On a crisp Friday morning in November, Upper School students taking all levels of Chinese traveled to the Memor Museum on Madison Avenue.
The new and immersive “Sanxingdui Encounter” exhibit (open from October 2024-January 2025) strives to “integrate culture and technology to bring history to life in an enduring way.” The students began their visit by viewing the unearthed artifacts through the museum’s 12k resolution “micro-viewing”—a 360-degree video to show the intricate details etched into the gold and bronze relics. “Look at those patterns. Think about what you notice,” prompted US Chinese Teacher Jie Yang as the video played.
From there, the students moved into the exhibit to view one-to-one replicas. The artifacts, which date back over 3,000 years to the ancient Shu civilization, include gold masks, jade congs, clay pigs and bronze portraits, among others. The museum’s website notes, “The 2.62-meter-high ‘Bronze Standing Man,’ the 1.38m-wide ‘Bronze Mask’ and the 3.95-m-high ‘Bronze Sacred Tree’ are sublime masterpieces, the likes of which have never been seen before.”
“There’s no written record of this time period,” explained a member of the museum staff. “Less than 1% is discovered.”
The first discovery, the students learned, was found accidentally by a farmer in 1927 in the Sichuan Province of China. (Other discoveries were made in 1986 and 2021.) The gold mask—determined to be 84% gold—was crumpled in a ball when found. “Gold is a very soft metal,” the staff member explained, sharing that archeologists worked hard to restore it to its original shape.
Next, the students utilized the museum’s Virtual Reality (VR) equipment to immerse themselves in the archeological site where these intriguing items were found. The remainder of their trip was spent on the second and third floors of the museum, where they watched a video of archaeologists at work in China and observed more artifacts.
“The students especially enjoyed the VR experience, with the modern technology helping them to connect with ancient China,” shared US Chinese Teacher Lin Wang. In subsequent classes, the students gave presentations in Chinese about their trip experience.
