Regional Museum of History and Local Lore

Just to the south, along Abai Street, sits the Regional History and Local Lore Museum. The displays here kick off with natural history, with stuffed animals populating dioramas of desert, mountain and riverbank scenes, the last featuring a fox enjoying a duck dinner. There is a large wall map of the Altyn Emel National Park, and a display of local rocks and minerals, some fashioned into necklaces and vases. Maps chronicle the expeditionary journeys through the region in the 1850s of Pyotr Semyonov-Tianshansky and Chokan Valikhanov.

History follows, with displays of Bronze and Iron Age implements, photographs of the Tamgaly petroglyphs, a model of the Golden Man and a selection of stone balbals. There is a display on the Kazakh khanates and a map of the Great Silk Road, focused on routes passing through the territory of present-day Kazakhstan. The displays continue upstairs with instruments which once belonged to prominent local musicians, a model of the barrel-vaulted tomb of ethnographer Chokan Valikhanov, and household objects of Russian migrants. Coverage of the Soviet period includes the work of industrial enterprises in the region, including miniature models of some ghastly-looking armchairs and a coffee table, the products of the Taldykorgan furniture factory.

The achievements of the region's war heroes, including members of Major General Panfilov's 316th Rifle Division, labour heroes and noted artists are all chronicled, as is the work of Dinmuhammed Kunaev, the long-serving First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. There is coverage too of the 1916 uprising, collectivisation and the victims of Stalinist repression. There is a sobering display of the events of 1986 in Almaty, featuring the biographies of three young people killed during or in the aftermath of the unrest. The displays conclude with the post-independence era, featuring a display of books written by President Nazarbaev and a selection of products from the region's factories: ice cream, facial scrub, wine and car batteries.