One gallery of the Shanxi Museum is given over to a single state. The hall on the hegemony of Jin presents the many bronzes excavated at the Qucun-Tianma site together with objects from the Jin site at Houma, and among the better-known pieces are the chime bells of Marquis Su of Jin and a set of Houma covenant tablets. The display covers the Spring and Autumn and Warring States centuries, when Jin was the strongest power in northern China and its workshops cast for its lords. Around that core the permanent display is organised as seven historical themes - from the cradle of civilisation to the Jin state and the Ming-Qing merchants - and five art themes, so the bronzes sit in a chronology rather than in a showcase on their own.
From the journal
The Jin Bronzes in the Shanxi Museum
The museum's Jin gallery, the tomb finds of Sima Jinlong and the Northern Dynasties hall show how the state of Jin survives in metal, and how the museum itself grew from a library of 1919.
In the same city · Taiyuan ↗Bronze vessels from the state of Jin
A tomb that gave back its contents
The museum's strongest single holdings come from a tomb rather than from a site: the group of objects connected with Sima Jinlong, who died in 484 CE, with a large number of tomb figurines from his burial, among them pieces made of lead-glazed ceramics, and a tomb plaque from the same grave. Other objects from that tomb are kept in the Datong Museum, so the finds are split between two provincial collections. Around them the display runs through the Northern Dynasties with tombs such as those of Lou Rui, Xu Xianxiu and Yu Hong, including a painted stone chariot procession, a wine vessel, a four-spirit dye vat and a bronze lamp shaped as a goose and a fish. From Yu Hong's tomb comes a gilded silver cup with a human-and-animal design on a high stem.
What the name Jin means
The name on the chime bells is the name of a state. Jin was the strongest power in northern China before it was partitioned in 403 BC among the states of Han, Zhao and Wei, and its capital stood further down the Fen valley, near today's Houma. The same word gives the provincial capital its older name, Jinyang, and the name of Jin Shrine, first built for Tang Shuyu, the founder of that state. The museum itself began as the Education Library and Museum of Shanxi, opened on 9 October 1919 in the Taiyuan Confucian Temple, one of the earliest museums in China; it became the Shanxi Provincial Museum in September 1953 after merging with the Taiyuan City Relics Hall, and took its present name when the new building was finished in the middle of the 2000s. Admission has been free with valid identification since March 2008.