Hubei Provincial Museum

Major provincial museum east of central Wuhan. Famous for the Bianzhong bell-set of the Marquis Yi of Zeng.

Hubei Provincial Museum stands on the east shore of East Lake in Wuhan and is among the strongest provincial museums in China by collection quality and curatorial approach. Its defining object is the Bianzhong — the chime bell set of the Marquis Yi of Zeng, excavated in 1978 from the tomb of the Marquis at Suizhou, dated to approximately 433 BCE. The set consists of 65 bronze bells of graduated sizes arranged on a three-tiered wooden frame extending 7.48 metres across; each bell produces two distinct notes depending on where it is struck. The full set has a tonal range equivalent to five octaves and covers all twelve semitones of the chromatic scale — a musical sophistication that predates comparable Western musical theory by two millennia and was not suspected to exist in 5th-century BCE China before the excavation. The bells are still playable and are sounded in scheduled performances in the adjacent concert hall.

The Bianzhong is exhibited in its own dedicated hall alongside the complete contents of the Marquis Yi's tomb — over 15,000 objects, including ritual bronzes, lacquerware, jade, and the largest collection of Eastern Zhou-period weapons found in China. The scale and quality of the burial reflect the Zeng state's wealth and sophistication, and the contrast between the Zeng-state objects and the contemporaneous Chu-state material elsewhere in the museum illustrates the cultural complexity of the Warring States period in the middle Yangtze region.

Additional galleries cover Chu-state archaeology (the culture that dominated the middle Yangtze basin before the Qin conquest), a Yuan-dynasty wooden warship excavated from the Han River, and Hubei's more recent history. Entry is free with advance online reservation; the bell performance ticket is a separate charge. Weekday mornings are the least-crowded visiting conditions.