6-Day Field Science Study Tour: Chengdu Archaeology & Rivers

Morning / Afternoon — Arrival and Check-in
Your guide and driver meet the group at Chengdu Shuangliu or Chengdu Tianfu International Airport and transfer you to the hotel. Check-in is completed with the group and the guide gives a short orientation to the city and to the week's logistics.

Afternoon — Programme Opening and the Shu Civilisation Briefing
The opening session sets out the two subjects the programme works between. The first is water: the Dujiangyan works, built around 256 BC by Li Bing, the Qin governor of Shu, which divide the Min River without a dam and have been maintained continuously for more than two thousand years, turning flood-prone ground into the Chengdu plain. The second is Shu archaeology: a bronze culture at Sanxingdui and Jinsha that produced masks with exaggerated eyes and a four-metre bronze tree, and then disappeared from the written record entirely. Students receive their field notebooks and the question sheets used at each site.

Evening — Welcome Dinner
A welcome dinner introduces the local table, a set banquet of Chengdu dishes, and the group agrees how the fieldwork pairs will work.

Meals
Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Chengdu.

Morning — The Headworks, Structure by Structure
Dujiangyan is not a dam. It is a set of three works that split the Min River, shed its silt and control what is allowed into the plain, and they have been doing that since about 256 BC. Work through them in order. The fish-mouth levee, Yuzui, sits in the middle of the river and divides it into an inner and an outer channel. The flying-sand spillway, Feishayan, is the safety valve: when the inner channel runs high, water and the bed load of gravel and silt are thrown across into the outer river rather than into the fields. The bottle-neck intake, Baopingkou, is the control: a gap cut through the rock that meters the flow onto the plain no matter what the river is doing upstream. The students sketch each in plan and section and record the dimensions.

Afternoon — Maintenance and the Long Record
The system survives because it is repaired on a schedule rather than rebuilt. After lunch the group walks the site with the maintenance principle in hand - dredge the bed deep, keep the weir low - and works out why a low weir is the safer choice, and what happens to the silt budget when the rule is ignored. Cross the Anlan suspension bridge over the inner river, then return to Chengdu with the day's notes.

Evening — Field Notes
Back in Chengdu the students write up the measurements taken at the three works. The pairs set their Dujiangyan data against the second subject of the programme, which begins tomorrow at Sanxingdui and Jinsha.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Chengdu.

Morning - Sanxingdui Museum (depart 08:00)
Drive north to Guanghan and the Sanxingdui Museum. The site was first noticed by a farmer in 1929; the pits excavated from 1986 onwards produced bronze masks with exaggerated eyes, a bronze tree nearly four metres tall, and quantities of jade and gold unlike anything else in Bronze Age China. The finds forced historians to treat the Shu kingdom of the Chengdu plain as a civilisation in its own right rather than a footnote to the Yellow River.

Lunch
A restaurant near the site.

Afternoon - Jinsha Site Museum
Return to Chengdu and the Jinsha Site Museum, discovered in 2001 during building work and dated some five centuries later than Sanxingdui. Its signature object is the gold sun-bird disc, a thin ring of four birds circling a twelve-rayed sun, now the emblem of the city. Because Jinsha sits inside Chengdu, the museum allows students to see excavation trenches where they were found.

Evening - Debrief and return
Discussion of how archaeology rewrites history, then return to your hotel.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - transects and why elevation matters
Drive north-west to the wooded slopes of the Qingchengshan range, where the foothills of the Sichuan basin rise into the Qionglai mountains. The day is built on a simple fact of panda ecology: bamboo is everywhere in these hills, but pandas are not. They need the right species, a dense understorey they can move through, a canopy that keeps the bamboo from drying out, and slopes within their preferred range. Different bamboo species grow at different altitudes and a changing climate shifts those bands uphill, which is why survey work at the plot level matters. Field rules are set out before you start: stay on the marked line, take nothing, leave nothing, and record what you cannot identify.

