The Sacred Ladder: How China’s World Tree Fell from Within

[theme music] On June first, the Shanghai Museum launched an exhibition called On Top of the World Tree: Ancient Civilizations of the Americas, which has drawn huge crowds eager to explore the mysteries of ancient culture in the Americas.

This exhibition brings together nearly three thousand artifacts from Mexico and Peru, many displayed outside their home countries for the first time.

And the public has shown remarkable enthusiasm, with more than ten thousand advance tickets sold within forty minutes.

Centered on the powerful cosmic symbol of the world tree, the show reveals how ancient American cultures envisioned this sacred tree as the axis of the universe, connecting the underworld, the human realm, and heaven.

For the Maya, Aztec, Olmec, and the Inca, the world tree was not merely a myth.

It was the ladder between gods and mortals, the fixed center of an entire theocratic order.

These civilizations devoted everything they had to sustaining it.

Their rulers were living gods.

Their priests controlled the weather, the harvest, the fate of nations.

Their temples consumed nearly all the wealth their societies could produce.

Then, almost everywhere, the world tree fell.

In the Americas, it fell from outside.

The Spanish conquest shattered the Aztec and Inca empires.

But in ancient China, in the long lost sacred city of Sanxingdui, its world tree fell from within.

It was broken not by foreign invaders, but by the very people who had built it.

This difference is one of the great untold stories of the ancient world.

As Chinese visitors marvel at the American artifacts in Shanghai, many pause to ask, "What happened to our world tree?" The answer lies buried in the red soil of Sichuan Province in southwestern China.