Museum of Nuo Cultural Relics

Museum of Nuo Cultural Relics

Museum of Nuo Cultural Relics

The Nuo Culture Museum is the only museum in China that integrates collection, exhibition, research, and performance. The museum’s name was inscribed by Professor Feng Qiyong, former deputy director of the China Art Research Institute and vice president of the Chinese Redology Research Association. Nuo activities can be traced back to the Shang Dynasty. They originated from ancient rituals to drive away ghosts and epidemics and are a phenomenon of shamanistic culture in primitive religion. Over thousands of years of development and evolution, Nuo culture has been influenced by Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and the diverse cultural elements of the Guizhou region, but its basic core and form of expression—primitive sorcery—have remained largely unchanged.

The manifestations of Nuo culture include masks, divine altars, ritual implements, Nuo opera, and Nuo skills. Today, Nuo opera is hailed as a “living fossil of drama,” and performances are still held in Dongshan on certain special days. There are over 20 types of Nuo ritual ceremonies, along with some special performance techniques such as “ascending the knife ladder,” “descending into the oil cauldron,” “swallowing glass,” “stepping on red ploughshares,” “eating bowls,” and “water siphoning.” Audiences are often left thrilled, but for the folk artists who possess these extraordinary skills, it’s all in a day’s work.

The couplets hanging on the courtyard pillars are truly not easy for most people to understand. Some of the characters we rarely—or even never—see, and they can’t even be found in dictionaries. These are entirely special Nuo script characters created through symbolic meaning by the Nuo practitioners. These couplets cover natural phenomena such as metal, wood, water, fire, earth, sun, and moon, reflecting ancient people’s understanding of nature. Please feel free to visit the exhibition rooms on your own.