Aksu Prefecture Museum 阿克苏地区博物馆

About Aksu Prefecture Museum

Aksu Prefecture Museum (阿克苏地区博物馆), also called Aksu Museum, is the regional museum of history, art and folk life for Aksu Prefecture (阿克苏地区) in southern Xinjiang. It stands at 27 West Street (西大街) on the west square of Aksu city.

The museum dates from 1997, when it opened as the prefecture's first comprehensive museum in a 400 m² space. Its present home was started in early 2007, finished on 29 June 2008 and opened on 22 January 2009, built with aid from Shanghai and local government funds. The architect Xing Tonghe (邢同和) of Shanghai's Xian Dai Architectural Design Group gave the four-storey steel building a skin of red, yellow, blue and green blocks: the pattern combines the lozenge grid, which the museum takes as the most representative motif of Kucha (龟兹) culture, with the colour blocks of Uyghur atlas silk (艾德莱丝绸). It has 5,309 m² of floor space and was named a national third-grade museum in May 2009.

The collection follows local history. In Han times the Aksu area held the kingdoms of Kucha, Gumo (姑墨) and Wensu (温宿), and under the Han and Tang it was home to the Protectorate of the Western Regions (西域都护府) and the Anxi Protectorate (安西大都护府). Three permanent galleries cover Kucha history and culture, the folk culture of the Dolan (多浪) people, and ancient Xinjiang coinage, with a fourth hall for temporary shows. The museum holds 2,163 objects, four of them grade-one national relics; stone, pottery, bronze, wood and bone pieces, textiles and Buddhist images come from sites across the prefecture's eight counties and one city.

The coin gallery is what the museum itself singles out. It runs from Han-dynasty wuzhu coins and bilingual Chinese-Kuchean coins to Republican gold, silver and paper money. It also holds a full series of the Qing dynasty's Xinjiang "red coins" (红钱) from all seven Qing mints in the region, three of which stood in the Aksu area after the Qianlong reign. Displays use multimedia: a Dolan home scene, a holographic Dolan muqam (多浪木卡姆) performance, an electronic book on the life of the translator Kumarajiva (鸠摩罗什), a 3D image of the Kucha dance-and-music reliquary and a coin-casting scene.

What to look for

• The façade of red, yellow, blue and green blocks drawn from the Kucha lozenge grid and Uyghur atlas silk
• The ancient Xinjiang coin gallery, with Qing "red coins" (红钱) from all seven Qing mints in Xinjiang
• Bilingual Chinese-Kuchean coins and Han-dynasty wuzhu coins
• Stone Buddhist statues and a flying-apsara mural, photographed in the museum by People's Daily in 2009
• The Dolan (多浪) folk-culture gallery, with a Dolan home scene and a holographic muqam performance
• An electronic book on the life of the translator Kumarajiva (鸠摩罗什)

Location & getting there

Getting to Aksu Prefecture Museum

• Search for 阿克苏地区博物馆 with 阿克苏地区 and 阿克苏市.