Hotan Prefecture Museum 和田地区博物馆

About Hotan Prefecture Museum

Hotan Prefecture Museum (和田地区博物馆), on Beijing West Road (北京西路) in the city of Hotan (和田), Xinjiang, is the largest general museum in the Hotan area. Its galleries run from Old Stone Age finds through the ancient kingdom of Khotan, or Yutian (于阗), and its place on the Silk Road.

The museum grew out of a relics management office set up in 1979 to look after objects excavated in the prefecture; it became an exhibition room in 1981. Construction of a museum building started in April 2001, helped by a donation of one million yuan from the Japanese monk Kojima Yasutaka (小岛康誉), and it opened on 29 October 2005. A folk-customs display on the second floor followed in August 2006.

Much of the collection comes from excavations at sites across the prefecture, including the Niya site (尼雅遗址), the Shanpula tombs (山普拉古墓群), the Rawak Buddhist temple site (热瓦克佛寺遗址), the Mazar Tagh fort (麻扎塔格戍堡址) and Dandan Oilik (丹丹乌里克遗址), plus private donations; in 2017 one collector gave 11,696 folk objects. In 2024 the Hotan prefecture media centre put the total at more than 20,000 items or sets, in a building of 13,500 m² with 6,160 m² of galleries split into five halls, among them a hall devoted to the Niya site.

Among the exhibits is a Han-dynasty brocade arm guard from Niya woven with the phrase "five stars rising in the east benefit China" (五星出东方利中国), 18.5 cm long and on the list of relics barred from exhibition abroad. The Xinjiang Daily describes a palm-sized Tang-dynasty jade monkey, carved from white "mutton-fat" jade, as one of the museum's prize pieces: a seated monkey holds one young monkey and carries another on its shoulder. Other displays include Sino-Kharoshthi coins, struck coins that circulated locally around the 1st to 3rd centuries, with Chinese on one side and a horse or camel on the other, and Eastern Jin wooden tablets in Kharoshthi script, among them a court judgement and a divorce document.

What to look for

• The "five stars rising in the east benefit China" (五星出东方利中国) Han brocade arm guard from the Niya site
• The Tang-dynasty white-jade monkey carrying two young monkeys
• Sino-Kharoshthi coins (汉佉二体钱), struck coins in two scripts that circulated locally in the 1st to 3rd centuries
• Eastern Jin Kharoshthi (佉卢文) wooden tablets, including a trade-dispute judgement and a divorce record
• A display stone combining several kinds of Hotan jade, just inside the entrance
• The Niya site gallery, one of the museum's five exhibition halls
• A painted wooden coffin excavated in 1984 from a cemetery at the Imam Musa Kazim mazar (伊玛木·木沙·卡孜木麻扎)

Location & getting there

Getting to Hotan Prefecture Museum

• Search for 和田地区博物馆 with 和田地区 and 和田市.