6.5. What are the points of sightseeing, museums etc.?
Description
This article is from the Mongolia FAQ, by Oliver Corff with numerous contributions by others.
6.5. What are the points of sightseeing, museums etc.?
Inner Mongolia deserves a better coverage in literature and in this
FAQ than it finds at present. A few points of interest may be
mentioned here (indicating that this is a *very* preliminary list).
The Inner Mongolia Museum in Huhhot has an enormous collection of
archaeological findings from the times of the Xiong Nu on. The gold
crowns on display there are virtually identical in design with the
ones unearthed in Japan and dated to Japan's Kofun period. These
findings contain some of the strongest hints that early Japan (before
the nation state emerged) may have been part of a unified culture
stretching from Central Asia over Korea to Japan.
Not so many temples and monasteries survived in Huhhot. One of the
most intering ones is the ``Five Pagoda Temple'' (tabun suburGan sumu
- wu ta si) the walls of which are covered with thousands of Buddha
sculptures. Its most fascinating object is a stellar map cut in stone
(more than two meters in diameter) which is the eldest map with
Mongolian zodiacal names in the world. The stone carving is protected
by thick layers of glass which make it practically impossible to take
pictures but the site is well worth the visit.
Of the two main temples (``Big'' and ``Small'' temple: yeke zuu, baG-a
zuu; da zhao, xiao zhao) only the big one remains as the small one was
replaced by a school during the 1960s. The quarter of town where
these temples are located is pittoresque and offers an insight into
Chinese life (Huhhot by overwhelming majority is a city with Han-
Chinese population) as it might have been `before Revolution', i.e.
before 1949. The streets and lanes are so narrow that no automobile
can pass, and rare enough for a Chinese city, much of the old
architecture is preserved. Huhhot also has a mosque for its Hui
nationality.
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