Shaanxi History Museum

This guide to the Shaanxi History Museum in Xi'an starts with the sheer scale of what sits inside it, then turns to the architect Zhang Jinqiu, who broke ground in 1983 facing a harder problem than storage: how to build a modern museum that would not embarrass the Tang dynasty it stood near. Trained under the scholar Liang Sicheng, she designed a symmetrical palace of grey brick and white plaster, its central hall flanked by four corner towers echoing the vanished imperial court nearby. It opened on the twentieth of June, 1991, with galleries and storage sized for the collection as it stood that day. Look for the seams where later wings and additions had to catch up with what Xi'an kept turning up underground.