The 2018 Xuewei No. 1 tomb in Dulan yielded a square silver seal whose face combines a camel with Old Tibetan writing. In 2023, the seal appeared in a special Reshui tombs exhibition at China Archaeology Museum, alongside a broader group of objects excavated from the cemetery. The exhibition account says visitors stopped at the seal. Its scale invites close looking: the image and writing are compact, while the historical questions attached to them reach across political alliances and the Qinghai route.
From the journal
A Silver Seal Leaves the Reshui tombs
A 2023 exhibition at China Archaeology Museum placed a small inscribed seal from Dulan’s Reshui tombs before visitors as both an artifact and evidence.
A small object with an inscription
An object becomes part of a public account
The exhibition brought objects from a burial context into a museum narrative about travel and exchange. The seal’s inscription, read as “the seal of the nephew A-chai king,” offered evidence for the status and relationships of the person buried there. Gold and silver objects, textiles, ironware and lacquered wood broadened the display beyond a single deciphered mark. In the museum, each artifact could be seen separately, yet the labels and exhibition connected them back to the tomb and to a wider history of movement through the plateau.