Yunnan Provincial Museum

About 500m west of the centre along Dongfeng Xi Lu and the #5 bus route, the Yunnan Provincial Museum (Mon Thurs 9am-5pm, Fri 9am-2pm; last entry an hour before the museum closes;RMB15) has its moments, though the col- lection of clothes and simpering photographs near the entrance fails to inform on Yunnan’s cultural groups. Far better are the Dian bronzes on the second floor, dating back more than two thousand years to the Warring States Period and excavated from tombs on the shores of Dian Chi, south ofKunming. The largest pieces include an ornamental plate ora tiger attacking an ox and a cof- fin in the shape ora bamboo house, but lids fi-om storage drums used to h01d cowries are the most impressive, decorated with dioramas of figurines fighting, sacrificing oxen and men and, rather more peacefully, posing with their rani- lies and farmyard animals outside their homes. A replica of the Chinese impe- rial gold seal given to the Dian king early on in the second century implies that his aristocratic slave society had the tacit approval of the Hah emperor Upstairs again is a prehistoric museum with enjoyably awful piaster models and casts of locally found trilobites, armoured fishes, bits of dinosaur and earl), human remains.

Kunming City Museum
The highlight of the Kunming City Museum (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm;RMB5), west offBeijing Lu alongTuodong Lu, is the Dali Sutra Pillar, a 6.5-metre- high, pagoda-like Song-dynasty sculpture in pink sandstone in its own room on the ground floor. An octagonal base supports seven tiers covered in Buddha images, statues of fierce guardian gods standing on subjugated demons, anda mix of Tibetan and Chinese script, part of which is the Dharani Mantra. The rest is a dedication, identifying the pillar as being raised by the Dali regent Yuan Douguang, in memory of his general Gao Ming. The whole thing is topped by a ring of Buddhas carrying a ball - the universe - above them. Formerly part of the defunct Dizang temple, the pillar is a powerful work, full ofthe energT that later seeped out of the mainstream of Chinese sculpture. The other exhibits are a well-presented repeat of the Provincial Museum’s collection. Bronze drum enthusiasts can examine a range from the oldest known example to relatively recent castings, allowing you to see how the typ- ical decorations - sun and frog designs on top, long-plumed warriors ii1 boats around the sides, tiger handles - became so stylized (for more on bronze drums, see p.815).There are cowrie-drum lids, too, and a host of other bronze pieces worth examining for nit-picking details of birds, animals and people. Other rooms contain two excellent dioramas of moderen and Ming-dynasty Kunming, accounts (in Chinese) of tile voyages of Zheng the, the famous Ming eunuch admiral, and five locally found fossilized dinosaur skeletons -including a tyranosaurus-like allosaur, and the bulky Yunnanosaurus robustus.

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