Museum sights in Chángshā
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Húnán Provincial Museum
Not to be missed, this first-rate museum has fascinating exhibits from the 2100-year-old Western Han tombs of Mǎwángduī, some 5km east of the city.
The items on show allow you to get a rare handle on Western Han aesthetics – check out the astonishing expressions on the faces of some of the wooden figurines. Also excavated are more than 700 pieces of lacquerware, Han silk textiles and ancient manuscripts on silk and bamboo wooden slips, including one of the earlier versions of the Zhōuyì (Yìjīng, also called I Ching), written in formalised Han clerical script.
But the highlight is the body of the Marquess of Dai, extracted from her magnificent multilayered lacquered…
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Chángshā City Museum
A colossal 1968 statue of Mao – cast out of an aluminium-magnesium alloy in Hēilóngjiāng – affably greets you at the entrance to the museum's pleasant grounds. Compare his carriage – right arm raised aloft, heralding a new dawn – with that of his more demure statue erected in Sháoshān in 1993, when the reform drive had long kicked in and Mao was a demigod no more.
The statue is the first clue that this hammer and sickle–decorated museum is essentially a shrine to Chángshā's most famous adopted son, despite the paintings, ceramics and jade on display here. Check out the huge portrait of the young Mao, with shafts of light emanating from his head, which hangs o…
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Hunan CPC Committee
It is the former site of Mao's living quarters and includes photos and historical items from the 1920s, along with a wall where Mao's poems are on view. A small and fun antiques market materialises at the museum gate on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
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