This museum, covering an area of two hectares, houses more than 100,000 bamboo slips and wooden tablets dating back over 1,700 years, which have been unearthed in downtown Changsha since October, 1996. The astounding bamboo and wooden slips were known as "one of 20th Century's most important archeological discoveries in China" and also labeled as "the fifth great discovery of ancient Chinese records" following the unearthed inscriptions on oracle bones from Yin Ruins and Dunhuang documents.

The slips and tablets, which were inscribed with characters, recorded in detail the political, economic, military, cultural and geographic information of the ancient Changsha prefecture which was under the rule of Wu Kingdom (222 AD-280 AD), according to local government sources. Ancient Chinese wrote on either wood tablets or bamboo slips, and paper only appeared in the late Eastern Han Period (25-220 AD).

To protect these precious cultural relics, the municipal government of Changsha allocated more than 78 million yuan ($9.75 million) to build the museum.