WHEN the authors wrote their first guide to China’s museums in 2009, it was one of the only books on the subject. It is still the best. Now the official Chinese Museums Association (CMA) has asked them to repackage the work as its own guide to the nation’s treasures.
The authors have dropped some of their original entries, chiefly the odder ones, such as the Beijing museum devoted to eunuch culture, a collection in Shanghai of shoes for women’s bound feet and the ancient Chinese sex-culture museum outside the city.
This is a shame. But they have more than made up for it by adding museums that were left out of the original or have opened since its publication. More than 450 new museums were inaugurated in China in 2012 and about 350 the year before, so an updated version of the guide was necessary. Despite the proliferation of new museums of contemporary art, half the guide’s new entries refer to museums covering archaeology, oriental musical instruments, block-printing, celadon pottery and bronzework, indicating that traditional culture may be undergoing an official revival.
The guide also offers insights into politically important museums, such as the museum commemorating the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, which ended in ignominious Chinese defeat and the forced ceding of Taiwan to Japan. The memorial to the Korean war will disconcert American visitors, but it is useful for understanding the war from a Chinese point of view.
Not all the entries are so politically didactic. The Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Sichuan is an unusual private collection of 8m artefacts amassed by a businessman and concerned chiefly with the Cultural Revolution and the war against Japan. Its Chinese Heroes Plaza is filled with life-size bronze statues of figures from the civil war, both nationalists and communists. And the Sanxingdui, also in Sichuan and one of the great museum destinations in China, is a reminder that there are grand alternatives to the terracotta warriors in Xi’an. The site, which extends across 26 square kilometres, is known for its impressive display of bronze-age Shu burial artefacts: elephant tusks, heads with almond-shaped eyes, gold, jade and turquoise.
The CMA extends its remit beyond the mainland. The guide includes entries for the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Macao Museum, as well as (perhaps sensitively for some) the National Palace Museum in Taipei. More than 230,000 imperial Chinese treasures were shipped to Taipei from the Forbidden City by Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces during the civil war, a source of continued irritation to the powers in Beijing.