About Xinyang Museum

Xinyang Museum

Xinyang Museum, in Chinese Xinyang Bowuguan, is the comprehensive city museum of Xinyang, a prefecture-level city in the far south of Henan Province. It stands on Xinba Street in the Yangshan New District, in a modern building opened to the public on 8 September 2010, and it holds more than 20,000 objects spanning the whole history of the upper Huai River region. Xinyang is a city with a double identity: administratively it belongs to Henan and the Central Plains, but geographically and culturally it looks south, to Chu country, to the Dabie Mountains and to tea. The museum's permanent display, titled Huaishang Hometown, a tour of Xinyang history and culture, is built around exactly that identity, and its Shang and Zhou bronzes are celebrated as the finest part of its collection.

A New Museum for an Old City

Construction of the present museum began in April 2008. The site covers 34,000 square metres, the total construction area is nearly 30,000 square metres, and the exhibition space is about 10,000 square metres, a scale that placed Xinyang's museum among the substantial city museums of Henan when it opened on 8 September 2010. The museum is open to the public free of charge, in line with China's policy of free admission at public museums, and it is described as a symbolic public cultural facility of the city, the place where Xinyang presents itself to its own citizens and to visitors. Its standing was confirmed in September 2018, when the National Cultural Heritage Administration and the China Museums Association rated it a national second-grade museum in China's official museum grading system, with further honours following in December 2019. Grading matters in the Chinese museum system because it reflects audited standards of collection, exhibition, research and public service, and a second-grade rating for a prefecture-level city museum marks it as a serious institution.

The Land: Southern Henan and the Huai River

Xinyang's history cannot be separated from its geography. The city is the southernmost in Henan, set between the northern foot of the Dabie Mountains and the upper reaches of the Huai River, neighbouring Anhui to the east and Hubei to the south. The Huai is one of China's great rivers and the traditional dividing line between north and south China, and Xinyang sits in the transition zone where northern and southern climates, crops and customs meet. Local descriptions call Xinyang the Jiangnan of the north country and the north country of Jiangnan, a place of rice as well as wheat, of tea gardens on mountain slopes, and of a way of life that visitors from the Henan heartland often find surprisingly southern. The museum's chosen theme word, Huaishang, meaning on the Huai, announces that this river world, rather than the Yellow River world of northern Henan, is the frame for everything inside.

Ancient Homeland: The Earliest Chapters

The permanent exhibition is arranged in seven basic halls, organised under the Huaishang Hometown theme in six main parts. It begins with the preface hall and the section usually translated as Ancient Homeland, covering the region's earliest human story. Xinyang claims a history reaching back more than 8,000 years, into the Neolithic world of the Huai valley, and the museum's holdings of stone tools and early pottery, together with animal and plant fossils, give that claim material form. Southern Henan's rivers, lakes and mountain foothills offered the water, game and cultivable land that drew early farming communities, and the region formed part of the broad zone in which Chinese civilisation first took shape between the Yellow and Yangtze river systems. The display sequence then follows the historical development of southern Henan in order, so that a visitor walks from the Neolithic homeland into the age of states and kings.

The Huai-Side Princely States

The second part of the exhibition, the Huai-side princely states, covers the Shang and Zhou world in which the Xinyang region was divided among small vassal states. During the Xia and Shang dynasties the area consisted of many such states, and under the Zhou it formed a contested frontier zone of little kingdoms and marquisates whose bronzes, buried in their tombs and hoards, are now the glory of the museum. This is the period that produced the collection's most famous material. Statelets of the Huai valley stood between the Zhou royal domain to the north and the expanding power of Chu to the south, absorbing influences from both, and their ritual bronzes show it: Central Plains forms and inscriptions combined with southern taste. For the archaeologist, these small states are precious precisely because they were small; their tombs preserve the equipment of a middle rank of the Zhou world that the great royal sites cannot show.

