Leitai Han Culture Museum

The Leitai Han Culture Museum is built around a Han Dynasty tomb discovered in 1969, the burial place of a military officer and his wife, sealed and preserved from approximately the second century AD. The tomb yielded over two hundred bronze objects, including the famous Flying Horse of Gansu — the most reproduced image in Chinese tourism, an image of a horse in full gallop with one hoof resting on a swallow, somehow conveying both impossible lightness and tremendous speed. The original is displayed in Lanzhou, but the museum here provides the essential context: the full assemblage of chariots, horses, infantry figures, and domestic objects that accompanied the tomb occupant on his journey.

The tomb itself, carved into the loess cliff above the platform on which the museum stands, can be entered. The vaulted brick chambers, descending in sequence, still feel sealed and ancient despite a century of excavation. The bronze objects displayed in the museum galleries include military equipment, horse trappings, and vessels that between them give a vivid picture of Han Dynasty military culture in the northwest.

things to do museum sight
A story
The Flying Horse of Gansu — cast in bronze around 200 AD, one hoof balanced on a flying swallow — was found in 1969 by farmers digging an air-raid shelter on the outskirts of Wuwei. They broke into a Han Dynasty tomb that had been sealed for nearly two thousand years. The horse, with its expression of concentrated speed and its impossible physics, became one of the most reproduced images in Chinese tourism — it is the official emblem of the China National Tourism Administration. The original is in the Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou. The Wuwei museum has it in the context of everything else that came out of the same tomb.