About Nanchong Museum

Nanchong Museum

The Nanchong Museum is the principal public museum of Nanchong, a prefecture-level city in northeastern Sichuan on the middle reaches of the Jialing River. Known in Chinese as Nanchong Shi Bowuguan, it occupies a modern building on Baituba Road in Shunqing District, inside the Xihe Sports Park, where it shares a single cultural complex with the Nanchong Cultural Center and the Sichuan Grand Puppet Theatre. Its galleries are arranged over four floors, and visitor accounts of the museum describe a rich and clearly classified programme of displays in four great themes: the historical culture of Nanchong, the city's celebrated silk culture and art, Three Kingdoms culture, for which this region is a noted source, and the revolutionary history of northeastern Sichuan. Those four themes are a faithful map of Nanchong itself — an ancient river city founded more than 2,200 years ago, the hometown of Chen Shou, author of the Records of the Three Kingdoms, a historic silk capital of western China, and, in the early years of the People's Republic, the seat of the Northern Sichuan administration. The museum is where the city presents that layered identity to itself and to its visitors.

Location and the Xihe Cultural Complex

The museum stands on Baituba Road in Shunqing District, the historic core district of Nanchong, within the grounds of the Xihe Sports Park. It does not stand alone. The same modern building houses the Nanchong Cultural Center and the Sichuan Grand Puppet Theatre, so that museum, cultural centre and theatre form a combined culture, museum and theatre complex of the kind many Chinese prefecture-level cities built in the 2010s, when new cultural infrastructure was concentrated into single landmark buildings. Visitor descriptions of the museum call the building modern and atmospheric in design, note the four floors of exhibition halls, and praise the setting inside the sports park, with its parking, bus stops and green surroundings. The pairing with the Grand Puppet Theatre is locally apt: northern Sichuan, and the Langzhong area of Nanchong in particular, is one of the historic homes of Chinese shadow and puppet theatre traditions, so the theatre beside the museum continues a performing craft that the museum's folk and art displays document. For the visitor, the arrangement means a single trip covers the city's museum, its cultural centre programming and a puppet performance under one roof.

A City Founded in 202 BC

The local history displays rest on an unusually long civic pedigree. Nanchong's history begins with Anhan County, established by Emperor Gaozu of Han in 202 BC — giving the city a recorded history of more than 2,220 years. In the pre-Qin period the region belonged to the lands of Ba and Shu, the two ancient peoples and states of the Sichuan Basin; in the middle Warring States period Qin conquered Ba and Shu and drew the basin into the emerging Chinese state, and under the Qin the Nanchong area belonged to Ba Commandery. The present name came much later: in 598, under the Sui dynasty, Anhan County was renamed Nanchong, a name explained as marking the county's position south of the old Chongguo territory. Through the dynasties the city served repeatedly as an administrative and military centre for northern Sichuan — county, prefecture and circuit seat in successive systems — and its far older county town of Langzhong, now administered by Nanchong, was for long periods the governing centre of the whole region. The museum's historical galleries draw on this stratigraphy: Ba-Shu beginnings, Han founding, and two millennia of prefectural government along the river.

The Jialing River City

Nanchong's position explains its history. The city stands in northeastern Sichuan on the middle reaches of the Jialing River, the great tributary that drains northern Sichuan southward into the Yangtze at Chongqing. In a mountainous province, a navigable river was a highway: the Jialing made Nanchong a river port and trading centre from ancient times, linking its agricultural hinterland — the city is also known as a "fruit city," Guocheng — to the markets of the lower Yangtze. City accounts list the cultures that blend in Nanchong as Three Kingdoms culture, silk culture, red culture and Jialing River culture, and the river is the thread through all of them: silk left the city by water, armies and officials arrived by water, and the revolutionary-era administration governed a river-defined region. The museum's displays of the city's historical culture sit within this frame. Even the museum's neighbourhood tells the story — Shunqing District, where it stands, is the old prefectural city on the river's bank, and the Xihe, the West River of the sports park's name, is one of the small tributary valleys of the Jialing system around which the modern city has grown.

Silk Culture and Art: The Museum's Signature Theme

Of the museum's four themes, silk is the one that is Nanchong's alone. The city is known across China as a silk capital — "the only silk capital in Western China," in the assessment of its silk association, and a member of the international network of silk cities. Its silk galleries present a craft and an industry that the city regards as its defining inheritance. Local tradition reaches deep: the legend of Leizu, the consort credited in Chinese mythology with first raising silkworms, is located by tradition in this region, and Nanchong presents itself as a source place of sericulture, with accounts of the city's silk history holding that ancestors here were planting mulberry, raising silkworms and weaving silk along the Jialing some 5,000 years ago. By the Qin and Han dynasties the region was already praised, in the phrase preserved by its silk historians, as a famous silk and brocade state. The museum's silk culture and art displays take up this whole arc — sericulture, reeling, weaving, brocade and silk art — presenting both the technology and the decorated textiles that made "Nanchong silk" a name traded far beyond Sichuan.

