About Jingmen Museum

Jingmen Museum

Jingmen Museum, known in Chinese as Jingmen Shi Bowuguan, is the comprehensive city museum of Jingmen, a prefecture-level city in Hubei Province in central China. It works under the city's culture authorities and brings together the protection, collection, research and exhibition of cultural relics for a region whose history is inseparable from the ancient state of Chu. Few city museums in China can claim a holding of genuinely world significance, but Jingmen can. Its name is known to scholars around the world because of the Guodian Chu bamboo slips, the earliest surviving manuscripts of parts of the Tao Te Ching, which were excavated near the city in 1993 and whose study the museum organised. Around that famous discovery, the museum presents the bronzes, lacquerware, jades and tomb finds of Chu and Han period Jingmen, a total collection of more than 60,000 cultural relics.

Jingmen and the World of Chu

To understand Jingmen Museum, it helps to understand where Jingmen sits in early Chinese history. The city lies in the heartland of Chu, one of the great states of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Ying, the Chu capital from about 676 BC until 278 BC, stood only about nine kilometres south of the Guodian tomb complex where the museum's most famous objects were found. For centuries this was not a borderland but the political and cultural core of a powerful southern state, a rival to the Zhou kings and later to Qin, the state that would eventually unify China in 221 BC. Chu developed a distinctive culture, famed for its bronze casting, its lacquerwork, its silk, its shamanic religious traditions and its poetry. The archaeology of the Jingmen area, including the tombs at Baoshan and Jishan, has repeatedly produced material that illustrates that culture at its height, and Jingmen Museum is the institution charged with preserving and explaining it.

History of the Museum and Its Buildings

For most of its life the museum has been housed at 19 Xiangshan Avenue in Jingmen. Its exhibition building there was begun in 1987, covers about 11,340 square metres, and was completed and officially opened to the public on 8 November 1993, by a striking coincidence in the same season that the Guodian slips were coming out of the ground nearby. As the collection and its ambitions grew, the city invested further in the site. In 2001 the municipal government funded a dedicated treasure hall, a building of about 1,200 square metres, used to display the Warring States female corpse and the Guodian Chu bamboo slips. In 2010 a central cultural relics store, of about 2,068 square metres, was built and put into use, giving the museum modern storage for a rapidly growing collection. More recently the museum has also presented a new building on Shuangxi Avenue in the Zhanghe New District, described in visitor guides as a modern cultural landmark for the city, with exhibition areas using technologies such as augmented reality and holographic projection to recreate how objects were made and used.

A Collection of Prefecture-Level Strength

The museum holds more than 60,000 cultural relics, of which more than 700 are graded third-class or above under China's cultural relics grading system. By both the total number of relics and the number of top-grade pieces, the collection ranks in the forefront of China's municipal and prefecture-level museums, a remarkable position for a city of Jingmen's size. The strength of the holdings reflects the richness of the archaeology around the city: Chu tombs, Han remains and earlier sites have been excavated in the region for decades, and their finds have accumulated here rather than all being drawn away to the provincial museum in Wuhan, although part of the Guodian material is also held by the Hubei Provincial Museum. The museum's internal organisation reflects the breadth of its work, with departments for collections care, exhibitions, security, cultural relics and archaeology research, and a dedicated Guodian Chu Slips Research Centre.

The Guodian Chu Bamboo Slips

The discovery that made Jingmen famous in the scholarly world came in October 1993, when Tomb No. 1 in the Guodian tomb complex, in the Jishan tomb area near Jingmen, was excavated. Inside were about 804 bamboo slips bearing some 12,000 Chinese characters, dated to around 300 BC, in the latter half of the Warring States period. Studies of the tomb's contents identified its occupant as an elderly noble scholar who had been a teacher to a royal prince, identified as Crown Prince Heng, who later became King Qingxiang of Chu. Because King Qingxiang was on the throne when Qin sacked Ying in 278 BC, the manuscripts can be placed with unusual precision for such ancient texts. Bamboo was the everyday writing material of early China, and a tomb library of this size and date is an extraordinary survival, preserved by the waterlogged conditions of the Chu burial ground.

