it was said the stone animal was first surfaced in dujiangyan, got relocated to chengdu, then was thrown in the river for some reason, and now it has been translocated into a museum upon re-discovered when cleaning up the river recently.
in the article you can see a couple of old style apartment buildings in the background…and yes they haven’t dug up Tianfu square in years.
but this ‘near’ comment is interesting. Maybe it’s one of the 2 construction sites next to TFS, a museum and library? I think the background buildings match pretty well the corner ‘library’ site.