The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Museum, or Xinjiang Museum, is located in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China. Its address is at 581 Xibei Road, Urumqi.
Xinjiang Regional Museum (Chinese name: 新疆维吾尔自治区博物馆) is a large integrated museum and a study on cultural relics in Xinjiang. Built in 1953, it covers an area of 7,800 square meters with over 50,000 items in the collection which vividly illustrate the history, lifestyle, religion and customs of 12 minorities living in Xinjiang. The Loulan Beauty, a 4,000-year old mummy, is among the best preserved and famous collections in the museum.
The museum holds over 40,000 items of various cultural relics and specimens, including 381 national first-grade cultural relics (国家一级文物). In May 2008, the Xinjiang Museum was included in the first batch of the National first-grade museums of China.
The Xinjiang Autonomous Region has long been a crossroads for many different kinds of people. Their diversity of scripts and cultures is exhibited in this museum through archaeological material, including documents in some twelve different scripts with a particularly large number from the Han-dynasty finds at Turpan. Xinjiang Regional Museum has several dozen original Tang-dynasty paintings. Although these are not from the hands of famous painters, they still exhibit the vital Tang spirit.
Presently, the Xinjiang Regional Museum has opened new exhibits called the Xinjiang History Exhibition and the Xinjiang People Customs Exhibition. The history exhibit shows the history of Xinjiang by using material from its rich collections and highlighting material from recent archaeological discoveries. The Customs exhibition introduces the customs and cultural lifestyles of twelve different ethnic groups in Xinjiang, including the Uighur, Kazakh, Mongolian, Kirgiz, Hui, Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, Tatar, Daur, Xibo, and Manchu.
Xinjiang Regional Museum display basic “historical relics” in Xinjiang, and show the “Xinjiang ethnic folk”, also held some exhibitions of special subjects like "the Chinese Primitive Society", "Great Silk Weaving Process", "Xinjiang Grottoes Frescoes (copy)" and so on. In 1986, “Chinese Xinjiang cultural relics” exhibited in Long Island, Tokyo, Okayama, Sendai; 1988 "Xinjiang ethnic folk cultural relic", "Xinjiang Uygur handicrafts" were put on display in Macau and Hong Kong.
General
The Xinjiang Museum was established in August 1959. The current museum building was built and opened for public on September 20, 2005.
Exhibits
The museum has been set up to show the four major exhibits: "Recover the Western Region's Glory of Yesterday - the exhibit of the historical cultural relics in Xinjiang", "the exhibit of Xinjiang's ethnic customs", "The Mummies of the Immortal World - the exhibit of the ancient mummies of Xinjiang,", “The Historical Monuments – the exhibit of Xinjiang's revolutionary history”.
