Turpan Museum is a museum in Turpan, Xinjiang, China. It has items from the Tang dynasty excavated from the Astana Graves which are located outside the town. Items include ancient silks, clothes and preserved corpses.
Overview
As one of the big cultural relic area in the autonomous region and in the country, Turpan area has six national preservation centers for cultural relics, 32 autonomous regional preservation centers for cultural relics and 79 county-level preservation centers for cultural relics. Turpan museum is a condensed encyclopedia to for you to know the social, political, military and economic life, with a collection of 5000 historical relics unearthed in the Turpan basin from the Old Stone Age to the modern time.
History
Founded in 1990, it has a floor area of 10 mu, 3500 of which being building area. Its main building is a two-storied modern building full of local color in simple and ancient design. The whole exposition area is divided into three parts, the Turpan historical relic exposition room, the Turpan ancient corpse exposition room and the big rhinoceros fossil exposition room.
According to the time, the Turpan historical relic exposition room is further divided to eight units, including primitive mankind period of remote antiquity, the Gushi period, the Cheshi period in Han dynasty, the period of Gaochang county, the period of Gaochang kingdom, the Xizhou period in Tang dynasty, the Huihu period of Gaochang and the period of Qing dynasty, which reflect the historical developing process and civilization result of Turpan area. It exhibit 300 pieces of historical relics unearthed in Turpan area, including stone wares, pottery wares, wood wares, bronze wares, iron wares, gold wares, silver wares and writings, cotton, silk ,wool, wooden sculptures, clay sculpture, painting, cereals, dry fruit and other foodstuffs, ranging from the Old Stone Age to Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty, mainly being diggings out of ancient tombs and some being civil collections.
However, the Turpan ancient corpse exposition room is the most mysterious and attractive one among the three. Ranging from the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States Period to Qing dynasty, the 11 ancient corpses shown here were mainly unearthed in the Ancient Tombs of Astana—the Harahezu Ancient Tombs, the Subeshen Ancient Tombs and the Yanghai Ancient Tombs.
The big rhinoceros fossil exposition room was finished in 1997. Its main exhibit is the big rhinoceros fossil (or called the“Tianshan big rhinoceros”) earthed in Feiyue railway station of Shanshan county in 1993. The big rhinoceros , called “the biggest mammal on the land”, had lived in the period between the Oligocene Epoch and the Early Miocene 33, 000,000 to 20,000,000 years ago.
Being an Indricotheriidae of Perissodactyla, the big rhinoceros fossil is of 4 meter's height and 7.3 meter's length and 15000 kilogram's weight, with leaves and twigs of trees and bushes as its food. The big rhinoceros fossil is a treasure of the Turpan Museum. It is verified that it is the most integrated rhinoceros framework fossil in the world.
