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China Museums
by Miriam Clifford, Cathy Giangrande and Antony White
Reviewed by Kerry Brown
China Museums is one of the first in-depth surveys of museums across China in one volume. As the authors point out in their very short introduction, there are almost 3,000 public museums now, in every province and autonomous region in the People's Republic. Beijing and Shanghai, inevitably, are well supplied, but some of the provincial museums contain an extraordinary richness of historical artifacts and cultural objects. Hebei, for instance, has the great Han dynasty chiming bells, excavated only a few years ago and still playable today. Hunan's museum has the perfectly preserved corpse of a female, as she was when buried two millennia ago. Urumqi has the great collection of mummified corpses, almost equally ancient. And Chengdu in Sichuan has the even more antique bronze statues and relics from the mysterious Shu Kingdom. Liaoning Provincial Museum in Shenyang, near the old Forbidden Palace (which was founded by the Manchus before their conquest of the whole of China in 1644) contains some of the finest Tang and Song dynasty porcelain, calligraphy and ink paintings. Even the National Palace Museum in Taipei gets a generous mention, along with acknowledgment of Taiwan's somewhat particular status in relation to the PRC and how the extraordinary collection got there after 1949.
This book can only survey the highlights, but it does find space for curiosities like the scissor museum in Shanghai and the Ancient Sex Culture Museum in Jiangsu. Suzhou's modern museum designed by I.M. Pei, the native-born architect who long since moved to the U.S., sits beside lengthy descriptions of the Forbidden Palace Museum in Beijing. Tibet's History Museum gets coverage, along with a warning that any museum that "thanks the kindness of the Central Committee of the Communist Party" is going to take a particular angle to the area's history. Even so, the authors look for the positives on each of the places they cover, making the valid point that there is a vast and wonderful world beyond the three most favoured tourist sites: the Great Wall, the Forbidden Palace and the terra cotta warrior site in Xian. Their coverage also highlights, very tangibly, the complex constituent cultures and different historic traditions that make up the People's Republic and contribute to its extraordinary history.
Each entry has details of current opening hours, and addresses in Chinese and English. Wisely, entry prices are not given, in view of how frequently these change, but websites, where they are available, are indicated, and presumably these give up-to-date prices. Warnings are given where museums carry very little English signage. The Potala Palace entry points out that these days, with the arrival of the rail line and ever greater numbers of tourists, there is a restriction of 2,000 people a day allowed access to the site. It also makes clear that, believe it or not, it is still a place of active worship by Tibetans and should be respected as such. The great strength of the book, however, is in the excellent illustrations, which bring many of the places covered to life. This is an very good companion to a more general guidebook like Lonely Planet or Rough Guide and, taken together, offers pretty much everything someone with a real desire to get under the skin of China and understand how it came to be as it is in a visit could need.
--
Kerry Brown is Associate Fellow, Chatham House, and author of Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (Anthem Press).
by Miriam Clifford, Cathy Giangrande and Antony White
Reviewed by Kerry Brown
China Museums is one of the first in-depth surveys of museums across China in one volume. As the authors point out in their very short introduction, there are almost 3,000 public museums now, in every province and autonomous region in the People's Republic. Beijing and Shanghai, inevitably, are well supplied, but some of the provincial museums contain an extraordinary richness of historical artifacts and cultural objects. Hebei, for instance, has the great Han dynasty chiming bells, excavated only a few years ago and still playable today. Hunan's museum has the perfectly preserved corpse of a female, as she was when buried two millennia ago. Urumqi has the great collection of mummified corpses, almost equally ancient. And Chengdu in Sichuan has the even more antique bronze statues and relics from the mysterious Shu Kingdom. Liaoning Provincial Museum in Shenyang, near the old Forbidden Palace (which was founded by the Manchus before their conquest of the whole of China in 1644) contains some of the finest Tang and Song dynasty porcelain, calligraphy and ink paintings. Even the National Palace Museum in Taipei gets a generous mention, along with acknowledgment of Taiwan's somewhat particular status in relation to the PRC and how the extraordinary collection got there after 1949.
This book can only survey the highlights, but it does find space for curiosities like the scissor museum in Shanghai and the Ancient Sex Culture Museum in Jiangsu. Suzhou's modern museum designed by I.M. Pei, the native-born architect who long since moved to the U.S., sits beside lengthy descriptions of the Forbidden Palace Museum in Beijing. Tibet's History Museum gets coverage, along with a warning that any museum that "thanks the kindness of the Central Committee of the Communist Party" is going to take a particular angle to the area's history. Even so, the authors look for the positives on each of the places they cover, making the valid point that there is a vast and wonderful world beyond the three most favoured tourist sites: the Great Wall, the Forbidden Palace and the terra cotta warrior site in Xian. Their coverage also highlights, very tangibly, the complex constituent cultures and different historic traditions that make up the People's Republic and contribute to its extraordinary history.
Each entry has details of current opening hours, and addresses in Chinese and English. Wisely, entry prices are not given, in view of how frequently these change, but websites, where they are available, are indicated, and presumably these give up-to-date prices. Warnings are given where museums carry very little English signage. The Potala Palace entry points out that these days, with the arrival of the rail line and ever greater numbers of tourists, there is a restriction of 2,000 people a day allowed access to the site. It also makes clear that, believe it or not, it is still a place of active worship by Tibetans and should be respected as such. The great strength of the book, however, is in the excellent illustrations, which bring many of the places covered to life. This is an very good companion to a more general guidebook like Lonely Planet or Rough Guide and, taken together, offers pretty much everything someone with a real desire to get under the skin of China and understand how it came to be as it is in a visit could need.
--
Kerry Brown is Associate Fellow, Chatham House, and author of Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (Anthem Press).
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