What the Slips Contain

After conservation, the slips were divided into eighteen sections. Their contents fall into Taoist and Confucian groups. Most celebrated are the three bundles containing versions of the Laozi, the Tao Te Ching attributed to the sage Laozi, which are the earliest known manuscripts of that foundational text. Alongside them was a previously unknown cosmogonic work, Taiyi Sheng Shui, usually translated as The Great One Generates Water, which describes the generation of the cosmos from the Great One through water, and which was bound together with one of the Laozi bundles. The Confucian material includes a chapter of the Classic of Rites, the text known as Ziyi or Black Robes, and works such as Wuxing, Xing Zi Ming Chu, Zun De Yi and Lu Mugong Wen Zisi, several of them previously unknown to transmitted literature. The coexistence of Taoist and Confucian texts in a single Chu tomb library has given scholars fresh evidence about the fluid intellectual world of the fourth and third centuries BC, before the traditions hardened into rival schools.

Publication and the Research Centre

Jingmen Museum did not simply store the slips; it organised their study and publication. In May 1998 the museum published the corpus with Wenwu Press, the Cultural Relics Press in Beijing, under the title Chu Bamboo Slips from Guodian, with the ISBN 7-5010-1000-5. The volume presented photographs, transcriptions into standard characters and annotation, and it made the texts available to researchers worldwide. International attention followed quickly; the Harvard-Yenching Institute scholar Tu Weiming compared the find to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls for what it could reveal about the formation of a textual tradition. The museum maintains a Guodian Chu Slips Research Centre and has worked on building a dedicated information database for the slips, keeping Jingmen an active node in the continuing study of excavated early Chinese manuscripts, a field that has since been enlarged by the Shanghai Museum and Tsinghua University bamboo slip collections, against which the Guodian texts remain the essential point of reference.

The Baoshan Chu Tombs and the Warring States Female Corpse

The Guodian display is one of three long-standing basic exhibitions described for the museum. A second presents cultural relics unearthed from the Chu tombs at Baoshan, another major Warring States burial ground in the Jingmen area, whose lacquerware, bronzes and written records illustrated the administration and daily life of Chu. The third strand of the museum's fame, displayed with the slips in the treasure hall, is the remarkably preserved female corpse of the Warring States period found in the Jingmen area. Preserved ancient bodies are among the rarest of archaeological survivals, and the Jingmen example, kept with its associated burial material, offers direct evidence about Chu burial practice, textiles and the physical remains of the period. Together the Baoshan relics, the corpse and the slips form a triangle of displays that few museums anywhere can match for the Warring States period: documents, objects and a human presence from the same world.

Fine Bronzes, Lacquerware and Jade

Beyond its star exhibits, the museum's selected fine relics exhibition presents the characteristic crafts of Chu and Han Jingmen. Chu bronzes, cast for ritual, for music and for war, include vessels with gold and silver inlay of the kind highlighted in guides to the new building. Chu lacquerware, built up in many layers over wooden cores and painted in red and black, is among the glories of early Chinese art, and the lacquered wooden vessels from the region's tombs show the elegance for which Chu taste was known. Jades, worked for ornament, ritual and burial, complete the picture. Displayed in sequence, these objects trace Jingmen's story from prehistory through the Ming and Qing dynasties in the museum's history and culture presentation, showing a region that was successively a Chu heartland, a Han territory and a part of the long imperial history of the middle Yangtze region.

Visiting the Museum

Visitors who know which building they are heading to will get the most from a trip. The long-established museum stands at 19 Xiangshan Avenue, while the new building is on Shuangxi Avenue in the Zhanghe New District; guides list opening hours of 9am to 5pm, closed on Mondays, though visitors should confirm current arrangements before travelling, as Chinese city museums commonly adjust hours on public holidays. The essential priority for any visit is the Guodian Chu bamboo slips and the Chu and Han relics around them: allow the most time for the treasure displays, then work through the general history exhibition. For travellers interested in early Chinese philosophy, in the Tao Te Ching, or in the archaeology of writing itself, Jingmen Museum is not a minor provincial stop but a destination in its own right, the home institution of one of the great manuscript discoveries of the twentieth century.