The Qinghai Folk Customs Museum documents the material culture of the province's main ethnic groups — Tibetan, Hui, Han, Tu, and Salar — with collections of traditional clothing, household objects, tools, and ceremonial items. It is a less glamorous institution than the Provincial Museum or the Tibetan Medicine Museum, but it covers ground those museums miss: the everyday life of farming and herding families in a region too often represented only through monasteries and high-altitude landscapes.
The Tu minority's embroidery tradition is particularly well represented; the Tu people of the Huzhu district near Xining produce intricate thread-work called panzhu embroidery that has been practised for centuries. The museum is in the Chengdong district, close to the Dongguan Mosque. Admission is free.