Nanjing 南京市 - Jiangsu Province 江 苏 省 简 介 - Nanjing Museum 南京博物馆

Located at the foot of the beautiful Zijin (Purple Gold) Mountain, Nanjing Museum, built in 1933, was called the Central Museum of China before 1950. Its first curator was Cai Yuanpei (1876-1940), a renowned Chinese scholar and educator during the influential New Culture Movement in the early 20th century. The museum now has a large collection of artifacts spanning 5,000 years of Chinese history. It includes six exhibitions halls displaying prehistoric and Shang-dynasty pottery, bronzes, jewellery, and tortoise-shell ware, iron agricultural tools, printed works, handicrafts from the Ming and Qing dynasties and ancient furniture. Items of special note include a 2,000-year-old burial garment of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), made of 2,600 pieces of green jade (the jade suit, exhibited abroad in the 1970s, belongs to this museum), an example of what may be the world’s first seismograph, invented by Zhang Heng (AD 78-139) in 132, and a Ming porcelain collection. A separate exhibit portrays the events of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolution (1851-1864) and aspects of the Heavenly Kingdom that the revolution founded. It is thought to be 1,800 years old and is made of 2,600 rectangles of jade sewn together with silver thread. The jade suit was made to totally encapsulate the body with the object of preserving it , but when archaeologists dug it up in Xuzhou, north of Jiangsu Province in 1970 all they exhumed inside were bones.

One of the most fascinating exhibits is the large wooden copy of a statue of a man showing all the body’s acupuncture points. The original bronze statue is believed to date from the Warring States period (475-221 BC). Another reminder of China’s superiority in early medical pioneering is a portrait of Hua Tuo华佗 (?-208)，who practiced acupuncture and surgery and reputedly employed anaesthetics 1,000 years before they were discovered in the West.

The museum boasts over 420,000 items, including 340,000 implements, 27,000 paintings and calligraphy works, and 31,000 historic documents. One-third of these collections were inherited from the former Central Museum, half were collected after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The others were those transported from the Palace Museum (known as the Forbidden City in the West) in 1931 to Nanjing, the national capital until 1949, when the Japanese occupied Northeast China six years before they launched an all-out war invading into the other parts of China. During the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), the museum’s collections were moved and kept in Chongqing in Southwest China until the war ended. When the Kuomintang authorities retreated from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan in 1949, they selected a number of treasured relics from museums around China, gathered them in the Nanjing Museum and planned to transport them to Taipei in three groups. The liberation of Nanjing came so rapidly that the Kuomintang authorities had to leave a large part of the third group behind in the museum. A new building in the yard of traditional style old mansions is very eye-catching and blends in with the architecture of the old main building of the Nanjing Museum. This forms the museum’s recent expansion, a facility displaying more than 5,000 pieces of works of art in 11 galleries. These galleries include ancient calligraphy and painting, modern art, private collections of modern celebrities, folk art, embroidery and netting, lacquer art, ceramics, bronzes, porcelains from official kilns, jade and other treasures. Many of the collections have been shown to the public for the first time since the establishment of the museum. Visitors will be especially surprised by the digital management systems used in the galleries and the stylistic installation of the exhibits, unusual in Chinese museums. The lights on the top automatically turn brighter when visitors approach an exhibit. If someone gets too close to a treasure, a surveillance system sounds a warning. Besides being displayed in glass windows, some exhibits have been installed in a more user-friendly way. For example, girls dressed in traditional costumes perform the process of netting cloth on a wooden netting machine. As well as being a venue that educates the public, the Nanjing Museum has also been a major force in archaeological studies since the new China was founded in 1949. It has played a role in the excavation of many ancient tombs and published a large number of books and magazines based on the academic research of its curators and researchers.

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