Museum of Right Alxa Banner1

The Museum of Right Alxa Banner is situated in the bustling area of Badain Jaran Town, the banner’s administrative center. Boasting convenient transportation and complete supporting facilities, the museum broke ground in September 2008 and completed renovation and upgrading in 2015. It functions as an internal institution under the Bureau of Cultural Relics.

The museum houses over 3,000 cultural relics, including 89 Grade-II cultural relics and 26 Grade-III cultural relics. It receives more than 42,000 visitors on average every year, serving as a vital window for the banner’s external publicity and cultural display. In October 2011, it was included in the third batch of nationwide museums open to the public free of charge.

The main building of the museum is a two-story concrete frame structure, integrating ethnic characteristics with contemporary architectural styles. Its interior adopts the design aesthetic of interconnected Mongolian yurts, presenting a primitive, compact and antique charm that fully embodies profound local ethnic features.

The museum features four permanent exhibitions and one temporary exhibition hall: the Camel Culture Exhibition, Social Achievements Exhibition, Stone Carving and Rock Painting Exhibition, and History & Ethnic Culture Exhibition.

As a key public cultural facility in the local region, the Museum of Right Alxa Banner acts as an external showcase platform, shouldering the important mission of comprehensively presenting and promoting Right Alxa Banner’s long-standing history, profound culture and remarkable development achievements. Meanwhile, it serves as an important base to foster patriotism and popularize historical and scientific knowledge among the general public and teenagers.

Operating free of admission fees, the museum gives full play to its collection of cultural relics. Adhering to the principles of "effective protection, rational utilization and strengthened management", it organically integrates the functions of collection and preservation, scientific research, publicity and education. A diverse exhibition system has been formed, where permanent displays, special thematic exhibitions and temporary shows complement and enrich one another. From multiple perspectives, the exhibitions reveal the rich cultural connotations of historical artifacts and showcase the extensive and profound civilization of the Chinese nation.

Furthermore, the museum consistently carries out a series of outreach activities titled "Museum Entering Military Camps, Schools, Enterprises and Communities", enabling more people to experience history up close and raising public awareness of cultural relics protection.

Alxa League of Inner Mongolia is known as "China’s Hometown of Camels", and Right Alxa Banner hosts the densest population of Bactrian camels in Alxa. In recent years, Right Alxa Banner has ramped up efforts to explore and protect camel culture, holding a rich variety of camel-themed cultural events annually. It once set the Guinness World Record for the Bactrian Camel Cross-Country Race. The exhibition aims to better protect and study the intangible cultural heritage of Right Alxa Banner, promote distinctive ethnic culture and polish the cultural brand of Right Alxa Banner as the "Hometown of Camels".

Camels are ancient species shaped by natural selection, with their earliest origins traced to North America. Paleontological research on fossil strata proves that modern camels evolved from early hooved mammals. The evolutionary lineage runs from the Protylopus of the late Eocene, through the two-toed Poebrotherium of the Oligocene, to the Camelops of the Miocene and Pliocene, eventually developing into modern camels.

Based on regional climatic and geographical conditions, modern camels fall into two distinct categories: Bactrian camels inhabiting the cold desert regions of northern Asia, and dromedary camels living in the hot deserts of Arabia and arid plains of northern India. Camels can be found across 23 countries worldwide, including Sudan, Somalia, India, Ethiopia, China, Mongolia, Mauritania, Pakistan, Chad, Niger, Kenya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, and others.

Archaeologists and paleontologists in China have verified that during the Ice Age, ancestral camels crossed the Bering Land Bridge and migrated into Central Asia and the Mongolian Plateau around Manzhouli. Well-adapted to desert environments, they settled and multiplied in these lands.

Fossil evidence confirms the evolutionary lineage of China’s modern Bactrian camels. Fossils of Paracamelus unearthed from Early Pleistocene strata in eastern Shanxi, giant Paracamelus remains found in Late Pleistocene layers in Henan and Zhoukoudian of Beijing, and Camelus knoblochi fossils excavated from Late Pleistocene deposits along the Sarawusu River in Inner Mongolia all share core skeletal features with living Bactrian camels. This proves that Paracamelus and giant Paracamelus are distant ancestors of China’s Bactrian camels, while Camelus knoblochi is their recent progenitor.

Scientific research based on fossil specimens from geological strata definitively demonstrates that camel species including Paracamelus inhabited northern China as early as one million years ago. They lived along river valleys and grasslands in eastern Shanxi, Hebei, Henan and Inner Mongolia, evolving into Camelus knoblochi by one million years ago. Camel bone fossils confirm that modern Chinese Bactrian camels descended from Paracamelus, giant Paracamelus and Camelus knoblochi during the Pleistocene Epoch.

However, British scholar I.J. Manson claimed in his book Evolution of Domesticated Animals, citing viewpoints of other foreign researchers, that "Camels were unknown in China until the late 4th century BC, suggesting China’s borderlands were not sites of camel domestication" and that "Bactrian camels were introduced to China around 300 BC". These arguments lack sufficient factual basis. Manson only acknowledged that "little evidence exists regarding wild ancestral camels of domesticated Bactrian camels in Central Asia". Similarly, the chapter on camels in An Introduction to Animal Husbandry in the Tropics, edited by G. Williamson and W.J.A. Payne, states that little is known about the center of Bactrian camel domestication.

In reality, abundant scientific evidence across China fully documents the evolutionary history of Bactrian camels during the Pleistocene in the Mongolian Plateau (including Inner and Outer Mongolia), Xinjiang, Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu.