A Tang-style hall on Xicheng Road
Ningxia Guyuan Museum stands at 133 Xicheng Road in Yuanzhou District, a provincial museum in a hall of Tang style. Northern bronzes sit with Silk Road objects from the Northern Wei, the Northern Zhou, the Sui, and the Tang, the range that most clearly belongs to Guyuan. The collection holds more than 20,000 objects or groups: 123 of the first grade, 2,008 of the second, 3,816 of the third, and three described as national-treasure level. Those three are the Northern Wei lacquer-coffin painting, the Northern Zhou gilt-silver ewer, and the bossed glass bowl. The permanent exhibition “千年固原 丝路华章” selects 2,280 objects excavated in Guyuan, from the Neolithic through the Ming and Qing. A gem-set gold ring, a ring-pommel iron knife, Persian silver coins, and Roman gold coins are among the objects that reached this mountain prefecture from Central and West Asia. The northern bronzes belong to the museum's picture of the mountain frontier. The lacquer painting and the gilt-silver ewer come from local tombs of the Northern Wei and the Northern Zhou.
A Xianbei coffin, reconstructed
The lacquer painting is a reconstruction of a coffin excavated in 1981 at Leizu Temple village. The lid is gabled, in a Xianbei form. A gilt river runs across it, with cranes, a sun and a moon, and figures read as Dongwangfu and Xiwangmu, the King Father of the East and the Queen Mother of the West. The front panel shows the tomb occupant in Xianbei dress. The side panels carry filial-piety stories, pearl-roundel ornament, and a hunt. These are excavated finds. The names on the lid are one reading of the painted figures. The object in the hall is a painted wooden burial from the Northern Wei, reassembled so the lid, the front, and the sides can be read as one object again.
The ewer, the bowl, and the rebuilt tombs
The ewer comes from the tomb of Li Xian and Wu Hui at Shengou village, excavated in 1983. It stands 37.5 centimeters high and weighs 1.5 kilograms, with a face on the handle and three pairs of figures on the body. Those figures have been read as a Greek story. The third treasure, the bossed glass bowl, is 8 centimeters high and weighs 245.6 grams, green, with raised circles. On the evidence of composition and ornament, it is called Sasanian. Inside the same building, a separate hall rebuilds nine tombs at full scale, from the Western Zhou to the Yuan, so the sequence is walked indoors, not at an excavation field. The stele hall shows 32 inscriptions. Among them are the Song record “东山寨修城记,” on the building of walls at Dongshan Fort, and a Qing stele by Wu Dacheng on the Sanguankou road. Painted wood, gilt silver, green glass, and later stone inscriptions share one building in Yuanzhou.