The museum's name tells a story of its own. When the foundation stone was laid on June 11, 2017, the project was called simply the "Erlitou Site Museum." The National Cultural Heritage Administration had recommended against including "Xia Capital" in the title, because archaeologists cannot definitively confirm whether Erlitou was the capital of the Xia dynasty or an early Shang capital. Xu Hong, the third-generation leader of the Erlitou Archaeological Task Force and a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has publicly stated that while Erlitou is most likely a Xia capital, declaring it as fact in an official museum name is controversial. The Luoyang Municipal Government renamed it anyway in July 2019, three months before opening. The name itself became an artifact of the tension between archaeological caution and national narrative.

Designed by Professor Li Li's team at Tongji University, the museum covers roughly 246 mu of land, with a total building area of 31,781 square meters. The steel-frame structure rises 22.9 meters at its highest point, but it is the surface treatment that makes the building remarkable. The first floor is clad in rammed earth -- 4,000 cubic meters of it -- a deliberate reference to the rammed-earth palace foundations uncovered at the archaeological site 300 meters to the north. Above this earthen base, the second floor and roof are covered with aged copper panels: 22,983 on the facades and 4,659 on the roof. The effect is of a bronze vessel emerging from the ground, the building itself serving as an exhibit of the materials that defined the culture within.

The museum contains five permanent exhibition halls spread across two floors, with three on the ground level and two above, plus two temporary exhibition spaces on the second floor. The collection spans the full range of Erlitou culture artifacts: bronze ritual vessels including the earliest known ding cauldrons, jade ceremonial blades and dagger-axes, turquoise-inlaid plaques with stylized animal masks, and pottery bearing enigmatic symbols that may represent early Chinese writing. The museum also houses an Early China Research Center, a collaboration between the Luoyang Municipal Government and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Archaeology, ensuring that the museum functions as an active research facility as well as a public exhibition space.

The museum's opening resolved a problem that had persisted since excavations began at Erlitou in 1959. For decades, the site lacked adequate facilities for storing, studying, or displaying the artifacts being unearthed. Plans for a museum had been discussed many times over those sixty years, but construction did not begin until September 2017. The main structure was completed in October 2018. That the museum is free of charge -- and that it drew more than 110,000 visitors in its first week -- suggests that the hunger to connect with this earliest chapter of Chinese civilization runs deeper than the scholarly debates about dynasty names.