Anhui Provincial Museum
The Anhui Provincial Museum (Anhui sheng bowuguan), built in 1956, is the largest and most comprehensive museum in the province. The 9000-square-meters of space here houses over 100,000 exhibits, many fossils or historical relics that date back over 2,000 years. The museum has no English, however, and so is really only good either for those into their Chinese history or Chinese readers.
A lot of the exhibits are related to the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 AD), a time immortalized by the book of the same name, although exhibits mainly concentrate upon the Cao family, most famously headed by the warlord and king of the Wei Kingdom, Caocao. Calligraphists will be pleased with the mostly Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) exhibition pieces of the Four Treasures of Chinese Calligraphy (Wenfang sibao, see shopping overview for details). The last hall in the complex also contains some examples of Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD) Huizhou architecture.
Address: Mengcheng lu, directly north along Jinzhai lu.
Opening hours: 08:30-10:40 & 14:00-16:00, Monday-Friday; 08:30-11:40 & 14:00-17:00, Saturday and Sunday.
Cost: RMB10 for foreigners