[More pictures from the Beilin museum and the Shaanxi History Museum]
After finishing our bike ride and navigating by foot Xi’an’s treacherous traffic circles, we walked through the Shuyuanmen art street to the Beilin Museum. The museum has the standard temple look but the contents are more interesting to me than the collection of pots and bronze-works. Instead, this museum held giant stone slabs with scores of characters on them. Think the ten commandments only bigger. Included among them was one etched landscape that I subsequently bought in rubbing form. I really have to say, as means of preserving your words go, carving them in stone really does the job.
Next stop was the Shaanxi History Museum. Named after the province it covered the areas history from the earliest dynasties through Xi’an’s time as the capital of China on to the final Qing dynasty. The pieces were interesting and well presented. I thought the coins with holes were particularly neat. One attendent told me that in times of inflation they were further broken up into a smaller coin with a hole and a larger ring coin. Also of interest was a giant soduko style board where each line added to 111, apparently a way of warding ghosts. Also I thought many of the figures had funny expressions.
The main thing I learned is that what I thought of as a Ming vase was really a Qing vase. The blue and white vases with highly complex patterns are probably Qing, which makes sense as they were more recent and thus had more technology available. There weren’t even any blue and white Ming pieces in the museum at all, although I did later see a couple in the Summer Palace. They were still quite pretty and reasonably complex with drawings of dragons and such. However, unless I was the only one confused by this, the popular image of Ming vases is totally wrong.b
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