Kunming City Museum or Kunming Municipal Museum, 71 Ta East Road, Guandu District (+86 871 3153310. A simple museum whose main attraction is a central pillar taken from an old temple (now destroyed) and other relics from the Dian Kingdom (a tribute state of the Western Song dynasty). A large part of the museum is taken up by a series of shops selling fossils/minerals (many of the fossils are fakes) plus overpriced Chinese paintings, textiles, porcelains and some furniture. Free, including af tour.

A local comprehensive museum with an area of 5,000 sq meters, Kunming Museum has five regular exhibition halls and a temporary exhibition hall. The exhibitions in the five regular halls are as follows:

1. Dinosaur Fossil Exhibition: samples and models of dinosaurs are exhibited, imitating the process of the evolution of the dinosaur.

2. Bronze Culture Exhibition: displaying the bronze culture of the Dianchi District from the Spring and Autumn Periods (770BC-476BC) and the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-25AD).

3. Sutra Exhibition of Dizang (the Bodhisattva of Ksitigarbha) Temple: the sutras in Dizang Temple are reputed to be masterpieces of the Yunnan culture. They are also the major historic and cultural sites under the national protection.

4. The "Kunming: a Historic and Cultural City" Exhibition includes two exhibition halls: the History Hall and the New Era Hall, demonstrating the history and culture, the scenery and the major achievements China has made in the last 20 years.

5. Temporary exhibitions are usually held at the Temporary Hall. Some of the larger exhibitions include Mao Zedong's Mementos Exhibition, the Paintings and Calligraphies Exhibition of some outstanding local artists, the Paintings and Calligraphies of celebrities in Yunnan and the Clothes Exhibition of the Minority Women in Yunnan.

Travel Tips:
The skeletons of five dinosaurs are exhibited in the Dinosaur Hall. One is the fossil skeleton of Dilophosaurus sinensis, which lived in the early Jurassic Period. This specimen was discovered with a prosauropod, Yunnanosaurus, in 1987. Dilophosaurus is carnivorous and characterized by a pair of semicircular bony crests on either side of the skull. This dinosaur is a rare species in Asia. Only three dinosaurs of this kind have been discovered and the other two are in the United States.