The Kunming City Museum is a smaller, less polished counterpart to the new Provincial Museum, and its collection is more local in focus. The signature object is a 7-metre fossilised tooth of a Tibetan mastodon excavated in the city's southern suburbs in the 1990s — set out in a hall built around it — and a Yuan-dynasty stone pillar from a vanished Buddhist temple inscribed in a now-unreadable hybrid Chinese-Sanskrit script.
Other galleries cover the Bronze Age cultures of the Kunming basin, the city's role as a southern silk-road terminus, and the chaotic years of the early 20th century when Kunming was effectively independent under the warlord Long Yun. Less crowded than the Provincial Museum and worth a couple of hours.