Baoji lies about two hours west of Xi'an, at the point where the Wei river valley narrows towards the mountains, and it has been the source of more Western Zhou bronze vessels than anywhere else in China. The reason is historical: the Zhou heartland was here, and from the eleventh century BC onwards the ritual vessels of the Zhou aristocracy were cast, used, buried and forgotten across this plain, to be dug up by farmers in the twentieth century in hoards of astonishing size. The China Bronze Ware Museum, built in the city on a hill above the river, holds the results.
What is inside
The collection runs from the earliest bronze work of the Shang and early Zhou through the great ceremonial vessels of the middle Western Zhou and on into the Eastern Zhou and Qin. The pieces that matter most are the inscribed ones. Zhou bronzes carry cast inscriptions recording royal grants, land transfers, military campaigns, legal judgments and ancestral dedications, and these texts are the primary source for early Chinese history - many of them survive nowhere else. The museum displays them with transcriptions and translations, and the technical quality of the casting, in some cases three thousand years old and still sharp, is startling.
The vessel to look for
The best-known object in the collection is a tall wine vessel whose inscription includes the earliest known appearance of the two characters that later became the name of China. It was cast in the early Western Zhou and its text describes a royal audience and the granting of land, with the king speaking about the centre of the world. It is worth looking for early in the visit, because everything else in the galleries reads differently once you have understood that these objects were documents as much as vessels.
Practical notes
The museum is on the outskirts of Baoji and is reachable by high-speed train from Xi'an in about an hour, followed by a taxi; a car for the day makes it an easy add-on to the western route towards Tianshui. It charges a modest admission, opens daily except Mondays, and needs at least two hours for a serious visit. English labelling is limited but the object labels carry dates and find-spots, which is enough to follow the sequence. Combine it with the Famen Temple and the Qianling and Zhaoling mausoleums, which are on the same road back to Xi'an.
