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The Mengshan Buddha is a Northern Qi cliff carving rediscovered in 1980 without its head, measured at about forty-six metres, given a new head in 2008 and lit, in the old records, by ten thousand oil basins.
Caves cut into the western hills of Taiyuan from the Northern Wei to the Tang: what the two sources count, where the sculpture went, and what the digital reconstruction is putting back.
One Ming hall survives where a thousand-room monastery stood: the Great Compassion Hall, its eight-metre painted figures, its scripture library, and the naming history behind them.
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.
The Fen gives Taiyuan its name and its economy: the article follows the river from the northern mountains to the reservoirs and riverside park that now hold its water inside the city.
Jin Shrine is read in four parts: the Zhou cypress in the garden, the forty-three painted figures in the Song hall, the bridge set over the fish pond, and the springs that named the place.
Knife-cut noodles and the boiled dough shapes that go with them: a Jin cuisine tradition of central and northern Shanxi, made from hard high-gluten dough and shaped by hand at the pot.
Shanxi mature vinegar is made from sorghum, barley and peas through steaming, fermenting, smoking, pouring and drying; the season that finishes the work is the winter, when ice is fished off the vats.
The twin towers of Yongzuo Temple were built for the city's fengshui and became its emblem; below them a gallery of collected steles and a brick hall without beams hold the site's other histories.