No photo availableLinfen · CN
Dingcun Culture Exhibition Hall
The Dingcun Culture Exhibition Hall (丁村文化陈列馆) sits in the small village of Dingcun, about five kilometres southwest of Xiangfen county seat in Linfen, Shanxi, and serves as the showcase for one of China's most important Paleolithic discoveries. Housed within a Ming-dynasty courtyard, the hall gathers the finds from the Dingcun site — a national key protected cultural relics area — where the teeth and skull fragment of "Dingcun Man," an early hominin that lived over 100,000 years ago, were first unearthed along the banks of the Fen River. For a traveller, the appeal is twofold: it is a compact, easy-to-read introduction to the origins of human culture in northern China, and it pairs seamlessly with the surrounding village of well-preserved Ming and Qing courtyard houses. The story of Dingcun — where farmers digging sand in 1953 stumbled on ancient bones and stones — helped fill a missing chapter in China's prehistory and became a landmark in the country's own archaeological tradition.