SHANGHAI, July 9 (Xinhua) — Cornstalks planted two weeks ago outside Shanghai Museum have grown human high to greet visitors, as the museum’s blockbuster show focused on ancient American civilizations featuring nearly 3,000 relics from Mexico and Peru opened on Thursday.
Corn, a sacred symbol of life and fertility across Maya, Aztec and other ancient American cultures, serves as the symbolic entrance to this landmark ancient Americas exhibition.
Spanning of run of 16 months until November 2027, the exhibition named “On Top of the World Tree: Ancient Civilizations of the Americas” is destined to become one of the longest-running and most influential cultural events of its kind.
Among the star pieces in the exhibition are an Olmec Colossal Stone Head, a four-meter Maya stela recovered from Calakmul, maize god sculptures and monumental sacrificial relics from the Great Temple of Aztec. These treasures were ferried by two Boeing 777 cargo planes to Shanghai via a collaborative effort between Shanghai Museum and cultural authorities in Mexico and Peru.
Jose Luis Perea, deputy director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, called the exhibition “unprecedented” in its scope.
“This exhibition is a dialogue between two of humanity’s most ancient, intricate civilizations,” he said. “It does not merely connect two nations, but two millennia-old ways of seeing the world.”
The exhibition offers an immersive visitor experience with a four-story-high replica of the sacred World Tree. Guests can climb a full-scale American pyramid replica, where a panoramic screen unfolds the starry skies and rugged plateaus of pre-Columbian South America.
A collaborative VR experience, named “Flying Over Machu Picchu in Peru,” uses dynamic 360-degree seating to carry visitors soaring over the Andean cliffs and terraces, offering a bird’s-eye view of the Inca realm.
The museum has prepared more than 3,000 varieties of creative merchandise for the exhibition, which ranges from maize god figurines, magnetic parrot shoulder ornaments, and delicate Maya calendar bracelets to plush jaguar toys. Notably, images of these cultural products have fueled a viral social media buzz regarding Latin American culture ahead of this exhibition in east China.
Chu Xiaobo, Shanghai Museum director, said the exhibition is more than a cultural spectacle, with the institution also launching joint archaeological missions, sending Chinese researchers to conduct fieldwork across the Americas.
“The Americas hold a complete and profound civilization system,” Chu said. “To understand it is to reposition China’s own history and culture within a wider global context.”
Cuban visitor Thiago called the show unparalleled. “I have never encountered such a complete, vivid and sweeping narrative of American civilization, not even in the Americas.”
The exhibition follows the museum’s prior blockbuster focused on ancient Egyptian culture, which drew 2.77 million visitors and generated 760 million yuan (about 112 million U.S. dollars) in revenue, securing a world record for a single ticketed museum exhibition.
