About Gansu Provincial Museum

Gansu Provincial Museum

The Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou is the central museum of Gansu Province, holding some 355,000 artefacts that document the Hexi Corridor — the narrow land bridge between the Yellow River and the deserts of Central Asia along which the Silk Road ran. No other Chinese provincial museum is so completely shaped by a single trade route. Its galleries present Neolithic painted pottery, Han-dynasty bronzes and wooden slips, Silk Road textiles and Buddhist art, and fossils from the province's dinosaur beds; and it guards one object known to every Chinese schoolchild, the Eastern Han bronze Flying Horse of Gansu, a galloping horse balanced on a flying swallow that has become the symbol of China tourism. Founded in 1939 and housed on Xijin West Road in Lanzhou's Qilihe District, the museum was named a national first-grade museum in the 2012 assessment.

From Science and Education Museum to Provincial Museum

The museum was founded in 1939 as the Gansu Science and Education Museum, an institution of the Republican era that combined natural science with education. In 1950, after the founding of the People's Republic, it was renamed the Northwest People's Science Museum, and in 1956 it took its present name, the Gansu Provincial Museum. One historical summary notes that the museum was originally devoted to the history of Gansu itself, and that after three years of renovation it was re-purposed in 1956 as a natural history museum — a reminder that its dual identity, part history museum and part natural science museum, is built into its structure. Its collections are formally organised in two main sections, history and natural science.

The building most visitors know was first built in 1956 and opened in 1959, covering about 21,000 square metres with an exhibition space of about 13,000 square metres; its form — five floors in the middle block and three floors on either side — became a Lanzhou landmark on the banks of the Yellow River. Since its foundation the museum has held almost 300 exhibitions, by some counts more than 300, attracting nearly ten million domestic and foreign visitors, and items from its collections have been exhibited in the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Croatia, Singapore and Hong Kong, among other places.

The Scale of the Collections

Current institutional figures give the holding as some 355,000 artefacts — one published count gives 355,364 — spanning relics, fossils and works of art. Older summaries, reflecting earlier stages of collecting, cite nearly 100,000 pieces of relics and specimens, or up to 80,000 works of art; the growth in the headline figure reflects the museum's role as the repository for a province of exceptional archaeological richness. Gansu sits at a convergence zone of Han and Tibetan cultures and of the Central Plains, the Western Regions and the Tibetan Plateau, and its collections embody that diversity.

The museum's unique holdings are consistently listed as painted pottery from the Neolithic Age, fossils of ancient creatures, wooden and bamboo slips of the Han dynasty, documents, Silk Road treasures from the Han to the Tang dynasties, and Buddhist artworks. Together with Wei and Jin mural bricks and revolutionary relics, these groups define the permanent exhibitions: Silk Road civilisation, Gansu painted pottery, Gansu Buddhist art, palaeontological fossils, and Red Gansu. The museum describes itself as a large comprehensive museum centred on the civilisation of the Silk Road, and the description is accurate — even its Neolithic and fossil galleries serve a region whose fame rests on the corridor that crossed it.

The Flying Horse of Gansu

The museum's single most famous object is the Eastern Han bronze known in English as the Flying Horse of Gansu, the Galloping Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow. It is 34.5 centimetres tall, about 45 centimetres long and 13.1 centimetres wide, and weighs 7.3 kilograms. The horse is shown at full gallop, head raised and neighing, with three hooves in the air and the fourth resting lightly on the back of a flying swallow — a feat of balance and casting that holds the whole weight of the figure on a single point. It dates to the Eastern Han dynasty, around the second century AD.

The bronze was excavated in 1969 from the Leitai Han tomb at Wuwei, in the Hexi Corridor, together with a procession of bronze chariots and horses that is displayed with it: an honour guard in miniature, escorting the tomb's occupant in the afterlife. In the 1980s the Chinese government identified the galloping horse as the symbol of Chinese tourism, and its silhouette — reproduced in the China tourism logo and in replicas at stations and airports across the country, including in Lanzhou itself — became one of the most recognisable images in China. In the museum the original is displayed in a prime position in the Silk Road Civilisation exhibition on the second floor; visitors should note that the original is normally exhibited for part of the year, roughly from May to mid-October, with a replica shown at other times.

Civilisation Along the Silk Road in Gansu

The Silk Road Civilisation exhibition is the museum's centrepiece. It presents more than 420 artefacts telling the story of the ancient Silk Road within Gansu from its origins to its peak: northern grassland bronzes, the bronze galloping horse and its honour guard, silk products of the Han and Tang dynasties, Buddhist statues, gold and silver vessels, Tang sancai three-colour glazed pottery, and Yuan-dynasty blue-and-white porcelain. Han and Tang silk textiles, gold and silver artefacts and everyday objects together make the prosperity of Silk Road trade tangible — this was the corridor through which silk left China and glass, metalwork, religions and crops entered it.

