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The couple of Ganjiang and Moye, masters of sword casting, tempered double-edged swords in blazing fire day and night.

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States, the iron abounding in the Yue State was the best in quality and sword-making masters emerged in large numbers, of whom Ganjiang was a man of great reputation. Afterwards, Ganjiang went to the Wu State and was tied in wedlock with Moye. As He Lv, the king of the Wu State, was fond of double-edged sword, the two of them were appointed to an official position. For casting an excellent sword, the king of the Wu State sent someone to acquire the best iron from the Yue State and ordered Ganjiang to work out a unique sword within three months or he would be beheaded for disobeying the order.

Ganjiang and Moye went on working hard night and day for two months, but the iron was still not melted in the furnace. The deadline for the sword was due soon but they were at their wits’ end. Ganjiang brought up the story about how his master worker and his wife jumped into the furnace so that the iron was melted and a good sword was worked out within the deadline set by the king of the Yue State. After hearing the story, Moye decide to sacrifice her life for the sword. After turning the issue over in his mind for a long time, Ganjiang said as hair and nails of human beings were parents’ essence, maybe they could melt the iron. So Moye cut off her long hair and nails and threw them into the blazing fire. Simultaneously, three hundred young boys and girls did all they could to air-blast the furnace with more carbon added in the balzing fire. In an instant the iron melted and a couple of unique “male and female swords” in the world was finally wrought. The male sword, covering with lines in tortoise-shell pattern on the surface, was named Ganjiang while the female sword, covering with lines in water-wave pattern on the surface, was named Moye.
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Address: Beijing, Fuxingmennei Dajie, #49

The exterior of the Cultural Palace of Minorities in Beijing

The Cultural Palace of Minorities is located on the west end of Chang’an Street, in Beijing. This is a focal point where all the nationalities of the country can come together for cultural exchange: it is a microcosm of the greater family of diverse peoples that make up China. The building occupies some 30,000 square meters and is a multistoried tower-like structure. It stands 13 stories high and has two wings that flank the central hall.

Some 30,000 objects constitute the collections of the Museum, including scripts, costumes, and handicrafts that relate to minority peoples. The territory from which they are drawn extends to Tibet,
Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Ningxia, Yunnan and Guizhou. The material encompasses artifacts from all 56 of modern China’s ethnic minorities. It also includes historical objects

Minorities’ garments displayed in the Cultural Palace of Minorities in Beijing

from peoples who once lived on the same territories including Xiongnu,Dangxiang, Qidan, Dian peoples among others. Traditional clothes are a particularly striking part of the collection.

There is also a wealth of religious artifacts relating to every kind of religion in China. Among the objects from Tibet are scriptures, documents, laws, treaties and books that constitute an invaluable historical record. Historical relics are also held in this museum. They include musical instruments dating to the Tang dynasty, armor from the Yuan dynasty, items from the Western Xia, weapons from the Qing dynasty, and so on.

A corner of minorities’ cultural exhibition hall in Cultural Palace of Minorities in Beijing

Based on these collections, the Museum has held exhibitions of ancient scripts,costumes, bronze drums, and a great diversity of other topics. As an example, an exhibition of the Tong minority of Guizhou showed local architecture using not only actual objects but models of architectural sites. It brought in young Dong boys and girls to dance, play instruments, and perform so that the audience could feel they were situated in the deep mountain passes of the Dong people.

An extensive library of books in twenty-four different national minority languages is located in the basement of the Museum. The languages include Han, Mongolian, Tibetan, Korean, Uighur, Kazakh, and others, in some 400,000 volumes. Among these are rarely seen scripts, and artistic works of great value in the form of golden sutras, carved woodblocks, manuscripts, paintings and early rubbings. These have scientific as well as artistic value, in narrating the history of the cultures of all of China’s people.

Address: Shaanxi Province, Xi’an City, Yanta Road, #70

A Tang-triple-color ceramic camel that carries a small musical band on its back with a female performer standing in the middle singing and dancing

The Shaanxi History Museum is situated on Yan Ta Road in Xi’an City, Shaanxi Province. It covers 65,000 square meters, with a building area of 60,000 square meters. The newly built modern building recreates Tang-dynasty architecture and successfully symbolizes the great extent of Shaanxi history and its remarkable culture.

Exhibited in the main exhibition hall are 2,700 works of art, with an exhibition line that extends 2,300 meters. The exhibition space is divided into an introductory hall, permanent exhibitions, special exhibitions, and temporary exhibitions, as well as one that has been named the National Painting Hall.

The Museum’s permanent exhibition primarily displays Shaanxi’s ancient history. Representative pieces from all periods have been selected to show the development of civilization in this region. The exhibition space of this display is 4,600 square meters. It includes three exhibition rooms, divided into seven parts (Prehistory, Zhou, Qin, Han, Wei-Jin-North and South dynasties, Sui-Tang, and Song-Yuan-Ming-Qing). The superlative 2,000 selected objects include: painted Neolithic ceramics reflecting early people’s living conditions and their pursuit of vibrant art forms, bronzes
reflecting the rise of Zhou people, bronze weapons including swords, and statuary of horses and soldiers, reflecting the

A Tang-dynasty gold bowl with lotus petal carving unearthed in Xian

way in which Qin unified all under heaven, Tang-dynasty gold and silver objects and Tang sancai ceramics, reflecting the most flourishing period of feudal glory. All of this is accompanied by models of archaeological sites, and drawings, and photographs.

These works systematically exhibit the ancient history of Shaanxi from 150,000 years ago to the year 1840. Since several historical periods all based their capitals on Shaanxi territory, such
as Zhou, Qin, Western Han, Sui and Tang, the exhibits emphasize these periods and these places.
This not only expresses the extent of culture in ancient Shaanxi, it also displays the highest level of cultural development of China’s social economy.

A bronze ox zun (a kind of ancient wine vessel) of the Western Zhou
Dynasty unearthed in Qishan County,
Shaanxi Province.

The temporary exhibits hall, located on the east side of the museum, has had a variety of exhibitions including Tang-tomb wall paintings, that is to say 39 of the actual paintings. Shaanxi’s wall murals of this kind rank first in the entire country. They are fluid in concept and line, they have marvelous details, and they both depict Tang customs and are superb works of art. The special exhibition hall is located on the west side of the museum. Its first two exhibitions were a Shaanxi bronzes exhibit (260 were on display) and a Shaanxi-through-the-dynasties terracotta masterpieces exhibit (341 objects were exhibited). The area of this hall is around 2,600 square meters.

The Shaanxi History Museum contains 115,000 objects in its collections. The more representative of these include bronzes, Tang-dynasty tomb wall paintings, terracotta statuary, ceramics (pottery and porcelain), construction materials through the dynasties, Han and Tang bronze mirrors, and coins and currency, calligraphy, rubbings, scrolls, woven articles, bone articles, wooden and lacquer and iron and stone objects, seals, as well as some contemporary cultural relics and ethnic objects.