A museum devoted to a slave society that disappeared only 50 years ago has been modernized and expanded in Sichuan Province, southwest China.
More relic exhibits have been added to the Museum of the Yi Ethnic Group as a Slave Society, which covers 30,000 square meters and is located in Lushan, southeast of Xichang City.
The museum was also equipped for the first time with modern facilities such as video, sound and electronic demonstration tools.
With a population of 1.8 million, the Yi, the sixth largest of China's 55 ethnic groups, was still a slave society until the 1950s, when democratic reforms were introduced.
About 2,000 cultural relics are on display in the museum, including more than 30 listed by the central government as national treasures.
Among them are over 10 official seals of the Zimo, the supreme ruler of the ethnic group, and tableware, drinking vessels and silver horse accessories used by the Nohuo, the ruling class of the slave society, and instruments of torture, such as fetters and cuffs, iron chains and whips.
Weapons used by rebel slaves -- bows and arrows, spears and swords -- are also shown in the museum.
The relics are of historical value for anthropologists, ethnologists and scholars specializing in other social sciences.
According to records, before the slave society was converted to Socialism, the ruling class accounted for only 5.1 percent of the Yi population, but the number of slaves they owned amounted to 70 percent.
The life of Su Jiazi, a slave, is also on show at the museum. Su was bought and sold 11 times from 1937 to 1953.
The museum also houses a collection of short poems named Ma Mu Te Yi, preaching the values of the slave society, and an epic manuscript in Yi style and other items of Yi culture.
The museum was built in 1985 at a cost of two million yuan (US$230,000), and the renovation project cost nearly four million yuan (US$460,000).
(Xinhua News Agency September 26, 2002)
