About Hebei Museum

Hebei Museum

The Hebei Museum in Shijiazhuang is the only provincial-level comprehensive museum in Hebei Province and the principal showcase of the history of the North China plain. It stands in the centre of the provincial capital, between Zhongshan Road to the north and Fanxi Road to the south, beside the Hebei provincial exhibition centre square, its older northern building on Zhongshan East Road housing temporary exhibitions and its newer southern building housing the permanent collection. Its official website is hebeimuseum.org. The museum is a national first-class museum, and wandering its cavernous halls takes the visitor from Palaeolithic Hebei through the mysterious Zhongshan kingdom to the Han dynasty tombs whose jade burial suits are famous around the world.

From Baoding in 1953 to Shijiazhuang

The museum first opened in April 1953 at the Ancient Lotus Pond in Baoding, then the provincial capital. When the capital moved, the museum moved with the provincial government to Shijiazhuang in the 1980s, after two relocations reopening on Zhongshan Road in October 1987 — some accounts give 1 October 1987 for the reopening at the present site. There it remained a single-building museum until a major expansion transformed it. On 9 June 2014 it reopened in greatly expanded form as the Hebei Museum, with a total area of some 53,128 square metres, of which about 20,000 to 22,000 square metres are used for exhibitions. It is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with free entry on presentation of valid identification.

Scale of the Collections

The museum holds around 150,000 cultural relics, several hundred of them first-grade — one official profile gives 565 first-grade cultural relics — together with more than 50,000 books, the majority recording the local history of places in Hebei. Its permanent galleries connect the threads of the province's past in ten thematic exhibitions in recent descriptions: Hebei in the Stone Age, the ancient Zhongshan kingdom, the Yan and Zhao states, the Mancheng Han tombs, Northern Dynasties murals, Quyang stone sculpture, regional ceramics, and displays of porcelain, calligraphy and folklore. The collection's function, as the province's only comprehensive museum, is the collection, exhibition, publicity and research of cultural relics from across Hebei.

The Mancheng Han Tombs: Discovery in 1968

The museum's fame rests above all on the Han dynasty tombs of Mancheng. In May 1968, soldiers of an engineering unit working on Lingshan mountain in Mancheng County, near Baoding, accidentally broke into an ancient tomb that had slept undisturbed for more than 2,000 years. It proved to be the cliff tomb of Liu Sheng, Prince Jing of Zhongshan, a son of Emperor Jing of the Western Han, who died in 113 BC; a second, similar tomb about a hundred metres to the north held his wife Dou Wan, who died around 104 BC. They were the first undisturbed royal Western Han tombs ever discovered, and they are counted among the top ten archaeological discoveries in China in the twentieth century. Liu Sheng's tomb alone measures 52 metres long, 38 metres wide and about 7 metres high, arranged with a tomb passage, carriage and horse room, storage room, front hall and rear chamber.

Jade Burial Suits Sewn with Gold Thread

From the two tombs came more than 2,700 catalogued burial objects in some counts — 419 bronzes, 499 iron objects, gold, silver, jade and lacquer pieces, six chariots and hundreds of pottery vessels — and in broader accounts over 10,000 items including fragments. The most celebrated are the two complete jade burial suits sewn with gold thread, the first complete examples ever found. Liu Sheng's suit is 1.88 metres long and made of thousands of small jade plaques joined with gold wire, assembled in five parts — head, top, trousers, gloves and shoes; its manufacture is estimated to have occupied a skilled craftsman for more than ten years. Dou Wan's suit comprises 2,160 jade pieces stitched with over 600 grams of gold thread. Han nobles believed jade could preserve the body from decay; the excavators found only teeth and bone traces within, but the suits remain supreme evidence of Han jade working and funerary belief, and the museum's Great Han Legacy display interprets them object by object.

The Changxin Palace Lantern and the Boshan Censer

From Dou Wan's tomb came the Changxin Palace lantern, dated to about 172 BC and 48 centimetres high: a gilt bronze lamp in the form of a kneeling palace maid holding a lantern, whose sleeve serves as the smoke duct, conducting soot into the hollow body so the room stays clean — a design praised for its environmental ingenuity as much as its beauty. From Liu Sheng's tomb came the gilt Boshan censer, 26 centimetres high, a hill censer inlaid with gold in swirling patterns that evoke sacred mountains rising from the sea, its lid pierced so incense smoke curls around the peaks. Both are masterpieces of Han bronze work and permanent icons of the museum, photographed and reproduced wherever Chinese art is taught.

The Ancient Zhongshan Kingdom

The museum's second great theme is the Zhongshan kingdom of the Warring States period, a state founded by the Xianyu people of the Bai Di group between the larger powers of Yan and Zhao, sometimes called the eighth power of the age though the histories record little about it. The excavation in the 1970s of the tomb of King Cuo of Zhongshan at Pingshan lifted the veil. The gallery Warring States Majestic Style: The Ancient Zhongshan Kingdom displays the Three Instruments of Zhongshan — the iron-footed bronze ding, the dragon-decorated square hu and the round hu of King Cuo — cast, by their long inscriptions, from bronze plundered in Zhongshan's northern campaign against Yan, and recording that history in the king's own words. A 2,300-year-old bronze lamp from King Cuo's tomb is also among the collection's noted pieces.

Quyang Stone Carving and Northern Dynasties Art

Many guides single out the Quyang Stone Carvings as the museum's quiet star. Quyang in Hebei has been a centre of white marble carving since the Han dynasty, and the museum's collection of mostly Buddhist statuary carved from Quyang marble spans the Northern Dynasties through later periods, showing the development of Chinese Buddhist sculpture in the region where the stone itself was quarried. Companion galleries present Northern Dynasties tomb murals from Hebei, preserving painted plaster that would otherwise have perished in the ground. Together with Shang dynasty bronzes and funeral figurines, these displays carry the provincial story from the Bronze Age into the age of Buddhist art.

Cizhou Ware and Regional Ceramics

Hebei's kilns give the museum another strength. The Cizhou kilns of southern Hebei were among the great folk kilns of the Song dynasty, famous for white-glazed ware painted in black — the museum's examples include a pillow painted with a child playing ball, a pillow with a fishing boy, and vases with peony patterns. A Yuan dynasty blue-and-white jar with fretwork floral designs in underglaze blue and red, crowned with a lion finial, shows the later brilliance of Chinese porcelain. Ceramics galleries trace the province's production across dynasties, setting the celebrated Mancheng bronzes within a much longer craft tradition of the North China plain.

The Museum Today

The expanded museum of 2014 organises the visit around its permanent exhibitions in the new southern building, with temporary exhibitions — ranging from natural history to loan shows from Beijing and other provinces — in the northern building, and regular free guided explanations for the public. It has lent and hosted exhibitions with museums in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and many provinces, and publishes on the province's heritage. For most visitors the sequence is unforgettable: Stone Age Hebei, the bronzes of Zhongshan, and then the gold-thread jade suits lying as their wearers were buried at Mancheng. No other institution tells Hebei's story at this depth, and the Hebei Museum remains the essential first stop for the history of Yan and Zhao.