The Lianyungang City Museum has collected over 16,000 historically and culturally significant relics and has developed several special exhibitions on history, nature and art, including artifacts from the primitive culture of the Lianyungang region that date from the Paleolithic Era (10,000 to 20,000 years ago) to the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The Lianyungang Museum is also home to an important archaeological discovery of a mysterious female corpse in 2002, preserved for 2,000 years in the moist sands of eastern China.
The woman, named "Ling Huiping", was discovered along with three other bodies by construction workers at a building site in Lianyungang. Her coffin was found in an unusually warm and wet environment, and what most puzzles researchers is that her coffin was full of alkaline liquid, which is prone to breeding bacteria that facilitate the process of decay. Her body is astonishingly well-preserved, but by all accounts, this important discovery should not even exist. According to the museum experts, her major organs are all still intact: brain, muscles, heart, lungs, liver and intestines. Along with the body, a toiletry set including a comb, mirror and list of burial objects were found. A name plate was also found in the coffin, with the inscription of "Ling Huiping".
This high-profile exhibit has turned the public on to the importance of other sociological displays at the museum, mainly cultural relics dating back to the Stone Age. There is still speculation on the part of Chinese and Japanese archaeologists that the eastern part of China was once connected to Japan, and artifacts excavated around Lianyungang and Japan dating back to the Paleolithic Period (prior to 10,000 B.C.) show similarities. One is a Dayi Mountain tomb dating back to the Neolithic period (roughly 10,000 -2000 B.C.). Instead of burying a whole tomb underground, its stone slabs were assembled above ground. The face of the corpse inside the coffin was covered by a red earthenware bowl.
Also rare and culturally significant is the Lianyungang museum's collection of wooden tablets and bamboo paper from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - A.D.). There are twenty-four wooden tablets and 133 bamboo paper similar in function to today's books. Before paper was invented, the Chinese wrote on slips made from bamboo and strung them together. They were the official documents of the Han and were used to record annual statistics of administrative constructions, population censuses, cultivated farmlands, income and budgets. They are significant references for study of the history and culture of Lianyungang as well as the bureaucratic system of the Han Dynasty.
