About Datong Museum

Datong Museum

Datong Museum, in Chinese Datong City Museum, is the comprehensive history museum of Datong in Shanxi Province, northern China. It is a national first-class museum, and its subject is the city itself: a place that was Pingcheng, capital of the Northern Wei dynasty from 398, the Western Capital — Xijing — of the Liao and Jin dynasties, and a fortified frontier town of strategic importance under the Ming and Qing. Few Chinese cities have changed roles so often, and the museum's permanent displays are organised around exactly those transformations. Its stated theme, rendered in English-language reporting as harmony in Datong, is the long process of ethnic integration through which northern peoples and Han Chinese political, economic, military and cultural life were repeatedly joined in this border region.

That theme gives the museum a coherence that a simple chronological survey would lack. Again and again, its galleries return to exchange: Xianbei ornaments beside Han-style tomb painting, Persian silver coins in a northern Chinese capital, Buddhist sculpture in the orbit of the Yungang Grottoes, and porcelain, bronze and painting produced in a garrison city that was also a trading centre. For a visitor going on to Datong's temples, city walls and grottoes, the museum is the natural place to begin, because it explains why so much of what survives in the city belongs to successive, very different regimes.

Origins and institutional history

The museum began as the Datong City Museum of Cultural Relics exhibition hall at the end of the 1950s — sources date that predecessor to 1958 or 1959 — and it was officially renamed the Datong Museum, or Datong City Museum, in 1963. Over more than half a century the institution occupied a succession of homes, among them the Lower Huayan Temple, the west hall of an exhibition hall, and the astronomical building of Datong No. 10 Middle School. Those moves reflect a familiar pattern for Chinese municipal museums of the period: a growing civic collection, assembled largely from local finds, housed wherever suitable historic or public space could be found.

The institution's standing rose with its collection. In 2009 it was recognised as a national second-level museum, and it is now graded a national first-class museum, the highest category in China's museum classification. A new purpose-built home was planned from 2009, construction began on 18 May 2010, and the present building opened to visitors on 31 December 2014. The move ended the era of borrowed premises and gave the museum, for the first time, a building designed around its own narrative of Datong's past.

A new home on Taihe Road

The present museum stands at 506 Taihe Road in Pingcheng District, in the newer eastern part of Datong. It covers 51,556 square metres of land and provides 32,821 square metres of building area, arranged over one underground floor and three floors above ground, with partial mezzanine levels. Exhibition space is reported at roughly 9,000 to 10,000 square metres. At the opening in 2014, about 4,000 objects were placed on display in the different halls, selected at that time from a city collection then reported at around 70,000 relics; reporting at the opening also described a large entrance wall painting of Northern Wei nobility, 15.5 metres high and 50 metres wide, by Sun Jingbo and Wang Yingsheng of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, its scale matched to Northern Wei tombs found near the city.

Scale matters here because the collection has continued to grow. Recent accounts put the holdings at more than 170,000 cultural relics, including more than 3,000 precious pieces or sets, the great majority of them found locally. Most of those objects necessarily remain in store, which is why the museum's published emphasis falls on the quality of its Northern Wei, Liao and Jin material rather than on the sheer number of items a visitor will see.

Architecture: Volcano, Dragon Wall and Grottoes

The building was designed under the architect Cui Kai, and its forms are a deliberate summary of Datong's landscape and culture. Accounts of the design describe elements drawn from the Datong volcanic group, from dragon-wall carving — the city is famous for its glazed Nine Dragon Wall — and from the spatial rhythm and evolution of the Yungang Grottoes, the great Buddhist cave temples outside the city. The resulting massing is often described as a spiral, double-S form, like dragons entwining or a dragon soaring, wrapped around a central hall.

The symbolism is explicit. Datong stood for centuries on the border between Han agricultural China and the peoples of the northern steppe, and the building is meant to embody the fusion of Hu — northern — and Han cultures that the displays inside describe. A spiral plan that draws different strands into one whole is therefore not decoration for its own sake. It is the museum's argument in architectural form: that Datong's identity was made by integration, and that the objects in the galleries, from Xianbei metalwork to Han-style lacquer painting, are products of that meeting rather than of a single tradition.

The Collection

With more than 170,000 cultural relics and more than 3,000 precious pieces, the collection is broad, but its reputation rests on clear strengths. English-language introductions to the museum consistently single out the relics of the Northern Wei, Liao and Jin dynasties, and describe the holdings as famous for the culture of northern peoples and for the military and religious culture of a border town. The Northern Wei material is the most celebrated of all, because it documents Datong in its years as an imperial capital.

Named highlights recur across accounts of the museum: the screen paintings and ceremonial troop material from the tomb of Sima Jinlong, including five wooden lacquer panels; the ancestral headstones associated with Song Shaozu; Persian silver coins, evidence of long-distance exchange reaching the Pingcheng court; Xianbei objects and accessories; and Northern Wei ceramics or celadon. Stone carvings excavated from Northern Wei architectural remains outside Datong's south gate are described as particularly rare in the history of Chinese stone carving. Together these objects show a capital connected simultaneously to the steppe, to Han artistic traditions and to trade routes running west.

Pingcheng, Capital of the Northern Wei

The central chapter of the permanent display is the Wei capital, Pingcheng. The Northern Wei dynasty, dated 386 to 534, made Pingcheng its capital in 398, and the city remained the seat of the dynasty until 494. The basic exhibition is divided chronologically into four parts: the changes or vicissitudes of the land and the prelude to Datong's early civilisation; the Wei capital Pingcheng; the Liao and Jin Western Capital; and Datong as a town of strategic importance in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Within that structure, the Pingcheng section does the heaviest work, using palace and architectural remains, ritual objects and the contents of tombs of different ranks to reconstruct the society of the capital.

