On May 19, my wife and I met several of my colleagues outside our apartment building and took a bus to the Henan Provincial Museum in Zhengzhou, courtesy of the Shengda College Foreign Affairs Office. I was a warm day in May but we were happy to be visiting such an interesting place.

The museum is shaped like a trapezoid and opened into four spacious floors. We had a lovely Chinese translator who told us the exact history of each artefact, most of which were taken from archaeological sites in Henan province. Among them were sacred bones on which ancient observers recorded the dates of solar and lunar eclipses; scaled-down replicas of elaborate homes that had been buried with the dead to house their spirit; weapons from China’s Bronze Age; reproduced scenarios from daily life during the Ming dynasty; and a jazzy soul dressed to kill in the afterlife in a jade suit! My favorite piece was an earthquake machine, or seismograph, that worked when fixed dragon figures released balls in their mouth into the mouth of sitting frogs. In this manner, the ancient Chinese could predict the severity of an approaching quake.

We concluded our visit on the top floor, which contained a planetarium and old ingenious contraptions from the ancient Chinese study of astronomy.