Local's Guide to China: Exploring Unique Museums | Shaanxi Archaeological Museum #china #travel

I, a Chinese, will take you to a special and interesting museum. Hello everyone, here is Shaanxi Archaeological Museum. Let's go inside. This is the entrance hall of Shaanxi Archaeological Museum. The museum is free. You just need to make an appointment online in advance. The museum has three floors with a total construction area of 35,000 square meters and 5,215 cultural relics on display. What distinguishes this museum from other museums is that it displays exhibits to visitors from the perspective of archaeological excavation. A major feature of the museum is a 3D analog digital exhibition hall which simulates the interior of the tomb chamber so that you can feel you are in the tomb, which is a cool feeling. In ancient Chinese tombs, they'd have coffins in the middle with murals all around the walls and ceiling. These murals usually depict scenes from the life of the tomb's owner like feasts, farming, or stories of sages and saints. Murals are painted on the walls of tomb passages, tomb chambers, etc. Generally, the closer to the tomb, the closer the content of the painting is to the owner of the tomb. What is painted in the tomb is some pictures that can reflect the real life of the tomb owner. As for the ceiling, it usually features star maps or mythical figures. And this right here is an actual star map from the ceiling of a tomb chamber. There are drawings of the sun and moon, 28 stars and figures. Some exhibits are not only displayed in glass cases here, but the entire excavation site was relocated and displayed in front of visitors. In other words, you can see the excavation site of a tomb. What you see here are two horses pulling a carriage. It was the most luxurious form of transport of the time. What you see here is the actual appearance of a tomb when it was unearthed. This is the tomb of a woman. And you can even see the jade bracelets on the hand of the owner of the tomb. Can you guess what this is? It's an ancient Chinese jewelry box. And you can still see the owner's jewelry inside clearly. An interesting and special experience is that you can actually touch cultural relics from different dynasties and have close contact with them. This is an experience that is impossible to have in other museums. Here you can touch porcelain pieces from different dynasties and feel their differences. This group of pottery figurines fully embodies the music and dance scenes of the Han dynasty in China. The placement of the pottery figurines we see now is the way they were when they were unearthed. Among them in the middle are two dancers who perform a dance that is a favorite of Liu Bang, the founding emperor of the Han dynasty. There were musicians and attendants all around. And the musicians were playing different instruments. Do you know what this is? This is chime bell, a large percussion instrument in ancient China. It is made of bronze. It consists of ablate bells of different sizes arranged in order of pitch and hung on a huge bell stand. The bronze bells are struck with a T-shaped wooden hammer and a long rod to produce different sounds because each bell has a different tone. If you strike it according to the music score, you can play beautiful music. A set of copper bells with different pitches are hung on the wooden frame. And the performers use small mallets to hit the bells to play music. These are two bronze xidun, one large and one small. The shape is a fusion of various auspicious animals. The head is like a herbivore and the four legs are like a carnivore. It has the characteristics of a sheep, the appearance of a deer and the wings of a bird. The museum also popularized some archaeological knowledge. If you are interested in archaeology, this is a good place to go. Okay, that's all for this video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel. I will continue to update videos about China from a local Chinese perspective. Welcome to leave messages and discussions in the comment area. See you in the next video.