China Guide
The Yangzi basin
Hubei Provincial Museum
Opening time: Daily 8.30am – noon & 1.30–5pm
Price: ¥30
Address: Donghu Lu, Wuchang
Hubei Provincial Museum's display of items unearthed from the Warring States Period's tomb of the Marquis Yi deserves a good hour of your time – especially if you're planning on visiting similar collections at Jingzhou and Changsha.
The marquis died in 433 BC and was buried in a huge, multi-layered, wooden lacquered coffin at nearby Suizhou, then a major city of the state of Zeng. His corpse was accompanied by fifteen thousand bronze and wooden artefacts, twenty-one women and one dog. The museum's comprehensive English explanations of contemporary history and photos of the 1978 excavation put everything in perspective. Don't miss the impressive orchestra of 64 bronze bells, ranging in weight from a couple of kilos to a quarter of a tonne, found in the waterlogged tomb – the largest such set ever discovered – along with the wooden frame from which they once hung in rows. Played with hand-held rods, each bell can produce two notes depending on where it is struck. The knowledge of metals and casting required to achieve this initially boggled modern researchers, who took five years to make duplicates. Souvenir shops outside sell pricey recordings of period tunes played on the bells, and there are brief performances every hour or so in the museum's auditorium. More than a hundred other musical instruments are also on display, including stone chimes, drums, flutes and zithers, along with spearheads and a very weird brazen crane totem sprouting antlers – an inscription suggests that this was the marquis's steed in the afterlife.