About Sichuan Museum

Sichuan Museum

The Sichuan Museum in Chengdu is the largest comprehensive museum in southwest China and the principal repository for the history, art and ethnography of Sichuan and the wider Ba-Shu region. Founded in 1941, it holds more than 360,000 cultural objects, including over 1,300 first-grade relics, covering the ancient Ba and Shu cultures of the Sichuan Basin — a civilisation that developed in the upper Yangtze valley with a bronze art, a writing of picture-like symbols and a burial culture quite distinct from those of the Central Plains. Its present building, on South Huanhua Road beside Huanhuaxi Park, opened in 2009. Ba-Shu bronzes, Han-dynasty pictorial bricks, Buddhist sculpture from the Wanfo Temple site, Sichuan ceramics and a dedicated gallery of the paintings of Zhang Daqian make it a national first-class museum of the first importance.

Founded in 1941: Feng Hanji and the Early Museum

The museum was established in Chengdu in 1941. The archaeologist Feng Hanji, then associated with National Sichuan University, was recruited by the Sichuan provincial education authorities to organise the museum and became its first director. Feng was one of the founders of Sichuan archaeology, and his leadership gave the young institution a scholarly character from the start; he also led the excavation of the tomb of Wang Jian, founder of the Former Shu kingdom, now preserved as the Yongling Mausoleum. The museum he founded collected through the war years, when Chengdu was a rear-area city crowded with refugee universities and institutions, and the preservation of cultural property was an urgent national concern.

In 1950 the institution was renamed the Western Sichuan Museum, and in 1952 it took the name Sichuan Museum, which it has kept since, in its current Chinese form as Sichuan Bowuyuan. It is owned and funded by the Sichuan Provincial People's Government. Through the second half of the twentieth century it received the finds of Sichuan archaeology as excavation expanded across the province — bronzes from Ba-Shu tombs, Han pictorial bricks from cliff burials, Buddhist statues from demolished temples — until the collection outgrew its successive homes and a new building became unavoidable.

The Huanhuaxi Building of 2009

The present building stands at No. 251 South Huanhua Road in Chengdu's Qingyang District, in the Huanhuaxi Historical and Cultural Scenic Area, between Qingyang Palace and the Du Fu Thatched Cottage — a setting that places the museum among the city's most cherished cultural sites, beside the Huanhua stream celebrated by the Tang poet Du Fu. It opened in 2009 and organises its displays in some fourteen to fifteen exhibition halls across its floors. Travel and museum guides describe a characteristic route: Han-dynasty pottery art on the first floor; the Bronze Ware Gallery, the Zhang Daqian Art Gallery, the Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Gallery and the Ceramics Gallery on the second floor; and on the third floor the galleries of Tibetan Buddhism, of Buddha statues from Wanfo Temple, of Sichuan crafts, of Sichuan ethnic culture and of Sichuan history.

Admission to the permanent exhibitions is free, as in other major Chinese public museums, and the museum is closed on Mondays. The building's generous halls were designed for a collection that had reached hundreds of thousands of objects; even so, only a fraction can be shown at once, and the museum rotates material — most notably the paintings of Zhang Daqian, many of which are too fragile, and too precious, for permanent exposure.

The Collections in Overview

As of recent published counts, the museum holds more than 360,000 cultural objects, including 1,318 objects classified as first-grade cultural relics under China's system of cultural-property protection. The collections cover archaeology, ceramics, bronze vessels and weapons, sculpture, painting and calligraphy, coins, historical inscriptions, ethnographic objects, folk arts and modern historical material. They span the archaeology, history, art and ethnography of Sichuan from the Neolithic to the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China.

Particularly important groups, consistently singled out in descriptions of the museum, include ancient Ba-Shu bronzes, Han-dynasty tomb sculpture and pictorial bricks, Buddhist stone sculpture, Tibetan Buddhist objects, ceramics and porcelain from Sichuan kilns, and works by Zhang Daqian. It is a combination found nowhere else: the material of a distinctive Bronze Age civilisation, the tomb art of China's most prosperous Han-dynasty province, the Buddhist sculpture of a great pilgrimage region, and the life's work of one of the twentieth century's most famous Chinese painters, all gathered in the city where he was formed.

Ba-Shu Bronzes: A Civilisation of Its Own

The Gallery of Bronze Ware displays some 271 units of bronze ware from the Western Zhou dynasty to the Warring States period, divided into five parts covering vessels, weapons, tools and small human figures. Most of the bronzes were found by archaeologists in Sichuan and Chongqing in the 1950s, and they demonstrate that the Ba and Shu peoples reached a peak of culture in the Sichuan Basin three to four thousand years ago. Ba-Shu bronze has a character of its own: a wide range of blades, weapons and tools; vessels engraved with special pictorial symbols — casts in the forms of palms, flowers, tigers and birds; and, alongside the local style, pieces similar to those of neighbouring states, such as the bronzes of the nine tombs at Xindu, which resemble the bronze ware of Chu.

Among notable individual objects in the museum is a Warring States bronze vessel decorated with scenes of land and naval warfare — a vessel about forty centimetres tall engraved with more than 200 human figures depicting hunting, mulberry picking, banquets and battle on land and water. Such pictorial bronzes are documents as much as artworks, picturing the ceremonies and wars of the Ba-Shu world. A set of chime bells with gold-inlaid decoration excavated from Chongqing, more than 2,000 years old, can still sound. Together with the museum's Neolithic human-face pendant associated with the Daxi culture — a small black jade face of 5,000 to 6,000 years ago — the bronze gallery argues that the upper Yangtze sustained an original, sophisticated civilisation alongside the Shang and Zhou of the Central Plains, a case the discoveries at Sanxingdui and Jinsha, whose material is shown in their own site museums, have since made famous worldwide.

