Baoji Bronzeware Museum

The Baoji Bronzeware Museum stands in Weibin District of Baoji, a city long known in China as the hometown of bronzeware for the sheer volume of Western Zhou dynasty ritual bronzes recovered from the surrounding countryside, where local farmers have unearthed buried hoards since at least the Han dynasty, with major discoveries continuing through the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 2000s. The museum's current building, opened in 2010 on Zhuque Yuan hill overlooking the Wei River, replaced an earlier facility and was designed to hold the growing collection in climate-controlled galleries. Its centerpiece is the He Zun, a ritual wine vessel cast around 1000 BCE whose 122-character inscription contains the earliest known written appearance of the term Zhongguo, literally central state, an early ancestor of the modern name for China. Surrounding galleries display hundreds of additional bronze vessels used in Zhou dynasty ancestor-worship rituals, cast with inscriptions recording royal grants of land, military campaigns, and clan genealogies that historians use as primary textual sources for a period with few surviving written records. The exhibits are organized thematically around vessel types and their ritual functions, such as food vessels, wine vessels, and water vessels, with explanatory panels on Zhou bronze-casting technique, which used multi-piece ceramic piece-molds rather than lost-wax casting. The museum's hillside site also affords views over the Wei River valley, the same river valley in which the historical Zhou state originated before conquering the Shang dynasty.