Inner Mongolia Museum

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The museum is renowned for its dinosaur skeletons

A bone carving in the museum

The Inner Mongolia Museum (Simplified Chinese:内蒙古博物馆) is a regional museum in the city of Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, in north-west China.

This museum was founded on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in 1957. The building, expressive of local minority characteristics, is located at the intersection of Xinhua Dajie and Zhongshan Lu in the heart of Hohhot City, the capital of the autonomous region.

The Museum has over 44,000 objects relating to ethnic history in its collections. Among these quite a few are rare treasures seldom seen in China, especially the artifacts relating to the northern tribes called Xiongnu, Xianbei, Qidan, Mongolians and others.

The museum in particular offers an insight into the history and traditions of the Mongolian people exhibiting paraphernalia used by nomadic Mongols, including saddles, costumes, archery and polo equipment and a ger (a portable tent used by Central Asian nomads).

One of the important sources of its collections are precious materials excavated from the earth as a result of archaeological research. These materials are of great speciality to the museum. The Inner Mongolia Museum is renowned for its extensive collection of fossils and dinosaur remains found in both Inner Mongolia and Outer Mongolia including a complete skeleton of a wooly rhinoceros unearthed from a coal mine in Manzhouli.

The upper floor of the museum is dedicated to the life of Genghis Khan who in the 13th century united the disparate Mongol tribes and established one of the largest land empires in human history. Many of the maps and objects on display have English captions.

The museum also contains a number of intricate Mongol bone carvings depicting historical events.