The museum and the kiln

The museum began modestly. Built in 1951 and opened to the public in July 1956 on Dongfeng Road beside the Revolutionary Martyr's Park, it spent its first decades growing by excavation: a dedicated Mawangdui exhibit hall rose in July 1974, two years after Tomb 1 was opened, and a new display building followed in 2003. The present building is the third answer. On 18 June 2012 the museum closed for complete reconstruction — the design led by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts with the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki assisting — and reopened on 29 November 2017 with roughly ninety-one thousand square metres of floor on a forty-nine-thousand-square-metre site. The scale is set by the holdings. More than 180,000 objects are kept, from Zhou bronzes to Qing calligraphy, and the Mawangdui collection alone — a preserved body, painted silk, featherweight robes and libraries of silk books — demands climate control the 1950s building never imagined. Basic entry has been free since March 2008, with visitors booking by identity card or phone app, one small marker of how a provincial collection turned into mass entertainment.

The permanent displays run from the tomb to the kiln, and the route is effectively a descent through Hunan's layers. The Mawangdui halls come first: the excavated woman herself, the T-shaped banner, the gauze robes, and the silk writings on astronomy, medicine and statecraft that rewrote the early history of Chinese books. The bronze galleries follow with the province's Shang and Zhou finds — Hunan is a heartland of Bronze Age hoards, and the famous four-ram square zun came from its soil — together with the strangely ornamented Da He ding and weapons from the Western Zhou to the Warring States. The ceramics hall then lays the province's kilns in one long sequence: the glazed, sculpted wares of the Xiangyin kiln, the underglaze-painted stoneware of the Changsha kiln, and the underglaze five-colour porcelain of Liling, three technologies arranged as a single relay. Ming and Qing galleries rotate calligraphy and painting — Wen Zhengming, Dong Qichang, Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang among the names — and a survey of the province's ten great excavations closes the circuit with Warring States slips and Qin documents. A visitor leaves having walked, in effect, from a Han burial chamber to the doorstep of modern industry.

The last case in the ceramics gallery explains the province's most consequential pot. The Changsha kiln — in reality a string of folk workshops at Tongguan on the Xiang's east bank north-west of the city — fired in the middle and late Tang and the Five Dynasties, making plain stoneware for the table that its decorators then did something new to: they brushed iron- and copper-based pigments directly onto the unfired body and covered them with glaze, so the colour burns up from underneath rather than sitting on the surface. Pieces found there with dated inscriptions — 808, 838, 855 — pushed the earliest known underglaze painting back into the Tang, and the site is now treated as the technique's birthplace. The kilns themselves were workmanlike: dragon kilns cut into hillsides, among them a thirty-four-metre slope at Chenjiaping. But the output travelled — through the middle and lower Yangtze, then abroad to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, West Asia and Africa — and the proof is spectacular: an Arab dhow of the 830s, wrecked off Belitung in Indonesia with more than 60,000 Changsha bowls and ewers aboard, its cargo now housed in Singapore. The kiln site became a national protected unit in 1988, and its archaeological park opened in 2012.