Guanzhong Folk Art Museum

The Guanzhong Folk Art Museum is in the heart of the Qinling-Zhongnanshan World Geological Park with Cuihua Mountain to the east, Straw Hut Temple to the west, the Xi’an city center in to north, and Wuhai Mountain to the south. The museum covers an area of 329, 253 square metes and has a construction area of 108,000 square meters. It was set up by Wang Yongchao for the purposes of preserving, protecting, and researching the Shaanxi folk custom culture. More than 33,600 cultural relics have been collected and well-preserved in the museum since the 1980’s, including stone carvings, wood carvings, brick carvings, ancient residences, and calligraphic and painting works. Some of the artifacts are from the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046 B.C.-771 B.C.), some from the Tang Dynasty (618 A.D.-907 A.D.), and others are from the post-Tang Dynasty, thus covering the full spectrum of folk customs of the ancient Guanzhong people throughout different periods of time.

The building of the Guanzhong Folk Art Museum itself is in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1616-1911) architectural styles, and it consists of the Ancient Town Sightseeing Area, Folk Custom Culture Exhibit Area, Intangible Cultural Heritage Exhibit Zone, and a folk tradition research center. Its main attractions are the 40 ancient civilian residences from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, a folk custom exhibit hall, theater tower, man-made lake, altar square, the gardening landscape, and the galleries.

In total, more than 12,000 stone carvings are collected in the museum, including stone horse-hitching posts, figures, lions, turtles, and mangers, where the stone horse-hitching posts serve as the highlights. Most of the stone figures were carved according to the northern barbarian tribes in ancient China; dozens of these stone female figures are very impressive and represent the advanced conception of equality between the sexes among the ancient ethnic minority groups.

There are also more than 8,600 delicate stone horse-hitching posts in the Guanzhong Folk Art Museum, infusing the circular carving style with the basso-relievo style perfectly as one. These horse-hitching posts are composed of a post head, pedestal, and post body. Of these, the main part of each stone horse-hitching post is the post head, which is often decorated in a circular carving style and features carved patterns such as eagles, elephants, and oxen. The pedestal, then, functions as the support for the post head, is often decorated in a basso-relievo style, and has patterns such as horses, deer, and lotuses carved on it. Finally, the post bodies are often decorated by white cloud and flower patterns, which are in a typical local style. As one professor named Jin Zhilin of the Central Academy of Art of China even once said, “The representative folk art of the Shaanxi Province, the stone horse-hitching post, is of high cultural value and it fully symbolizes the great achievement of Chinese stone-carving art, whose protection means that the Chinese culture and the spirit of the Chinese nation are well preserved in some sense.”

The impressively extensive Guanzhong Folk Art Museum has been named The Shaanxi Patriotic Education Base and The National Culture Industry Demonstration Base. As well, it has been valuably honored as “The Above-Ground Terra Cotta Warriors” by archaeologists.

Address: No. 1, Wutaishan Road, south of Wutai Ancient Town, Chang’an District, Xi’an
Opening hours: 8:00 am to 6:00 pm every day
Bus routes: 600 and 404