Hangzhou Museum
Museum built around a rock-crystal drinking cup dug from a Warring States tomb by a stubborn excavator.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Hangzhou Museum follows archaeologist Du Zhengxian, who kept digging into a Banshan hillside in 1990 that his colleagues had already written off as worthless dirt, chasing odd pottery scraps that local brick makers kept turning up. Two months in, his crew broke into a burial chamber from the Warring States period, more than two thousand two hundred years old, right at the edge of the age when China's warring kingdoms were about to fall to the first Qin emperor. Inside was a drinking cup carved from a single block of natural rock crystal, ground and polished by hand with no seams, glass or metal frame. Stand close to the case and look for the tool marks such patient hand-polishing leaves behind.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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