About Yibin Museum

Yibin Museum

The Yibin Museum is the comprehensive city museum of Yibin, a prefecture-level city in southern Sichuan where the Jinsha and Min rivers meet to form the Yangtze. Known in Chinese as Yibin Shi Bowuguan, it was founded in August 1983 and opened to the public in October 1984, and for decades it was the largest comprehensive museum in the prefecture. Its original seat was the Zhenwu Mountain temple complex in Cuiping District; it now also presents from a new home on Changcui Road in the Sanjiang New District, the district named for the three-river confluence that defines the city. Yibin calls itself the "first city on the Yangtze" and China's "liquor capital," and the museum's modern displays are organised around exactly those identities: the city's long history, Yangtze River humanities, and the liquor culture of the home of Wuliangye. Its collection of more than 5,000 cultural relics is strongest where Yibin itself is most distinctive — above all in the finds from the Han dynasty cliff tombs cut into the rock faces of the surrounding hills.

A City Where the Yangtze Begins

Geography is the first gallery of this museum, even before a visitor enters it. Yibin stands in southern Sichuan, at the junction of Sichuan with Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, where the Jinsha River, flowing down from the Tibetan Plateau, is joined by the Min River from the north. Below Yibin the combined stream bears the name Yangtze — in Chinese usage the Jinsha is the upper river and the Chang Jiang, the Long River, begins at this confluence — which is why Yibin styles itself the first city on the Yangtze. Human habitation here reaches back at least 4,000 years; the area was one of the birthplaces of ancient Ba-Shu culture, and Yibin was established as a county in the Han dynasty. Under the Ming and Qing the city and its hinterland formed Xuzhou Commandery, the name rendered in older Western books as Suifu. The city was a natural river port and transport hub, a point on the trade routes of the Southern Silk Road linking Sichuan with Yunnan and Guizhou, along which tea, salt and other goods moved. A museum of Yibin is therefore necessarily a museum of rivers, and the current displays give the Yangtze humanities a dedicated place in the new building, down to recreated scenes of the Sichuan river boatmen who once hauled vessels up these currents.

Foundation and the Zhenwu Mountain Home

The museum was founded in August 1983 and officially opened to the public in October 1984. Its first home was characteristic of Chinese city museums of that era: an historic temple complex given a second life. On Zhenwu Mountain in the northwest of the old city, the museum occupied temple buildings on a site of about 49 mu, with a building area of roughly 4,000 square metres, of which about 2,000 square metres served as exhibition space and about 800 square metres as storage. The Zhenwu Mountain temples gave the young museum atmosphere and a foothold in the city's historic landscape, at the price of the constraints every temple-housed museum knows — limited galleries, limited storage and buildings designed for worship rather than display. From that base the museum built its collection, its exhibition programme and its scholarly reputation over the following decades, before the city's growth carried it, like so many Chinese museums of its generation, toward a larger modern home in a new district across the rivers.

The New Home in the Sanjiang New District

The museum now presents from Changcui Road in the Sanjiang New District — Sanjiang meaning "three rivers," for the Jinsha, the Min and the Yangtze itself. Visitor accounts of the new building describe its story told through three great themes: the history of Yibin, the humanities of the Yangtze River, and liquor culture. The Yangtze displays use large river-view reliefs and a recreated boatmen scene with lighting effects to evoke the ancient Sanjiang dock, rooting the city's identity in the working river. The liquor culture area, which guides advise visitors to make for first, displays a Ming dynasty brewing workshop model and ancient cellar fragments among its exhibits. The move from temple rooms on Zhenwu Mountain to a purpose-presented museum at the three-river confluence mirrors the trajectory of Yibin's own development, from historic prefectural town to modern river city, and it lets the museum present its strongest material — Han finds, river culture and wine history — at a scale the old site could not offer.

The Collection: More Than 5,000 Relics

The museum holds more than 5,000 cultural relics, with over 500 pieces graded third-class or above in China's national system of relic grading. The holdings span the materials typical of a rich regional collection: pottery, porcelain, bronzes, calligraphy and painting from successive dynasties. But the museum's own descriptions and its guides agree on what makes the collection Yibin's rather than anyone else's — the cultural relics unearthed from the rock tombs of the Han dynasty are the most distinctive part of it. Among the individual pieces singled out in accounts of the museum are an Eastern Han pottery tower, a model building of the kind placed in Han tombs to house the dead in the afterlife, and a bronze double-fish basin. The collection's balance tells the region's story in objects: a river-port prefecture at the edge of the Sichuan basin, wealthy enough across two thousand years to bury its Han dead in decorated cliff chambers, to cast and trade in bronze, and to furnish the kilns, workshops and wine cellars whose products fill the later galleries.

