The museum began its work in 1920 as Shymkent Pedagogical Museum and Laboratory of Syr-Darya Regional Department of Education. In 1977, in the new building, museum staff created an exposition of nature and history of the region. An expanded thematic and exposition structure was developed. In 1984, Shymkent Museum for the first time carried out independent field work on excavations of the settlement of Altyn-tobe, and in 1988 a study of the settlement of Zhuantobe was started.

In 2014, the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev officially opened the new building with the most modern technical equipment, special for the Museum of Local History of South Kazakhstan.

The total area of ​​the museum is 2.5 thousand square meters. It consists of four halls: "Nature, paleontology, archeology", "Ethnography", "Kazakh Khanate and the new century", "Independent Kazakhstan". The fund of the museum and its branches totals about 109 thousand exhibits. About 100,000 people visit the museum every year. The Museum of Local History is a regional cultural, leisure and research center.