There are many Buddhist statues collected in the Gansu Provincial Museum,which were excavated from different places in Gansu and date back to different periods from the Sixteen Kingdoms to the Qing dynasties.Systematic cataloguing and research about them have not been carried out.Some of the best Buddhist statues have been listed in various catalogues.Current published materials have some problems about their dates and authenticity.This paper attempts to identify and supplement previous researches by studying the dates and origins of a few selected earlier works including the bronze statue of the Sixteen Kingdoms, the pagoda built in the Datong second year of the Western Wei dynasty, the bronze bodhisattva statue inscribed with“the second year of Tai ping zhen jun Era,”and some clay statues from the Maijishan Grottoes.
