Gansu Provincial Museum Area

The Gansu Provincial Museum is the cultural centrepiece of Lanzhou and holds one of the most significant Silk Road archaeological collections in China. The museum's most famous object — the Bronze Flying Horse of Gansu (Gansu Pentium), also known as the "Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow" — is a Han-dynasty cast bronze of a galloping horse with one hoof resting on a swallow, discovered at the Leitai Han Tomb in Wuwei, Gansu, in 1969. The sculpture, dated to the 2nd century CE, became China's official tourism symbol after being selected in 1983 — the emblem of the Chinese National Tourism Administration.

The Silk Road galleries display a substantive collection of artefacts from the Han through Tang dynasty trade routes across Gansu — silk fragments from Dunhuang, Han-dynasty lacquerware, Buddhist sculpture from the Gansu cave temples, and written documents from the Juyan bamboo-slip archive (administrative records of the Han frontier garrisons). The collection gives a rich context for visiting the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, Jiayuguan Fort, and the other major Gansu Silk Road sites.

The Gansu fossil collection, in a separate wing, includes significant Cretaceous dinosaur specimens from the desert basins of inner Gansu — material that established Gansu as one of the productive fossil localities of north-central Asia.

People's Square, immediately south of the museum, is Lanzhou's principal civic space — a large formal plaza with the characteristic wide-open quality of Chinese planned civic spaces, used primarily for morning exercise and occasional public events.