Lüshun Museum

Cultural heritage

Lüshun Museum stands in the Lüshunkou district of Dalian, founded in 1915 as the Kwantung Leased Territory museum, one of the city's oldest museums and a national first-grade museum. Its holdings include ancient Xinjiang mummies—notably the millennium-old Yingpan man—along with bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy, painting and Buddhist sculpture, making it a key institution for the study of the Liaodong peninsula, Northeast Asia and the Silk Road.

Visiting: Inside the museum's early-modern building, the Xinjiang mummy hall never fails to stop visitors—millennium-old bodies and their burial silks lie quietly displayed, carrying one back to the Silk Road oases—while the bronzes and Buddhist sculpture galleries trace the cultural ties between Liaodong, the central plains and the western regions. The Sino-Soviet Friendship Tower stands in the grounds, inviting a slow walk that conveys the weight of Lüshun, "half of China's modern history."