Archaeology around the city supports that reconstruction. Excavations at the Pingcheng site have produced remains of palace architecture and royal ritual relics, while tomb groups, including more than a hundred Northern Wei tombs cleared along the Yuhe River south of the city, belonged to royal nobles, aristocratic families and commoners. Presented together, models of the capital, Buddhist sculpture, pottery figures, glass vessels and tomb furnishings let the museum show both the monumental city and the people buried around it.

Signature Tombs: Sima Jinlong and Song Shaozu

Two Northern Wei tombs anchor the museum's best-known material. The joint tomb of Sima Jinlong and his wife Ji Chen was discovered in November 1965 at Shijiazhai, in Datong's eastern suburbs, during well-drilling for farm work, and was identified from its epitaphs. Sima Jinlong, a Northern Wei official who held the title of Prince of Langya, died in 484. More than 450 objects were recovered from the tomb by several accounts, including large numbers of painted pottery figurines, stone plinths and a carved stone coffin bed — a burial whose mixed Han and Tuoba, or Xianbei, aesthetics are themselves an exhibit in the museum's story of integration.

The tomb's most famous object is its painted lacquer screen: five relatively complete wooden panels, each about 80 centimetres long, 20 centimetres wide and 2.5 centimetres thick, joined and painted in lacquer on both sides with stories of wise emperors, loyal ministers, virtuous women and filial sons, a Han-dynasty moralising tradition carried into a Northern Wei aristocratic tomb. A Northern Wei painted figure-story lacquer screen of this type is included on China's list of cultural relics prohibited from exhibition abroad. The tomb of Song Shaozu, dated to 477, is the other landmark find: a three-month excavation recovered an exquisitely carved stone coffin and 179 burial objects, including painted pottery figurines of a walking guard of honour, and it is described as a milestone in Northern Wei archaeology after Sima Jinlong.

Western Capital and Frontier Town

Datong's second great period came under the Liao and Jin, when the city was Xijing, the Western Capital. The Liao and Jin Western Capital display presents Datong as a political and cultural centre through the Liao, Jin and Mongol Yuan periods, a stage for what the museum describes as the second major ethnic integration in Chinese history, as Khitan, Jurchen and Mongol peoples succeeded one another in ruling the north. Ceramics, architectural decoration such as glazed roof ornaments, religious objects and everyday artefacts give that Western Capital a material character distinct from Pingcheng's.

The final basic chapter turns to the Ming and Qing dynasties, when Datong was no longer a capital but a fortified frontier city of strategic importance. The display follows the city through war and peace on the Ming frontier and into its later life as a centre of trade and culture, including the rise of Shanxi merchants and the prosperity that commerce brought. Read in sequence, the three later chapters make a point the museum returns to throughout: Datong's importance did not end when the Northern Wei court left in the fifth century, but changed form — capital, western capital, then garrison and trading town.

Themed Galleries: Dinosaurs, Porcelain, Painting and Buddhist Art

Alongside the four chronological chapters, the museum maintains themed displays. Dinosaurs in Datong occupies a first-floor hall devoted to dinosaur fossils found around the city, presenting the region's Mesozoic past and, as opening reports put it, the feeling of passing back to the Jurassic Age; a woolly rhinoceros fossil is also among the main collections named in introductions to the museum. Treasures of the Porcelain Road presents ceramics from the Tang dynasty onwards, with strength in the Liao, Jin and Yuan periods, reflecting northern China's porcelain production. Other themed halls are devoted to painting and calligraphy — the Miaobi Danqing display — and to Buddhist art, the display rendered as Sanskrit Pure Sound, presenting Buddhist and Taoist statues.

These galleries broaden the museum beyond dynastic narrative. The dinosaur hall anchors Datong's story in deep time before human settlement, the porcelain display follows a craft and trade that crossed dynasties, and the Buddhist art gallery connects the collections to the religious world that produced Yungang. Temporary exhibitions have added further subjects over the years, including Datong's modern revolutionary history and exhibitions of ancient bronze art, allowing material from the large stored collection to rotate into public view.

A Museum System and Visiting

Datong Museum is also the centre of a wider museum system. Under a general-and-branch museum model, it leads nine branch museums that have opened to the public, each with a specific theme complementing the main narrative: the Liang Sicheng Memorial Hall, the Pingcheng Memorial Hall, the Mingtang Site Museum — built on the Northern Wei Mingtang ritual site — the Kuixing Culture Museum, the Northern Dynasties Art Museum, the Liao, Jin and Yuan Dynasties Ethnic Integration Museum, the Datong Revolutionary Memorial Hall, the Ancient Bronze Art Museum, and the memorial hall at the former house of the Weibei calligrapher Zhang Aitang. Scholars describing the system present it as a way of telling Datong's complete history in the places where parts of it happened, and of supporting Datong's ambition to be a museum city.

For the visitor, the main museum is generally reported as open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with last admission at 4 p.m. and closure on Mondays, and recent visitor guides describe admission as free with an advance reservation required; intending visitors should confirm current arrangements before travelling, as the candidate record for the museum lists no official website. Buses including routes 65 and 66 serve the museum stop on Taihe Road. Allow the Northern Wei galleries the most time: Pingcheng is where Datong Museum is at its most distinctive, and it is the chapter of Chinese history that this city, above all others, is placed to tell.