Nanchong Silk: From Han Brocade to Modern Industry

The historical displays behind the silk galleries can draw on a documented modern industry as rich as the ancient one. After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Nanchong's battered pre-war silk trade was rebuilt, and in the early years of the Republic, as the report of the 2019 Western China Silk Expo in Nanchong recalled, some 80 percent of the city's residents worked in silk-related industries. Reform and opening after 1978 brought a heyday in the later 1980s and early 1990s, when the city held five successive China Sichuan Nanchong Silk Festivals between 1990 and 1995 and national television carried its story as "Millennium Silk in Nanchong." The city has been designated one of China's great sericulture bases and silk production and export bases; in its peak modern accounts, cocoon and silk output accounted for about a third of Sichuan's production and a still larger share of the province's silk exports. Today Nanchong maintains a complete modern chain — mulberry and cocoon production, reeling, weaving, research and development, garment processing and export — with dozens of silk and garment enterprises in the city. The museum's silk art displays thus document not a vanished craft but the cultural face of a living industry, one the city still promotes under its "China Silk Capital" title, reaffirmed by the China Silk Association in 2017.

Three Kingdoms Culture and Chen Shou

Nanchong's claim in Three Kingdoms culture is not that a famous battle happened here, but something rarer: the period's history was written here. Chen Shou (233–297), the Western Jin historian who compiled the Records of the Three Kingdoms — the Sanguozhi, the standard official history of the Wei, Shu and Wu kingdoms and one of the foundational works of Chinese historiography — was a native of this territory, born in Anhan, modern Nanchong. Without Chen Shou's Records, as the Sichuan provincial government's own account of the city puts the local saying, there would have been no later Romance of the Three Kingdoms and no Three Kingdoms culture as the world knows it. In October 1993 an international seminar on Three Kingdoms culture, attended by around a hundred scholars from China, the United States, Canada and Japan, was held in Nanchong and formally identified the city as the source of Three Kingdoms culture. The museum's Three Kingdoms displays belong to this civic argument: they present the region's part in the period and, above all, its historian, whose work turned the wars of the third century into permanent national memory.

Wanjuan Tower: The Landmark Behind the Displays

The city's Three Kingdoms devotion has a monument that stands behind the museum's galleries. At Xishan, in Shunqing District, rises Wanjuan Tower — the Tower of Ten Thousand Volumes — first built in the period 222 to 237, where the young Chen Shou is remembered to have read and studied. The present complex was rebuilt by the government in 1990 at a cost of four million yuan and comprises a Chen Shou Reading Tower, a Chen Shou Memorial Hall and a book-collecting tower, with a total building area of about 2,400 square metres; a Tang dynasty temple, Ganlu Temple, had earlier stood before the tower. The museum's Three Kingdoms galleries and the Wanjuan Tower complex are complementary institutions of the same civic story: the tower marks the place of Chen Shou's study, and the museum places his period and his region in the broader display of Nanchong's history. Together with the city's other Chen Shou sites, they explain why a prefectural museum in northeastern Sichuan gives one of its four permanent themes to a period in which its home region is otherwise little mentioned in the famous narratives — because the narrator himself was its son.

Revolutionary History of Northeastern Sichuan

The museum's fourth theme, the revolutionary history of northeastern Sichuan, covers the region's twentieth century. Nanchong's place in that story is anchored in its administrative role: in the early days after liberation, the city was the residence of the Northern Sichuan administrative region, the authority governing the northeast of the province in the first years of the People's Republic, and Shunqing District preserves sites of that period, including the former office of the Northern Sichuan bureau and the city's martyrs' cemetery. The region the museum serves had been a base of revolutionary activity in the wars of the 1930s and 1940s — northeastern Sichuan, around the Daba Mountains, was one of the areas of Red Army activity in the years of the Sichuan-Shaanxi revolutionary base — and its sons and daughters figure throughout modern Chinese history. The "red culture" that city accounts list among Nanchong's defining cultures is the subject of these galleries: the revolution in the northeast of the province told through its own prefecture's people, sites and administration, ending in the city's years as a regional capital of the new state.

The Museum in Nanchong's Cultural Life

As the main public museum of the prefecture-level city, the Nanchong Museum carries the standard duties of its kind in China — collection, protection, research, exhibition and public education for a prefecture of several million people and 12,500 square kilometres, administering three districts, five counties and the county-level city of Langzhong. Its four-floor galleries, the permanent local-history displays and the temporary exhibitions it hosts alongside them present the city in the round: Ba-Shu and Han antiquity, the Jialing River port, the silk capital, Chen Shou's Three Kingdoms and the revolutionary northeast. Its setting — museum, cultural centre and grand puppet theatre in one building inside a sports park — makes it a working part of the city's everyday cultural life rather than a detached monument, used by school groups, residents and visitors alike. For the traveller crossing northeastern Sichuan, it is the most efficient introduction the region offers: in a single building, the 2,200-year-old river city explains why it is at once a fruit city, a silk capital and the hometown of the man who wrote the Three Kingdoms.