Yan'an Revolutionary Memorial Museum

The Yan'an Revolutionary Memorial Museum, on the north side of the city, is the principal exhibition covering the CCP base-area period from the end of the Long March in 1935 to the party's departure for Xibaipo in 1948. The museum is large, well-funded, and serious — it was substantially rebuilt and expanded in 2009 — and its collections include documents, photographs, weapons, uniforms, personal objects, and reconstructed scenes from the revolutionary years. The English-language labelling is better than average for Chinese provincial museums.

The permanent exhibition is organized chronologically, beginning with the Long March and the establishment of the base area, and moving through the Yan'an period's key events: the Rectification Campaign, the Seventh Party Congress, the response to the Japanese war, and the preparation for the civil war offensive. The photography section is particularly strong, and the section on daily life — the agricultural labour of the party leadership, the Yan'an arts movement, the schools and medical clinics — gives context that the outdoor sites lack. Plan two to three hours for a thorough visit.

Admission is free. The museum is a fifteen-minute walk from Pagoda Mountain and a reasonable starting point for a day covering the city's revolutionary sites.

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The museum's photographic collection is one of its strongest elements. Many of the images were taken by Edgar Snow, the American journalist who visited the base area in 1936 and whose book "Red Star Over China" introduced Mao Zedong and the Communist leadership to Western readers. Snow's portraits of Mao and his fellow commanders — taken in the cave-dwelling period, long before they took power — are among the canonical images of twentieth-century Chinese history, and seeing them at large scale in the place where they were made changes their texture entirely.