Banpo Museum

Banpo Museum in Xi’an displays artifacts from the Neolithic Banpo site, offering insights into ancient Chinese settlements.

Planning your visit

Banpo is a Neolithic village, excavated from 1954 and dated to around 4500 BC, and the museum is built directly over the dig — China's first site museum, opened in 1958. Visitors walk on raised walkways above the excavated ground, looking down at house foundations, storage pits, kilns, a defensive ditch and burials exactly as uncovered.

The settlement belonged to the Yangshao culture, and what makes it significant is how much it reveals about early social organisation: circular and square semi-subterranean dwellings arranged around a large central building, a separate pottery-production area, a cemetery outside the ditch, and burial practices suggesting a matrilineal society, with women interred with more grave goods than men.

The painted pottery is the other draw — red ware with black designs of fish, deer and human faces, including the famous human-face-and-fish-net motif that has become emblematic of Chinese prehistory.

Banpo sits in eastern Xi'an.

Bookable options include coach tours combining Banpo with the Terracotta Warriors. Current availability is listed below.