China Guide
The Yellow River
Shaanxi History Museum
Opening time: March– Nov 8.30am–6pm; Dec– Feb 9am–5.30pm
Price: March– Nov ¥50; Dec– Feb ¥35
One of the city's major highlights, the Shaanxi History Museum is an impressive modern building with spacious, well laid out exhibition halls and English captions, displaying to full advantage a magnificent collection of more than three thousand relics.
The lower floor, which contains a general survey of the development of civilization until the Zhou dynasty, holds mostly weapons, ceramics and simple ornaments – most impressive is a superb set of Western Zhou and Shang bronze vessels covered in geometric designs suggestive of animal shapes, used for storing and cooking ritual food. The western hall holds bronzes and ceramics, in which the best-looking artefacts are Tang. Large numbers of ceramic funerary objects include superbly expressive and rather vicious-looking camels, guardians, dancers, courtiers and warriors, glazed and unglazed. The eastern hall holds a display of Tang gold and silver, mainly finely wrought images of dragons and tiny, delicate flowers and birds, and an exhibition of Tang costume and ornament. The hall's introduction states that Tang women led "brisk and liberated lives", though it's hard to imagine how when you see the wigs arranged to show their complex, gravity-defying hair-dos, and the tall, thin wooden soles on their shoes.
The two upstairs galleries display relics from the Han through the Qing dynasties; notable are the Han ceramic funerary objects, particularly the model houses.