Han-Dynasty Pictorial Bricks and Pottery

Sichuan in the Han dynasty was rich, populous and famous for its pleasures, and its tombs preserve that world in clay. The Gallery of Pottery Art in the Han Dynasty shows more than 200 pieces of pictorial bricks and pottery sculptures. Pictorial bricks — moulded bricks whose faces carry scenes of harvesting, feasting, music, hunting and mythology — lined the chamber tombs of Han Sichuan, while pottery figures peopled them: servants, musicians, farmers and entertainers modelled with a humour and observation that make Han Sichuan sculpture beloved far beyond China.

The emblematic figure is the Eastern Han storytelling figurine, a cheerful pottery drummer-singer caught mid-performance, drum under one arm and face split by a grin. Carved stones accompany the bricks: fragments of stone steles engraved with Confucian classics during the Later Shu period connect the Han tradition of stone inscription to its Sichuan successors a thousand years later. For social historians these galleries are a primary source — the nearest thing Han China left to photographs of daily life — and for visitors they are often the most immediately enjoyable rooms in the museum.

Buddhist Sculpture and the Wanfo Temple

The museum's Buddhist sculpture is anchored by the material recovered from the site of the Wanfo Temple, the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas, in Chengdu. The temple, one of the great Buddhist establishments of the southwest, was destroyed in the modern era, but its sculptures — excavated from the site where they had been buried and preserved — survive in the museum, and a dedicated gallery on the third floor displays them. Southern Dynasties and later stone Buddhas from Wanfo Temple are counted among the museum's signature holdings, their serene carving showing how the Buddhist art of the southern courts reached and transformed the Sichuan Basin.

A separate Gallery of Tibetan Buddhism presents the art of the Tibetan plateau, with which Sichuan has been in continuous exchange for over a millennium: thangkas, gilt images, ritual implements and texts reflecting the province's position as the corridor between Chengdu, Kangding and Lhasa. The two galleries together explain a permanent feature of Sichuan culture — its layering of Chinese Buddhism, arriving from both north and south, with the Tibetan Buddhism of its western highlands, where the museum's ethnographic collections, covering Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other peoples in costume, masks and tools, complete the picture.

Ceramics, Calligraphy and the Tang Guqin

The Ceramics Gallery presents ceramics and porcelain from Sichuan kilns within the wider Chinese ceramic story, from Han pottery through the wares of the province's own kiln sites. Sichuan's kilns served a vast regional market, and their products — everyday jars and fine wares alike — chart the province's economic history as faithfully as its bronzes chart its Bronze Age. The Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Gallery draws on the museum's holdings across the dynasties, providing the context in which the Zhang Daqian gallery, next door, should be read.

One musical treasure deserves particular note: the Tang-dynasty guqin known as Shijian Qiaobing, Knocking Ice by a Mountain Stream. The seven-stringed zither is one of only about twenty surviving Tang-era instruments worldwide, and its presence in Chengdu testifies to Sichuan's standing in the musical culture of the Tang, when the province's conservatories and temple fairs were famous across the empire. Objects of this rarity — a playable survivor from the eighth or ninth century — give the museum's art galleries a depth that complements its archaeological fame.

The Zhang Daqian Gallery

The dedicated gallery of Zhang Daqian presents the paintings and calligraphy of the Sichuan-born master (1899–1983), among the most celebrated Chinese painters of the twentieth century — the painter honoured as the Oriental Brush, who in the 1950s travelled the world and exchanged experience with Picasso. The Sichuan Museum's Zhang Daqian collection is one of the defining holdings of the institution, and at its core stand his copies of the Dunhuang murals.

During his wartime stay at the Mogao Caves in the early 1940s, Zhang Daqian copied more than 200 Dunhuang frescoes, studying the Tang and earlier wall paintings at first hand and transforming his own art in the process. The Sichuan Museum collected 183 of those copies. Many were left unfinished under the time limits of his Dunhuang sojourn; brought back to Sichuan, they were folded in boxes and stored at places including Zhaojue Temple and Shahe Village, until in 1963 Zhang Daqian's family formally donated the batch to the Sichuan Museum. Because most of the paintings cannot be exhibited abroad, the collection is truly rare: Chengdu is the place to study Zhang's Dunhuang copies, displayed near a wax figure of the artist and alongside his other paintings and calligraphy, in the province where he was born and to which his family entrusted the work.

The Museum's Place in Southwest China

The Sichuan Museum describes itself, with justification, as the largest comprehensive museum in southwest China and a national first-class museum. Its role extends beyond its galleries: it is the provincial repository to which Sichuan's excavated heritage comes, a research institution for Ba-Shu studies, Han art and Sichuan Buddhism, and a partner to the site museums at Sanxingdui, Jinsha and Yongling, whose stories its own galleries frame and complete. A visitor who begins at Huanhuaxi — with the bronzes of Ba and Shu, the grinning Han drummer, the Wanfo Temple Buddhas and Zhang Daqian's Dunhuang copies — holds the key to every other museum in the province. That is the achievement of the institution Feng Hanji founded in 1941: a single building in which five thousand years of a great and distinctive regional civilisation can be read, object by object, from a Neolithic jade face to the brushwork of the modern master who copied the caves of Dunhuang.