Maoling Museum 茂陵博物馆

About Maoling Museum

Maoling and the tomb of Huo Qubing both belong to the first national group of key protected cultural relics. The museum's own account puts the wider mausoleum district at 9.5 km east to west by 7.0 km north to south, an area of 66.5 square kilometres or 99,750 mu, holding more than 400 remains, satellite tombs and burial pits; more than twenty satellite tombs lie around Maoling, among them those of Wei Qing, Huo Qubing, Huo Guang, Jin Midi and Lady Li. The museum itself covers 492,000 square metres with 16,159 square metres of buildings, and is a public institution under the Xingping Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism. Its grounds fall into two parts, broadly symmetrical about a north-south axis and built in imitation-Han overhanging-gable tiled style: a front part centred on a fish pond and rockery with east and west exhibition halls facing each other, and a rear part centred on Huo Qubing's tomb mound, piled from natural boulders in imitation of the Qilian Mountains, with the mound's original stone sculptures set out symmetrically in east and west corridors.

The Shaanxi Provincial Local Chronicles Office dates the best known of those sculptures, the Horse Trampling a Xiongnu, to the sixth year of the Yuanshou reign of Emperor Wu (117 BC), and gives it as 168 cm high and 190 cm long: a natural irregular block worked into a warhorse with a Xiongnu slave-owner lying beneath its belly, bow and arrow in hand. The same entry records that Huo Qubing, who lived from 140 to 117 BC, campaigned six times against the Xiongnu, defeated their main force and opened the Hexi Corridor, and that Emperor Wu titled him Grand Marshal, General of Agile Cavalry, Marquis of Champion; his tomb was built in the shape of the Qilian Mountains where he had campaigned, with the group of large stone sculptures set out before it. The museum grew out of the Maoling relics management office, set up in 1956; it was renamed a museum and opened to the public in 1979, named a provincial patriotic education base in 1994, announced a 4A tourist scenic area in 2001, and published by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in May 2009 in the first group of second-grade museums. By the end of 2024 its collection totalled 5,259 items or sets, of which 70 are first-grade, 54 second-grade and 578 third-grade.

What to look for

• The Horse Trampling a Xiongnu carving, dated to 117 BC and measuring 168 cm by 190 cm, with the Xiongnu figure lying beneath the horse holding a bow and arrow
• Huo Qubing's tomb mound itself, piled from natural boulders in imitation of the Qilian Mountains, with its original stone sculptures ranged symmetrically in the east and west corridors
• The east and west exhibition halls flanking the fish pond and rockery in the front part of the grounds
• The imitation-Han overhanging-gable tiled buildings the museum's grounds are built in

Location & getting there

Getting to Maoling Museum

Confirm the venue or campus, reservation channel and exhibition calendar. A museum name may cover more than one building.

• Search for 茂陵博物馆 with 咸阳市 and 兴平市.