Guanyun County Museum

Guanyun County Museum

Guanyun County Museum is a national AAA-level tourist attraction.

Established in 1985, Guanyun County Museum was among the first county-level museums in northern Jiangsu. Known as the location of China’s earliest stone coffin tomb clusters, Guanyun County saw these tombs discovered in 1981. From 1984 to 1985, the Nanjing Museum, Lianyungang City Museum, and Guanyun County Museum jointly conducted scientific excavations. The site is not only the earliest-discovered, largest in scale, and most densely distributed stone coffin tomb cluster found in China to date.

The predecessor of Guanyun County Museum was the Cultural Relics Office of the Guanyun County Library. Some collections were transferred from the county cultural center. Following the 1984 cultural relics survey and the excavation of the Dayishan site, the collection grew significantly, prompting the Guanyun County government to establish the Guanyun County Museum.

Cultural Relics Collection

The exhibition content of Guanyun County Museum includes: the Historical Relics Exhibition of Guanyun County, featuring mainly Neolithic artifacts, Han Dynasty relics, and some calligraphy and paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties. There are a total of 200 exhibits.

The museum houses 3,500 cultural relics, covering all periods from primitive society with virtually no gaps, serving as a microcosm of the county’s millennia-long civilization. Most notable are over 170 pottery, stone, bone, and jade artifacts unearthed from the Neolithic Dayishan Stone Coffin Tomb site, a collection of pottery that highlights Guanyun’s location within the Han cultural sphere, and more than 1,000 calligraphy and paintings by notable figures from the Ming Dynasty to the Republican era. The construction of the museum represents an important step in protecting, inheriting, and utilizing these precious historical and cultural heritage items.

The artifacts unearthed from the Dayishan site at Guanyun Museum combine features of the Majiabang Culture of the lower Yangtze River and the Beixin Culture of the lower Yellow River. Typical items include waist-rimmed vessels and sandy pottery. The site also yielded exquisitely crafted jade artifacts such as jade huang pendants, jade ? (unidentified), and turquoise earrings. Among them, there are 140 first-, second-, and third-grade precious relics. These artifacts hold significant historical, scientific, and artistic value, providing tangible evidence for the study of Guanyun County’s history.

Archaeological Discoveries

Good news has come from the Office of the Third National Cultural Relics Survey in Guanyun County. During field investigations, the relics survey team newly discovered two rock carvings of sika deer in the Dayishan area of the county town.

The Sika Deer Rock Carvings of Dayishan in Guanyun County are a key cultural relic protection unit designated by Jiangsu Province in 1995. They are located on a cliff on the western side of Dashanwei, the main peak of Dayishan. Created in the second year of the Huangqing era of the Yuan Dynasty (1313), they consist of an intaglio image of a deer and an inscription. The deer has a single antler in an inverted V shape, spotted fur, a short tail, and is in a walking pose, with regular script inscriptions behind it. The two newly discovered sika deer rock carvings are situated above Jinqiling of Dajiguwa Mountain in Dayishan and on the northwest cliff of Dashanwei, respectively. Both carvings are smaller intaglio depictions, one with double antlers and one without antlers, both shown looking back toward the provincial-protected sika deer carving.

Industry insiders believe that the rock carvings were used by local residents for mountain worship and blessings. The three carvings likely form a set of three interrelated sika deer rock art compositions, with the provincial-protected piece—being larger and bearing inscriptions—possibly serving as the central piece. Yuan Dynasty rock carvings are rarely found in this region, making them highly valuable for the study of the history and culture of the Haidai area during the Yuan Dynasty.