The Shaanxi Provincial Museum, occupying a one-time Confucian temple, holds a rich store of art works and rare artifacts-funerary figurines, traditional paintings, ancient household equipment, and huge bronzes masterfully cast 3,000 years ago. But attention here focuses on the museum’s famous Forest of Steles. This library of inscribed stone slabs, including half a million words of Confucius, carved in the 9th century, documents the history of Chinese culture and calligraphy.

The Fresco Art Department of the Han and Tang Dynasty.

The artist of the Xi’an Art Academy have made excellent imitation paintings which reproduce the highlights of Chinese traditional paintings and murals that are fading and peeling away at their original sites. We visited their workshop and gallery where “redone”, not prints, paintings can be bought very reasonably.