodically independent.

Sanxingdui

In 1986, pits near Guanghan yielded bronze masks and figures more than three thousand years old — enormous staring faces with protruding eyes, a bronze figure two and a half metres tall, and gold masks — in a style unlike anything in the Yellow River civilisation to the north. They belonged to the Shu culture, about which almost nothing was known, and they forced a rethinking of how Chinese civilisation developed. More pits were opened from 2020 and the finds continue.

Dujiangyan

In 256 BC the governor Li Bing divided the Min river with a system that irrigates the basin without dams, using a weir, a spillway and a channel cut through a mountain. It has been in continuous operation for over two thousand two hundred years, still waters millions of hectares, and is UNESCO-listed.

The Three Kingdoms

Sichuan was the state of Shu Han in the third century under Liu Bei and the strategist Zhuge Liang, and that period is embedded in Chinese popular culture through the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Wuhou shrine in Chengdu commemorates it.

The wartime capital

When Japan took the eastern cities, the Nationalist government moved to Chongqing, then part of Sichuan, and the province became China’s wartime redoubt and industrial refuge.

The Long March

Some of the hardest stages of the communist retreat of 1934 and 1935 crossed western Sichuan: the crossing of the Dadu river at Luding, where the bridge is a chain span the marchers are said to have taken under fire, and then the grasslands of the north-west, where more died of cold, hunger and bog than in any battle. Those episodes became central to the party’s founding story, and the sites are visited accordingly.

Recent

Chongqing was separated as a municipality in 1997. The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake devastated the mountain counties and prompted an enormous reconstruction.