Yunnan's provincial museum, in the south-eastern part of Kunming, is the place to make sense of a province whose history does not run like the rest of China's. Yunnan was not simply a frontier that was gradually absorbed; it was a region with its own kingdoms, its own bronze-working cultures, and trade links south and west into Southeast Asia and over the mountains to India, and the museum presents that history through objects rather than assertion.
The Dian bronzes
The core of the collection comes from the burials of the Dian kingdom, a culture of the Kunming lake basin that flourished in the last centuries BC and was recorded, briefly, by Han dynasty officials. Excavations at Shizhaishan and Lijiashan produced bronzes of extraordinary character: cowrie-shell containers topped with scenes of people, animals and buildings cast in three dimensions; drums; weapons; and the famous table-like object on which a tiger and a pair of cattle are modelled. The imagery - processions, sacrifices, weaving, warfare, houses on stilts, musicians, dancers - is one of the most vivid pictures of daily life surviving from ancient East Asia, and it shows a society quite unlike the Central Plains.
The rest of the collections
Beyond the Dian material there are later bronze and iron work, Han and Tang period finds, Buddhist sculpture and painting from the Dali kingdom, which ruled the region between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and produced a distinctive religious art, and a very strong ethnographic collection covering the province's ethnic groups: textiles, embroidery, silver jewellery, costumes, looms, musical instruments, household objects and photographs. This last section is the most useful preparation for travelling in the province, because it shows what the dress of different groups actually looks like and where each comes from.
Practical notes
The museum is in the south-eastern district of Kunming, reachable by metro and taxi, and it is free, requiring identification to enter and a booking in peak periods; it is closed on Mondays. Allow two to three hours. Labelling is in Chinese and English at the section level and less consistently on individual objects. The museum is close to the Guandu old town and to the Dianchi lakeshore, so it combines naturally into a day that takes in both.
