About Ningxia Museum

Ningxia Museum

The Ningxia Museum (宁夏博物馆), formally the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region Museum, is the regional museum in Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China. Preparations began in 1959 and the museum opened in 1973 in the Chengtian Temple; a new building in the Jinfeng District opened in September 2008. It holds around 40,000 items. Its distinctive strength is the heritage of the Western Xia (Tangut) empire, which ruled northwest China from 1038 to 1227 with its capital at modern Yinchuan: the museum displays Tangut-script tablets and documents, Western Xia ceramics and coins, and the celebrated gilt-bronze bull excavated from a Western Xia imperial tomb. Other galleries cover the Palaeolithic site of Shuidonggou — among the most important early human sites in China — the rock art of the Helan Mountains, and the folk culture of the Hui people, whose autonomous region Ningxia is. The museum is the main research and display institution for Western Xia studies open to the public.

From Chengtian Temple to the Jinfeng District

The Museum of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region was prepared from 1959 and officially completed and opened in 1973, housed in the Chengtian Buddhist Temple in Yinchuan. For its first three and a half decades the museum worked from that temple setting as a comprehensive provincial-level historical museum, building its collections and its basic exhibitions — Ningxia historical relics, Western Xia relics, Ningxia revolutionary relics and Hui folk customs — within the old city. As the collections grew, a purpose-built home was planned at People's Square in the newer Jinfeng District. The new building, at No. 6 East Street by People's Square, opened in September 2008, giving the museum modern galleries across three floors: a rock art hall on the first floor, the general history displays on the second, and the Hui hometown customs exhibition on the third, alongside temporary exhibition space. The move from temple to purpose-built museum mirrors the institution's growth from a small temple-based collection into the region's central museum.

The Collection in Outline

The Ningxia Museum holds around 40,000 items in its present-day accounting; an earlier official profile recorded over 10,000 cultural relics, of which 45 were class-one pieces, reflecting the collection's size at that time. The basic exhibition of Ningxia historical relics alone displays over 400 items, ranging across the region's long past: stone artefacts and animal fossils of the Palaeolithic period from Shuidonggou; production tools and daily articles of the Majiayao culture, the Qijia culture and the microlithic cultures of the Neolithic and Bronze Age north; and bronzes, jades, ceramics, ironware, gold and silver vessels, wooden and bamboo objects, tablet inscriptions, brick carvings and coins of the dynastic periods. Among the class-one treasures singled out in the museum's earlier profiles are an ink stick unearthed from a Han-dynasty tomb at Guyuan, the gold-plated bronze bull of the Western Xia, and a silk banner presented to a Hui leader by the Red Army as it passed Guyuan during the Long March — three objects that between them span the museum's Han, Western Xia and revolutionary holdings.

Western Xia: The Museum's Defining Strength

No subject defines the Ningxia Museum like the Western Xia. The Tangut empire of the Western Xia ruled northwest China from 1038 until its destruction by the Mongols in 1227, with its capital — Xingqing, later Zhongxing — at modern Yinchuan, and the imperial tombs of its rulers still stand on the plain west of the city below the Helan Mountains. The museum is the main public institution for Western Xia studies, and its Western Xia exhibition displays over 200 items: large stone horses, dragon-carved columns, great glazed chiwen roof-ridge ornaments, bamboo-carved figures and fragmentary inscribed tablets. The displays present the material world of the Tangut state — its ceramics and coins, its architecture and its court art — recovered from the imperial tomb area and other Western Xia sites in Ningxia. Because the Western Xia left comparatively little standing architecture, the objects gathered in Yinchuan carry an unusual weight: they are the primary evidence through which most visitors encounter this empire at all.

