The Qinghai Provincial Museum, located at Xining City, is a provincial-level comprehensive museum of China. The Museum building used to be residence of Ma Bufang, a local warlord of Qinghai. At present the Museum, covering an area of 30,000 square meters with a floor space of 6,000 square meters, is one of the historical sites under the protection of the province.

The Museum was prepared in 1979 and completed on September 26, 1986. The Museum has collected over 10,000 items, including the chipped stone implements from the Paleolithic Age; the stone artifacts, bone objects, ceramics and bronze from the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age; the bronze seals, bronze figurines, bronze mirrors, tablet inscriptions, handwritten scriptures, wood figurines, bronze drinking vessels and Persian silver coins from the Han (206BC-220AD) and the Tang (618-907) dynasties; the paper currency and stone sculptures from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368); and the porcelain, painting and calligraphy from the Ming (1368-1391) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Among the relics of minority nationalities are the bronze seal with the characters of minority nationalities, the costumes, the imperial mandate granted by the Ming and Qing dynasties to the local officials of minority nationalities, as well as the religious artworks, images of Buddha and musical instruments used in a Buddhist mass. Among the revolutionary relics are the briefcase, bronze cauldron and soldier's cap left over by the Chinese Worker-Peasant's Red Army when passing by Qinghai. The most characteristic collections are the painted pottery from the remote ages, the relics of minority groups and the religious artworks through the ages.

Among the collections are two rare ones. One is a peculiar-shaped pot with the pattern of a nude figure, a full-length painted relief figure, and the other is a painted pottery basin with the pattern of dancers, three groups of dancers with five people in each, demonstrating the happy life of the primitive inhabitants. Both artworks, typical representative works among tens of thousands of painted pottery discovered in Qinghai, have had a long history of four to five thousand years.

The Museum has held the Exhibition of Historical Relics of Qinghai, displaying over 1,000 items of relics, to express the process of the historical development in Qinghia from the Neolithic Age to the later feudal society, the Exhibition of Relics Related to the Relationship between Tibet and Han, the Exhibition of Relics Related to Buddhism Introduced from Tibet, and the Exhibition of Coins and Currencies through the Ages. The Exhibition of Relics Related to Buddhism Introduced from Tibet was once also held in Hong Kong.

The Museum has also compiled and publishedthe Selected Historical Materials Related to Ancient Passages between Tang and Barbariansand the pictorial oftheBuddhist Art Introduced from Tibet.