An Introduction to Gansu Provincial Museum
Gansu Provincial Museum, located on the bank of the Yellow River, is one of the integrative local history museums renowned at home and abroad with its long history, abundant and characteristic cultural relics collection. Its predecessor is Gansu Scientific Education Center founded in 1939 which was re-named as Northwest People`s Science Museum in 1950 and Gansu Provincial Museum in 1956. In 1999, Gansu provincial government set up a project investing 150 million RMB Yuan in the reorganization and expansion of the museum. The new exhibition building opened to the public on Dec 26, 2006. There are 13 departments in the museum with 143 working staff of which 2/3 are professionals including 23 senior researchers and 51 junior researchers.
Gansu provincial museum has rich collection of cultural relics, fossils and specimens with distinguished feature whose total number amounts to 355,364 pieces. Those with most unique characteristics are painted pottery of the Neolithic Age, wooden and bamboo strips of the Han Dynasty, documents, treasures of the Han and Tang Dynasties from the Silk Road and Buddhist artworks. More than 300 exhibitions have been held which attracted nearly 10 million domestic and foreign visitors; many pieces of relics from the museum collection have been exhibited in U.S.A, France, Italy, Japan, Croatia, Singapore and HongKong .
Since the opening of the new exhibition building of Gansu Provincial Museum to the public, the strategy of creating excellent exhibitions has been adopted to carry forward ancient Chinese culture, new materials and techniques on sound, light and electron have been applied to strengthen the ornamental, interactive and interesting feature of the exhibitions. In 2007, three permanent exhibitions held in Gansu Provincial Museum: Civilization along the Silk Road within Gansu, Painted Pottery from Gansu and Paleontological Fossil of Gansu won the national award of seventh Ten Excellent Exhibitions for the year 2005-2006 competing with 18,000 exhibitions prepared by 2,300 museums all over China.