Late morning - the plots
Lay out small square plots - five metres by five is enough for this exercise - at three elevations, and work through a standard sheet. Identify the bamboo genus where you can: the high-altitude Fargesia and Bashania types characterise the habitat that pandas depend on in these mountains, while Chimonobambusa and Phyllostachys grow lower down. Count the culms in the plot, measure the height and the diameter of a sample, estimate the percentage of ground covered by bamboo, and record the canopy above and the other shrubs and herbs present. Then look for evidence of animal use: chewed culm stubs, feeding sites with the leaf littered in a ring, droppings, and tracks in soft ground.

Lunch
A packed field lunch, carried in and carried out.

Afternoon - data, then back to the city
Finish the third plot, pool the results and look for the pattern - where cover was densest, where the culms were thickest, and where animal sign appeared. The instructor then explains how a real survey turns plots like these into a habitat map, how the fourth national panda survey used a combination of sign counts and DNA from droppings, and why the answer to "how many pandas are left" always comes with a confidence range. Return to Chengdu, enter the day's data into a shared sheet, and discuss what could be improved if the survey were repeated.

If conditions do not allow
The field day needs dry weather, safe trails and a permit where the land lies inside a protected area. Rain, landslide risk or an unapproved route moves the day into the Qingchengshan scenic area on established paths, or to a supervised session at the panda base.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Chengdu.

Morning - two sites, one river
The final working morning applies the week's method to a comparison. Depending on what the partner has agreed, the group samples at two or three points that sit in different conditions - above and below a weir or a treated discharge, inside a park wetland and on the open channel, or at the inlet and outlet of a constructed wetland that the city uses to polish stormwater. The reading of the results is the work: temperature, oxygen, turbidity and nutrient readings plotted against each other, alongside the time, the weather and the photographs. Volunteers are asked to state what the numbers do not show as clearly as what they do, and the partner's staff check every claimed conclusion before it is presented.

Late morning - compiling the record
Then the group builds the deliverable the partner actually wants, which is usually short and simple: a spreadsheet of all readings with the sample-point metadata, a folder of labelled photographs, a one-page summary in English and Chinese of what was observed at each site, and a list of anything that should be re-checked by staff. Nothing is published anywhere, on any platform, without the partner organisation's written agreement, and unpublished observations - a location of a bird nest, say, or a bank that is eroding - are treated as confidential in the same way the partner treats them.

Afternoon - presentation and handover
The group presents the week to the partner organisation: what was sampled, what the readings looked like, what was uncertain, what failed, and what the partner would need if they wanted a group to do the same again. The staff are asked directly what was not useful. This is also the point at which volunteers hear, usually for the first time, how a single week of visitor data fits into an organisation's year - and it is rarely by producing a finding, but by providing a small amount of labour the staff would otherwise have had to do themselves, and by leaving a record that can be continued.

Evening - closing seminar
The final session is a discussion rather than a summary, and it is built around three questions: what the week measured, what it did not measure, and what a group of eight visitors can and cannot claim about a river they have known for four days. Participants are asked to consider the alternative uses of the same money - funding a local monitoring programme, for example - and to say honestly whether the placement was worth the carbon and the cost. The record of participation, where the partner issues one, is handed over here.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Chengdu.

Morning — Field Records and Group Presentations
Each pair lays out its full field book: the cross-sections and flow notes from the Dujiangyan headworks, and the object records and stratigraphy from Sanxingdui and Jinsha. The exercise is to state one engineering conclusion and one archaeological conclusion that the evidence actually supports, and to say plainly which of their earlier assumptions the evidence does not support. Instructors question each pair and the group writes up a joint summary.

Midday — Review and Farewell Lunch
A short plenary pulls the two halves of the programme back together: how a state that could organise the Min River in 256 BC also produced a bronze industry of a scale that left no written account. A farewell lunch follows.

Afternoon — Departure Transfer
Your guide transfers the group to Chengdu Shuangliu or Chengdu Tianfu International Airport, or to Chengdu East Railway Station, for the onward journey, assisting with luggage and check-in.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.