The Han Dynasty Cliff Tombs

The signature archaeology of Yibin is the cliff tomb. In the Eastern Han dynasty, prosperous families of the region cut burial chambers directly into the sandstone cliffs of the river hills — the "rock tombs" whose finds fill the museum's most distinctive cases. Cliff tombs are a hallmark of Han Sichuan, and the Yibin examples, including the Xijiashan cliff tombs noted in city itineraries, yielded the pottery, bronze and other grave goods on which the museum's reputation rests. The finds illuminate a frontier society of the Han empire at its most confident: a city at the head of Yangtze navigation, in contact with the peoples and routes of the southwest, burying its dead with model towers, vessels and furnishings for an afterlife imagined in architectural form. The museum gave this material prominence early: a "Yibin Han Dynasty Unearthed Cultural Relics Exhibition" was among its first generation of displays after 1984, and Han finds have remained a permanent theme ever since, including in the new building's presentation of the region's history.

Four Decades of Exhibitions

Since 1984 the museum has mounted a long sequence of exhibitions that map the prefecture's identity piece by piece. Alongside the Han dynasty finds exhibition came a Southern Sichuan ancient bronze drum exhibition, drawing on the bronze drum tradition of China's southwest; a Yibin historical and cultural city exhibition, described as the first of its kind among China's historical and cultural cities; a Southern Silk Road ancient coins exhibition, presenting the money of the trade routes that ran through Yibin toward Yunnan and beyond; a Shunan Bamboo Sea exhibition, on the great bamboo forest of southern Sichuan that is among the region's best-known landscapes; an exhibition on the development and use of Yibin's natural resources; and a Yibin wine history exhibition, on the city's defining industry. Read as a programme, these exhibitions show a museum systematically working through its city's assets — archaeology, the bronze drum cultures of the south, river trade, bamboo ecology and wine — and turning each into public history. Temporary and thematic exhibitions of this kind were also the means by which a small temple-housed museum, with only about 2,000 square metres of galleries, could display far more of its region than its permanent rooms allowed.

The Liquor Capital: Wine Culture in the Museum

Yibin claims 4,000 years of wine-making history, 3,000 years of tea planting and 2,200 years as a built city, and wine is the claim it presses hardest: the city is the home of Wuliangye, one of China's most famous baijiu, and calls itself China's liquor capital. The museum treats this not as advertising but as local history. Its earlier programme included a dedicated wine history exhibition, and the new building's liquor culture displays present a Ming dynasty brewing workshop model and ancient cellar material, showing the technology and organisation of traditional fermentation in the city. The theme connects the museum to the wider wine landscape of Yibin — the old cellars, the distilling quarters and the separate Wuliangye liquor culture displays at the distillery itself — and explains a genuine historical phenomenon: how the confluence city's water, grain, climate and river trade combined, over centuries, to make distilling its signature craft. In a museum whose other great themes are Han tombs and river humanities, the wine galleries supply the living, still-practised tradition that links the historic city to the present one.

Scholarship: The Journal Nan Chuan Wenbo

The museum's ambitions in its first decade were scholarly as well as popular. From 1985 to 1988 it published an academic journal, Nan Chuan Wenbo — "Southern Sichuan Cultural Relics and Museums" — also rendered in accounts of the museum as the Yibin cultural museum journal, which ran to four issues and is remembered as having had considerable influence in China's museum and cultural relics field at the time. An irregular in-house journal was a common instrument of serious Chinese museums in the 1980s, a decade when the country's museum profession was rebuilding and regional museums used their own publications to report excavations, publish collection studies and join national debates. That a small prefectural museum in southern Sichuan sustained such a journal, and that it was noticed nationally, marks the Yibin Museum's early standing among its peers — a standing later confirmed in the national grading system.

National Second-Grade Museum and Its Role Today

In September 2018 the museum was rated a national second-grade museum in China's official museum grading — the second tier of the national system, recognising the quality of its collection, exhibitions and public service. It remains what its founders made it: the principal comprehensive museum of the prefecture-level city, the institution charged with collecting, protecting, researching and displaying Yibin's material past. Its trajectory — temple-complex museum of 1984, scholarly publisher of the 1980s, graded museum of 2018, and now presenter from a new building in the Sanjiang New District — is a compact history of the Chinese local museum itself over the same forty years. For the visitor, the essentials are the three identities the new displays proclaim. Yibin is a Han dynasty city whose cliff-tomb dead left the museum its finest objects; it is the first city of the Yangtze, whose river built its trade and its boatmen's culture; and it is the liquor capital, whose cellars and workshops the museum presents as seriously as its bronzes. The Yibin Museum holds those three stories in one collection.