The Gilt-Bronze Bull and Tangut Script

The treasure of the museum is the gilt-bronze bull — described variously as a gold-plated copper bull or gilded bronze ox — excavated from a Western Xia imperial tomb. Recumbent and fully gilded, it demonstrates the casting skill of Tangut craftsmen and has become the museum's emblem, reproduced in its cultural and creative products and selected, with 25 other Ningxia relics including a grey pottery vessel, for the National Treasure Calendar launched jointly by twelve national first-class museums for 2022. Beside it, the museum's displays present the written remains of the Tangut state: fragmentary tablets in Western Xia script from the imperial mausoleum area, Western Xia script seals and documents, and the inscribed stone base known as the Hercules or Strongman support — described as the only stone carving bearing Western Xia script from the Western Xia tombs, its muscular supporting figure combined with the Tangut characters. The museum's published scholarship reinforces this focus: its edited volumes include a concise history of the Western Xia, a data collection on the Dangxiang (Tangut) people and the Western Xia, a collection of the fragmentary tablets found at the mausoleum area, and a volume of Western Xia relics.

Shuidonggou and the Palaeolithic

At the other end of the chronological scale, the museum presents Shuidonggou, the Palaeolithic site near the Yellow River east of Yinchuan that is among the most important early human sites in China — sometimes called, in Chinese accounts, a starting point for the study of Chinese Palaeolithic archaeology. The historical relics exhibition displays the stone articles and animal fossils left from the Palaeolithic period and unearthed at Shuidonggou, setting Ningxia's earliest inhabitants within the museum's general history of the region. Around this core, the galleries continue through the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of the Ningxia plain and loess hills — Majiayao painted-pottery culture material, Qijia culture tools and microlithic assemblages — tracing how farming and herding communities developed along the Yellow River bend and in the Liupan mountain country around Guyuan, long before the region entered the written record of the dynasties.

Rock Art of the Helan Mountains

The first floor of the new museum is given to a dedicated Rock Art Hall presenting the rock art of the Helan Mountains, the range that walls Ningxia on the west. Across the Helan range, nomadic peoples over thousands of years pecked and carved images into the rock faces — human faces and figures, animals, hunts and symbols, among which the famous sun-god image of the Helan carvings is the best known. The museum's hall introduces this open-air archive indoors, presenting the motifs and their makers as a prelude to the general history galleries above. The subject is a natural counterpart to the museum's Western Xia displays, since the Western Xia imperial tombs stand in the same Helan foothills where the carvings are found: in one visit, the museum connects the anonymous image-makers of the mountains with the literate empire that later buried its emperors in their shadow. Rubbings and reproductions of the rock paintings also feature among the museum's visitor offerings.

Hui Folk Culture and Ningxia's Peoples

Ningxia is the Hui Autonomous Region, and the folk culture of the Hui people forms the third great theme of the museum. The Hui folk-custom exhibition — presented in the new building as the Hui Hometown Customs Exhibition on the third floor — displays the dress, domestic life, religious and craft traditions of the Hui communities of Ningxia, whose history in the region runs through the Silk Road centuries to the present. The museum's holdings in this area include the silk banner presented to a Hui leader by the Red Army during the Long March's passage through Guyuan, an object that links Hui folk history to the revolutionary narrative the museum also tells through its Ningxia revolutionary relics exhibition. Guyuan, in the south of the region, recurs in the collections: the Han tomb there yielded the celebrated ink stick, and Li Xian's tomb at Guyuan has been the subject of a dedicated temporary exhibition of its unearthed relics. Together these displays present Ningxia not only as an archaeological landscape but as a living Hui homeland.

Silk Road Crossroads

Ningxia's position on the northern Silk Road threads through several parts of the collection. The Tang-dynasty stone tomb door carved with a Sogdian dancer performing the whirling Hu Xuan dance — now promoted among the museum's top treasures — records the presence of Central Asian Sogdian communities and their performance culture on the road through the region. The museum has also published on the traces of the ancient Great Wall in Ningxia and on the region's ancient pagodas, scenic spots and historical data, extending its research remit across the built heritage of the region. Its temporary exhibition programme has ranged from Ming and Qing painting and calligraphy in its own collection to the currencies and coins of successive ages and the history of Ningxia's liberation. As the main research and display institution for Western Xia studies open to the public, and as the regional museum of the Hui autonomous region — free to enter at its People's Square home in Jinfeng District — the Ningxia Museum remains the essential starting point for the history of this Yellow River region, from Shuidonggou's first hunters to the Tangut empire and beyond.