5-Day Chengdu Study: Dujiangyan Hydrology & Shu Archaeology

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 — Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding
At the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, observe playful cubs munching bamboo and climbing trees in spacious enclosures. Your visit also introduces the conservation efforts working to protect this beloved endangered species, from breeding programs to habitat protection.

Lunch — Sichuan Hotpot
Feast on Sichuan hotpot at Haidilao, where numbing peppercorns and fiery broths ignite the senses. Cooking fresh ingredients at the table makes for a lively, interactive meal.

Afternoon — Jinli Ancient Street
Explore Jinli Ancient Street, a Tang Dynasty-style lane lined with tea houses, snack stalls, and artisan workshops. It is a pleasant place to browse local crafts and soak up Chengdu's relaxed pace.

Evening — Sichuan Opera
Cap the day with a Sichuan opera performance, featuring face-changing performers and fire-spitting acts. The show highlights one of the region's most distinctive theatrical traditions.

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.