The Longxing Temple hoard

The hoard of Buddhist statues found at Qingzhou is the reason the city museum is famous. More than two hundred buried statues were recovered, and the museum, recognised in 2008 as one of the first batch of national first-class museums and the only one in a county-level city, holds some of those unearthed in 1996 and 1997. The figures include early examples of painted sculpture, and the burial is thought to have followed the Song emperor Huizong's repression of Buddhism in favour of Taoism. Weifang was one of the first places Buddhism reached in China, and the prefecture keeps a whole series of Buddhist sites: this hoard, the Tuoshan and Yunmenshan statues, and the Shimenfang grottoes.