Archaeologists have unearthed a jade workshop dating back more than 3,400 years at the Sanxingdui ruins in southwest Chin.

According to news Yijing Shen from www.scmp.com Chinese archaeologists have unearthed a jade workshop dating back more than 3,400 years at the Sanxingdui ruins in southwest Chin.

“This is the first time a handicraft workshop has been discovered at Sanxingdui. It fills a gap in the archaeological research on Sanxingdui and is of great significance,” said Ran Honglin, director of the Sanxingdui Site Workstation of the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, in an interview with official news agency Xinhua.

The artefacts include raw jade, finished products as well as scraps, fragments and blank pieces of the stone, representing various stages of the production process.

Sanxingdui is considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, providing a glimpse into a little-known culture that flourished more than 3,000 years ago in what is now Sichuan province.

Findings from Sanxingdui have distinctive regional characteristics and have been viewed as symbols of the diversity within ancient Chinese civilisation.