Yinqueshan Han Tombs Bamboo Slips Museum

The Yinqueshan Han Tombs Bamboo Slips Museum is built on the site of two Western Han Dynasty tombs excavated in 1972, whose contents transformed scholarly understanding of early Chinese military thought. The tombs yielded thousands of bamboo strips with texts including the oldest known version of Sun Tzu's Art of War, the rediscovered Sun Bin's Art of War, and other military and administrative documents dating from the 2nd century BCE.

The museum displays the original bamboo strips (or facsimiles where the originals are too fragile), along with the burial objects from the tombs and explanatory material on the significance of the finds. The bamboo strip texts are genuinely astonishing objects: small, fragile, and 2,200 years old, they contain some of the most influential strategic writing in history. The museum is modest in scale and easy to visit in 90 minutes; it is the single most compelling reason to spend time in Linyi. Entry is free or minimal.

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A story
The bamboo slips discovered in the Yinqueshan tombs in 1972 contained something extraordinary: a copy of *Sun Tzu's Art of War* that predated all previously known versions by over a thousand years. The text differed significantly from later editions, revealing that the canonical text has been revised and edited over the centuries. The same cache also contained a previously unknown military treatise attributed to Sun Bin, Sun Tzu's descendant — a text that had been considered lost for two millennia.