Two further treasures share the hall. The mural brick depicting a courier, from the Wei-Jin tombs at Jiayuguan, shows a messenger galloping on horseback; famously, the courier is painted without a mouth, a visual pun on the courier's duty to keep silent — to keep his mouth shut — and the image has become an unofficial emblem of China Post. Han-dynasty bamboo and wooden slips, the paperwork of the corridor's garrisons and post stations, reveal daily life and administration along the route: rations, patrols, letters and orders preserved by the desert dryness. A lotus-shaped glass vessel, a piece of imported glassware treasured along the route, is also counted among the museum's celebrated objects.

Gansu Painted Pottery and the Neolithic

If the Silk Road is Gansu's fame, painted pottery is its foundation. The Painted Pottery exhibition, on the third floor, displays more than 400 pieces, tracing the history of painted pottery in Gansu through the cultures of the upper Yellow River valley: Dadiwan, Yangshao and Majiayao among them. Dadiwan, whose ancient settlement is believed to span back some 7,000 years, anchors the early end of the sequence; the Majiayao culture anchors its artistic peak, with vessels painted in fluid black designs — spiral, sawtooth and wave patterns that rank among the masterpieces of Neolithic art anywhere in the world.

The emblem of the gallery is the painted pottery vase with a human-head-shaped mouth, one of the museum's three recognised treasures alongside the galloping horse and the courier brick: a vessel whose neck and mouth are modelled as a human head, uniting sculpture and pottery in a single Neolithic object. Early examples of ink calligraphy and characters carved into wood, also shown in the museum's displays, connect this prehistoric world to the literate civilisation that followed. Gansu's painted pottery cultures flourished for millennia before the Silk Road existed; the museum's argument is that the corridor's later cosmopolitanism grew from this deep local root.

Buddhist Art of Gansu

The Buddhist Art exhibition, also on the third floor, presents more than 100 Buddhist cultural relics dating from the Sixteen Kingdoms period to the Ming and Qing dynasties. Gansu was the gateway through which Buddhism entered China from Central Asia, and its cliff temples — Mogao at Dunhuang, Maijishan near Tianshui, Bingling and others — are among the wonders of world art. The museum's gallery brings that heritage into Lanzhou: it features replicas of caves from the Mogao Grottoes and the Maijishan Grottoes alongside statues, ritual objects, white pagodas and prayer wheels from both Han Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism.

The pairing of replicas with original sculpture is deliberate. The great grottoes cannot move, and many visitors to Lanzhou will not reach Dunhuang; the museum therefore serves as an introduction and an orientation, showing how Buddhist imagery changed as it travelled the corridor — Gandharan and Central Asian influences giving way to Chinese styles, and Tibetan forms arriving from the plateau. Handwritten Buddhist sutras among the Silk Road exhibits complete the picture of a religion carried by text as well as by image.

Fossils, Elephants and Dinosaurs

The natural science half of the museum is represented by the Palaeontological Fossils exhibition. Its popular centrepiece is the skeleton of the Yellow River ancient elephant unearthed at Heshui — a mammoth fossil replica some four metres tall has been described as among the biggest and best preserved of its kind — and its dinosaur displays draw on Gansu's Cretaceous beds, which have yielded rich dinosaur material. Fossils in the museum's remit include dinosaur remains and the wider fossil record of a province where sedimentary basins preserve life from many eras.

These galleries do quiet but important work. They establish that Gansu's significance is geological as well as historical: the same landscapes of loess, desert and river valley that channelled the Silk Road also preserved, in their sediments, both the bones of dinosaurs and the painted pottery of farmers. School groups in particular move from the dinosaur hall to the pottery hall in a single visit, and the museum's two-section structure — history and natural science under one roof — makes that movement natural.

Red Gansu and the Modern Galleries

The Red Gansu exhibition narrates the province's modern revolutionary history, showing historical artefacts and materials from periods such as the Nanliang base area and the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region — the Communist base areas of the 1930s and the Anti-Japanese War era, in which Gansu's east played a significant part. Wei and Jin murals, charts of the Silk Road and modern historical material shown elsewhere in the building extend the museum's story from the Han tombs to the twentieth century.

The first floor houses a rotating temporary exhibition hall, regularly hosting special exhibitions of cultural heritage and artworks, alongside services including the museum shop and café whose galloping-horse souvenirs carry the collection's emblem across China. More than 300 exhibitions held since the museum's foundation, and loans shown on four continents, testify to an institution in constant use. Named a national first-grade museum in the 2012 assessment, the Gansu Provincial Museum remains what its site and its collection make it: the museum of the Hexi Corridor, where the story of the Silk Road is told through the objects the corridor itself preserved — above all, a bronze horse, balanced on a swallow, still galloping after eighteen centuries.