Guanzhong Folk Art Museum

This guide to the Guanzhong Folk Art Museum in Xi'an follows Wang Yongchao, a Shaanxi businessman who in the late 1980s watched demolition crews saw apart carved stone hitching posts and sell off their carved heads for scrap. It traces how that roadside rescue turned into a decades-long obsession, as he sold seven companies to fund the collection of over eight thousand posts and forty dismantled Ming and Qing courtyard houses. The guide asks whether a museum with no government funding can finish reassembling all forty.