The Yin Ruins are the excavated remains of the last capital of the Shang dynasty, occupied from roughly 1300 to 1046 BCE and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The site covers about 30 square kilometres, though the museum and display area focus on the core palace-temple district near the modern village of Xiaotun. Walking through the excavation zones, you can see foundations of royal buildings, storage pits, and the distinctive rammed-earth construction techniques of the Bronze Age. The scale of the original city — home to perhaps 100,000 people at its peak — only becomes apparent when you look at maps showing the full extent of finds across the northern suburbs of modern Anyang.
The on-site museum is the heart of any visit. The collection of oracle bones alone — tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae incised with questions addressed to royal ancestors — numbers in the thousands, and the display explains both how they were used (heated until they cracked, then the cracks interpreted as divine responses) and what they reveal about Shang society: its wars, its agriculture, its obsession with ritual and sacrifice. Entry is ¥70 and includes access to the royal tomb precinct, where you can see the scale of the burial pits dug for Shang kings — some containing hundreds of sacrificed humans alongside horses, chariots, and bronze ritual vessels.