Ordos Museum

The Ordos Museum, housed in a spectacular polished-metal building designed by MAD Architects, contains a solid collection covering the natural history, archaeology, and cultural heritage of the Ordos plateau. The Ordos Bronze Culture collection is the highlight: the plateau was a major centre of nomadic metalworking from roughly 600 BCE to 100 CE, producing distinctive animal-style bronzes — belt plaques, harness ornaments, and weapons decorated with stylised deer, horses, and predators — that are among the finest examples of steppe art anywhere in the world.

The natural history section covers the geology and palaeontology of the Kubuqi Desert and the broader Ordos plateau, with good exhibits on the region's fossil record. The cultural section includes Mongolian material culture and documentation of the Genghis Khan ritual traditions maintained by the Darkhad clan. Allow 2–3 hours. Entry fee is modest; the building's interior is as dramatic as the exterior, with a spiralling atrium that recalls the forms of a Mongolian ger.

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A story
The Ordos Museum was designed by Chinese architecture firm MAD Architects, founded by Ma Yansong, and completed in 2011. The building's form — a free-flowing blob of polished metal that seems to hover slightly above the ground — was intended as a contrast to the rigidly geometric government buildings surrounding it. MAD's design philosophy argues that architecture should reflect the organic forms of nature rather than the rigid grids of Chinese urban planning. Whether the result achieves this is debatable; what is certain is that the building is one of the most photographed contemporary structures in Inner Mongolia.