Secrets of the Silk Road: Mystery Mummies of China
Last year, the
Bowers Museum in Santa Ana (that's right near Disneyland for all of you non-Californians) scored their third major exhibit from China with
Secrets of the Silk Road. It set a new attendance record for the museum, and ended its tenure without much fanfare before being trundled off to
Houston's Museum of Natural Science.
I had promptly forgotten about it until earlier this month when the Times of
Los Angeles and
New York reported that the Chinese government demanded that the
Penn Museum (officially the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)
not display any of the artifacts from China. Instead, it was set to open with a collection of photographs, multimedia displays, and a recreation of an excavation site.
Not very thrilling when the central figure of the exhibit was supposed to be a 3,500 (?) year-old mummy long identified as Caucasoid with red hair. I honestly didn't expect it to ever be mounted, and our East Coast members would miss out on an opportunity to see the very first Chinese mummies to be exhibited in the United States. Fortunately, this wasn't the end of the story.
As reported today in the
New York Times, the Chinese government has finally relented and is allowing a brief exhibition period! If you're anywhere in the vicinity of the City of Brotherly Love, take a moment to check out the exhibit. The mummies are only on display until the 15th of March, and the rest of artifacts will only be on display until the 28th of March.
Edward Rothstein said:
In another part of this 6,000-square-foot exhibition lies the body of a woman wrapped in a wool cloak, her lavish brown hair draped to the side of her face, long lashes still framing her sunken eyes. Her skin, tinged with a white coating is eerily sensuous. That must have been a cold winter: she is still wearing fur-lined leather boots. She is in her early 40s, we are told, though that was at least 3,500 years ago. The Beauty of Xiaohe she’s called, and we forgive the poetic liberty, because in her death, against all the cautionary chastisements of later centuries, even that ephemeral aesthetic property remains intact.
Exhibition Review:
Another Stop on a Long, Improbable Journey
Secrets of the Silk Road Slide Show
Penn Museum's Exhibit site
A clip from NBC Nightly News.
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In conjunction with this blockbuster exhibit, the Penn Museum has been marshaling all of its resources into giving the museum going public more information than they could ever possibly want including a PhD candidate's blog,
On the Silk Road. There's also the in-house magazine, Expedition; the current issue features articles on the Silk Road, the mummies, and other discoveries from the region. You'll need a .pdf reader, but every article is available to read on-line. Check out the site
here.
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Finally, the Penn Museum has been holding a series of lectures -- since late last year -- introducing museum goers to the region and it's history. And for those of us who don't live in the area, they've posted them in their entirety on their
site and
Youtube Channel. They're lengthy, but if you have the time I would definitely sit through them. You might pick up something you didn't know before.
The first lecture is a smidgen over an hour, and I've embedded it below for those of you who don't like following links.
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Additional Material
The Houston Museum of Natural Science's Youtube Channel has some interesting videos from their time with the exhibit. Check it out
here.
The Bowers Museum also has some neat vids from their time originating the exhibit. Check them out
here.
An article from The New York Times on the mummies and political tensions arising from the area:
In the Desert, a Trove of 4,000 Year Old Mummies