Ma'anshan Museum

The Ma'anshan Museum houses close to ten thousand artifacts in its collection, with particular strength in material from the Chu and Han dynasties recovered from tombs in the surrounding region. The Three Kingdoms period is well-represented — the Yangtze valley here was the frontier between the Wu and Wei kingdoms for decades — and the museum has assembled a creditable display of military artifacts and household objects from this era.

The newer cultural complex on the museum campus includes an exhibition on the city's steel industry heritage — an industrial archaeology of one of Mao-era China's model production cities — that is more interesting than it sounds. The Yangtze River culture section covers the city's history as a river port and trading center before industrialization. Allow ninety minutes.

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Among the museum's most interesting holdings are the battle relics recovered from Three Kingdoms period sites in the surrounding area — the region around modern Ma'anshan was heavily contested between the Wu and Wei kingdoms in the third century CE, and the fields regularly yield weapons, armor fragments, and military equipment that provide physical evidence of the campaigns described in the historical record.