Chengdu Museum

Chengdu Museum occupies a large modern building at No. 1 Xiaohe Street in Qingyang District, directly facing Tianfu Square in the heart of the city, and opened in its current form in 2016 after relocating from an earlier, smaller site. The museum presents a chronological survey of Chengdu's history from prehistoric settlement through the Qing dynasty and into the Republican era, organized across four main floors covering ancient history, Buddhist stone carving, folk customs, and temporary exhibitions. Among its most significant holdings is a large, well-preserved lacquered wooden chariot excavated from a Han dynasty tomb in the Chengdu area, displayed with its original fittings largely intact, alongside stone Buddhist statues and steles recovered from sites across Sichuan spanning the Southern Dynasties through Tang and Song periods. A dedicated Old Chengdu gallery recreates street scenes, teahouses, and shopfronts of the late Qing and Republican-era city using life-size dioramas and salvaged architectural fragments, giving visitors a sense of everyday urban life before modernization. The building's construction is contemporary, incorporating a large glass atrium and skylight hall used for rotating special exhibitions, rather than occupying a historic structure itself. The museum's approach is broadly chronological on the permanent floors, moving from archaeological prehistory to imperial-era religious and material culture and finally to social history, supplemented by a program of temporary loan exhibitions from other Chinese and international institutions. As a purpose-built modern museum rather than a historic building, its holdings rather than its architecture are protected and expanded, with new acquisitions and archaeological finds from ongoing excavations around Chengdu periodically added to the collection.