Copping It 2

Xinjiang Museum

This amazing museum impressed me big time. It's absolutely huge, jam packed full of incredible art and artefacts from prehistory right through to the present day.

And the most incredible thing there was a bunch of actual Chinese mummies. I'm talkin' about the real Egyptian-style preserved ancient corpse type.

The lobby

Traditional regional attire

Bronze axe from about the year dot

Pottery from around the same time

4,000 year old figurines

It won't last forever

Tang dynasty Buddhist sculpture from about the 700s, the golden age of the Mogao cave grottoes.

Temple guardian from the same era

Statue of a cameleer unearthed from a cemetery, also dated from the Tang era

Ming Buddha, from around the 1400s.

Qing dynasty silk work. This design is still common on Uyghur ladies dresses.

Other Qing treasures

Get ready for gruesome.

Believe it or not, but Xinjiang has the largest number and best-preserved mummies in the whole world.

In 1979 archaeologists unearthed a number of preserved corpses in a cemetery in Gumugou. They're around 3,800 years old. The unique super dry and saline environment has helped preserve the corpses till now.

The display hall in the museum houses 6 of the ancient corpses and related relics excavated from ancient tombs in Shanshan, Lop Nor, and was the most popular part of the museum.

Infant.

Woman.

Male adults

Photos of the original discoveries

Hongshan Park

Ürümqi has a huge number of beautiful parks scattered around the city, and Hongshan is the pick of the bunch, because you can climb the hill and get a view.