Gold and silver trace the pulse of Chinese civilization

HEFEI — Civilizations rise and fall, yet some endure. At the Anhui Museum in eastern China, a recent exhibition of ancient gold and silver artifacts offered visitors an unusually intimate glimpse into how power, belief and daily life played out — not through texts, but through precious metals.

Gold's Radiance Steeps Ancient China, one of China's most extensive exhibitions of its kind to date, closed earlier this month after tracing nearly four millennia of craftsmanship, exchange and imagination.

The exhibition brought together 490 cultural artifacts, drawn from 61 museums and archaeological institutions across 22 provincial-level regions.

Liu Huawei, the exhibition's curator and deputy director of the Anhui Museum, says the objects represented discoveries from 156 archaeological sites. Nearly 200 of the items displayed are classified as China's first-grade cultural relics, and dozens were exhibited to the public for the first time.

"The exhibition aimed to convey the shared human emotions and everyday sensibilities that resonate across time," Liu says. More fundamentally, he notes, the decision to curate this exhibition stemmed from the belief that Chinese gold and silver artifacts provide a unique lens to observe Chinese civilization.

While gold and silver have long been symbols of wealth and power, in ancient China, these precious metals carried a much deeper significance; they captured the evolving story of a civilization learning to survive, flourish and endure for millennia.

China is one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations. Its consistency, originality, unity, inclusivity and peaceful nature are not abstract concepts, but prominent features that are tangible in material culture.

To illustrate this, Liu singled out five artifacts from the exhibition that would form a concise, vivid narrative.

A tiny silver Kaiyuan Tongbao coin underscores the extraordinary continuity of Chinese civilization, where monetary forms outlived dynasties by more than a millennium, he says. Issued in 621 by the founding emperor of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the Kaiyuan Tongbao, which translates to "circulating treasure from the inauguration of a new epoch", became the most important currency of the Tang Dynasty. It established the tongbao coin system, which persisted for more than 1,200 years.