Shanxi Museum

Chinese name: 山西博物院(Shanxi Bowuyuan)
Location: No.13 North Section of Binhe West Road, Taiyuan City, Shanxi Province
Opening time: 9:00-17:00(close on every Monday, the last day of the 12th month and the first day of the 1st month in lunar calendar)
Best time for visit: all year round
Recommended time for a visit: 2-3 hours

Introduction to Shanxi Museum
The Shanxi Museum was formerly known as the Shanxi Educational Books Museum, which was founded in 1919 and since then it has been renamed many times. It was called Shanxi Provincial Museum since 1953, and got its present name till 2004 after the new buildings of the Museum were completed. As a modern comprehensive museum, the Shanxi Museum is a key construction project of the national “Ninth Five-Year Plan”, it is also the largest cultural infrastructure invested by Shanxi Province since the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Layout of Shanxi Museum
Shanxi Museum covers an area of 112,000 square meters, with a construction area of 51,000 square meters and an exhibition area of 10,000 square meters. Composed by a main building and four auxiliary buildings (office building, conference center, exhibition center, arts centre), the general layout of the Museum adopts the traditional Chinese axis-symmetric patterning method-- the east-west axis is the primary axis and the north-south axis is the secondary one. The 4-storey main building is located at the intersection of the primary and secondary axes, forming a symmetrical pattern. It looks like a “Dou” (an ancient vessel for holding grains) or “Ding” (an ancient cooking vessel), which symbolize the joy of harvest and stability & auspiciousness respectively.

Collections in Shanxi Museum
As the largest collection, protection, research and exhibition center of cultural relics in Shanxi Province, Shanxi Museum has gathered the essence of the cultural relics in the province, with about 400,000 precious collections, including first-class national cultural relics over 400 pieces (up to December, 2013). Among these collections, some are quite unique such as the Taosi ruins artifacts in the Neolithic Age, the cultural relics of Fangguo in the Shang Dynasty (about 1600 BC-1046 BC）), the stone carvings, the local ceramics in Shanxi, and the cultural relics of Shanxi merchants in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In addition, the library of Shanxi Museum covers an area of more than 1,000 square meters, with complete equipments and facilities, as well as sound management system. There are more than 160,000 books in the library and over 110,000 are ancient books.