Changsha Bamboo Slips Museum 长沙简牍博物馆

About Changsha Bamboo Slips Museum

The Zoumalou discoveries include wooden and bamboo documents recording land, people and official business in the Three Kingdoms period. Large split contract tablets show how a written agreement could be divided into matching parts, a useful detail to look for in the interpretation. Read the documents alongside their excavation context rather than expecting carved decorative scrolls. The museum pairs naturally with nearby Tianxin Pavilion, contrasting everyday records with the city’s defensive architecture.

The museum was formally established on 16 November 2002, at No. 92 Baisha Road in Tianxin District, Changsha. Construction began in June 2000 and was largely complete by the end of 2003; after a nine-day trial opening in late 2005, the museum opened to the public on 8 November 2007. It was designated a Second Grade National Museum (国家二级博物馆) by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in 2009, and a First Grade National Museum (国家一级博物馆) by the China Museums Association in 2017. The main building covers 14,100 square metres, with reinforced-concrete frame construction, an atrium courtyard and a black-and-white exterior.

The collection includes about 140,000 dated bamboo slips from the Three Kingdoms Eastern Wu period, unearthed from Well J22 at Zoumalou in October 1996; several hundred Eastern Han slips found near Wuyi Square in 1997; more than 2,000 dated Western Han slips recovered from Well J8 at Zoumalou in October 2003; and roughly 3,500 items of bamboo slips, bronzes, lacquerware, jade, gold and silver ware and paintings from the 1993 tomb of a queen of the Western Han Changsha Kingdom. Hunan Province has yielded more than 200,000 bamboo and wooden slips since the 1950s, more than any other region in China.

What to look for

• Zoumalou’s excavated Wu-period administrative documents.
• The large wooden contract tablets and their split-document structure.

Location & getting there

Getting to Changsha Bamboo Slips Museum

Use No 92 Baisha Road in Tianxin District, beside the Tianxin Pavilion area. Check the museum’s own reservation and closing-day notice before combining the two visits.