The Royal Style of Chu

The third section, the royal style of Chu, follows the absorption of the region into the great southern state of Chu during the Eastern Zhou period. Xinyang historically belongs to the Chu cultural zone; the ancient state of Shen, whose name survives in the city's old name Shencheng, was incorporated into Chu, and Chu culture left a deep imprint on local life, in food, in custom and in craft. Chu was famed across the Zhou world for its bronze casting, its lacquerwork, its silk and its distinctive religious and artistic imagination, and as its frontier moved north to the Huai, the Xinyang region became Chu's gateway to the Central Plains. The museum's Chu material, bronzes above all, but also jades and lacquer and wood ware, presents this southern splendour in the city where north and south contended. After Chu came unification: the fourth section of the exhibition covers the Qin unification of 221 BC and the imperial order that followed, when the region was bound into a single Chinese state.

The Collection: Bronzes Above All

The museum holds more than 20,000 objects. The range is broad: bronzes, gold and silver ware, jades, stone tools, ceramics, wood and lacquer ware, and animal and plant fossils. Nearly 2,000 sets are graded third-class or above, the official category of precious cultural relics. Among all of these, as the museum's own summaries put it, the bronzes are the most famous, and specifically the Shang and Zhou bronzes of the Huai River region. That emphasis is well judged. The Huai valley bronzes include ritual vessels cast for the princely houses of the region, with the forms, decoration and inscriptions that make early Chinese bronzes simultaneously works of art, religious equipment and written historical evidence. Set alongside them, the gold and silver, the jades and the ceramics of later dynasties carry the city's story forward, but it is the bronze age material that gives Xinyang Museum a collection of more than local interest.

The Fragrance of Tea

No account of Xinyang would be complete without tea, and the museum gives it a section of its own, the fragrance of tea, within the permanent display. Xinyang is the home of Xinyang Maojian, a green tea counted among China's ten famous teas, produced in the districts and counties around the city including Shihe, Pingqiao, Guangshan, Xin County and Luoshan. The region's tea history is traditionally traced back some 2,300 years; tea was reported discovered in an ancient tomb at Gushi County in 1987, the Tang dynasty tea sage Lu Yu ranked the teas of the Huainan circuit, including Guangzhou, the old name for the Xinyang area, in his Classic of Tea, and the Song writer Su Shi judged that among the teas of Huainan, Xinyang was first. Maojian, named for its fine, hair-tipped leaves, won a gold prize at the Panama exhibition of 1915, and its qualities are conventionally summarised as fine, round and straight leaves with abundant white down, high fragrance, strong taste and clear liquor. In the museum, tea is presented not as a souvenir but as culture: the product of Xinyang's in-between climate, where the northernmost great tea gardens of China flourish in the Dabie foothills.

Chu Flavour of Henan

The final part of the permanent exhibition, rendered as the Chu flavour of Henan, draws the argument of the whole display together. Xinyang's culture is Henan culture with a Chu accent: its people eat rice and drink tea where northern Henan eats noodles, its climate and landscape resemble the south, and its history was shaped by Chu, by migration from Jiangxi in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and by its position at the junction of three provinces, Henan, Hubei and Anhui. The city produced or nurtured figures of national fame in Chinese tradition, from the Chu minister Sun Shuao to the Song statesman Sima Guang, whose roots lay in the region. The museum's seven halls, preface, ancient homeland, Huai-side princes, Chu royal style, Qin unification, tea fragrance and Chu flavour, thus form a single sustained essay on a borderland city, and they explain why Xinyang feels different from the rest of its own province.

Visiting the Museum

Xinyang Museum is on Xinba Street in the Yangshan New District, the modern administrative and cultural quarter of the city, and admission is free. Visitors should allow at least a couple of hours for the permanent exhibition, longer if the bronzes hold their attention, and should check current opening arrangements before travelling. The museum pairs naturally with Xinyang's other attractions, Nanwan Lake, Jigong Mountain and the tea gardens of the Dabie foothills, and a visit here first gives those landscapes their history: the visitor who has seen the Huai-side bronzes and the tea exhibition will read the whole region differently. As the principal museum of southern Henan, Xinyang Museum is the essential starting point for understanding one of China's most distinctive cultural borderlands.