Ordos Bronze Culture Sites

The Ordos plateau was one of the most culturally productive areas of the ancient steppe world, home to the metalworking tradition known to archaeologists as the Ordos Bronze Culture. The plateau's burial sites have yielded thousands of animal-style bronze and gold objects — belt plaques depicting fighting animals, horse harness ornaments, daggers with animal-head pommels — that are among the finest examples of nomadic art from ancient Eurasia.

The main Ordos Bronze Culture collections are in the Ordos Museum in Kangbashi and in the Inner Mongolia Museum in Hohhot. Several burial sites on the Ordos plateau have been partially excavated and are accessible as archaeological parks, though signage and facilities are limited. For travellers interested in the long history of steppe civilisation before Genghis Khan, the Bronze Culture sites and their museum collections provide essential context for understanding how the Ordos plateau has always been at the intersection of the nomadic and agricultural worlds.

things to do sight historic site
A story
The Ordos Bronze Culture is the academic name for the distinctive animal-style metalwork tradition that flourished on the Ordos plateau from roughly 700 BCE to 100 CE — a tradition produced by nomadic peoples ancestral to the later Xiongnu, the fearsome northern enemies of the Han dynasty. The gold and bronze belt plaques, weapons, and horse ornaments they produced are technically sophisticated and artistically distinctive, combining realistic animal depictions with abstract patterns in a style that has parallels in the Scythian art of the Eurasian steppe further west.

Other places in Things to Do