From Rapid Development to a Digital Landscape — A Timeline of Chinese Museums
Part 1: The Boom
The Louvre, the Smithsonian, Yad Vashem — these cultural symbols evoke feelings, attitudes, and associations, from Mona Lisa’s secret smile to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Museums give our cities a personality, a history, and a center for people to find common ground. They serve as record keepers, preserving the history of societies that thrived thousands of years before us.
Displaying the artifacts of the world’s longest continuous civilization, museums are especially important for China. With a written history extending back 3,500 years, China is home to relics from developments dating hundreds — if not thousands — of years before any other region of the world. While the Romans were destroying the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Han Dynasty’s military recorded maps and battle plans on refined paper, a product valued so highly it became a Silk Road trading staple. Before paper had even become available in Europe, the Chinese were using it to record finances, government records, and pay taxes. And it is in China that type was invented: characters were carved into wooden blocks, arranged in a grid, inked onto a sheet of paper — and reused. The world’s oldest dated text, the Diamond Sutra, was printed by this method in Tang-dynasty China on May 11, 868.
For much of history, China was one of the most advanced societies in the world. The result of its long history and fairly developed civilizations is a treasure trove of cultural artifacts waiting to be discovered and displayed.
Despite its rich cultural history, China was late to the game of developing museums and other related establishments for its citizens. While the first public museum in Europe opened its doors in Oxford in 1683, China did not inaugurate its first public museum until after Europe’s proliferation of cultural institutions in the late 19th century.
Cities in China seem to be making strides toward closing the cultural gap, however. Within the past ten years especially, construction of museums has skyrocketed to an unprecedented level. Archaeological advancements have uncovered artifacts from cities possessing little to no records. The recent evolution of these spaces to a digital platform, then, is just another step in the development of the modern Chinese cultural landscape.
Surpassing the Standard
China has committed to the development of its public institutions in the early 21st century and has not stopped since. 349 existing public museums in 1978 became 5,100 in 2021. In 2011 alone, China opened 400 new museums.
China’s 1,360% increase in museums over the past 40 years still bears no comparison to the over 30,000 museums in the United States or 28,000 museums in Western Europe. In the hopes of expanding its sphere of influence, China’s efforts center not only around creating more museums, but also designing these institutions to surpass the grandiosity of most of those in Europe and North America.
Formerly the China Pavilion, the China Art Palace in Shanghai rivals the size of New York’s Museum of Modern Art with 600,000 feet of exhibition space. Hosting over 1,400 artworks, the museum features internationally renowned collections in addition to a wide array of modern Chinese oil painting, prints, and sculptures.
Yunnan Province’s Qujing History Museum resembles an upside-down staircase, complete with a garden courtyard, cantilevered roof, and “vertical landscape of concrete” described by its architects as a symbol of the million-year-old artifacts contained within the slanted walls.
Head-to-Head Development
For China, competition exists both globally and among its own municipalities. Each mayor hoped to gain support from the Party by bringing recognition and honor to their city through the creation of the next great Chinese icon.
Beijing, home of China’s Printing Museum, Planetarium, Great Wall Museum, and numerous other art and history museums, has seen an influx of contemporary artists and projects in recent years.
But Beijing is not the only metropolitan area seeing a surge of museums — Shanghai and Hong Kong are fast becoming China’s next cultural epicenters. Shanghai even opened two museums directly across from each other on the same day.
In Shanghai, The World Expo Museum opened in 2017, the world’s only museum solely dedicated to Expos. China’s first truly international museum, the WEM will further position Shanghai as a relevant global destination as the museum will participate in upcoming expos.
Hong Kong’s M+ will open to the public by the end of 2021 as one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. Almost 200,000 square feet of exhibition space will be accompanied by three cinemas, performance spaces, a learning hub, and a public roof terrace overlooking Hong Kong’s skyline.
“Ghost” Museums
While construction of museums increased steadily prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, many remained startingly empty.
China’s development model requires local municipalities to supply 80% of their operating expenses while only receiving 40% of the country’s tax revenue to assist them. Lacking income, developing and maintaining their cities is nearly impossible without a revenue stream from outside developers.
According to Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the China Megacities Lab, local governments found a way to generate the necessary funding from outside parties by granting said developers highly sought-after commercial property — so long as they agree to build and operate a museum on this land without any government contributions. Constructing the museum typically occurred as planned, but developers had little motivation to develop and curate exhibitions in a museum that was only built in the first place to further their own commercial interests. Iconic buildings thus may sit empty for years.
Even if developers did prioritize filling their new museums with state-of-the-art collections, they may have few pieces readily available. Museums in heavily trafficked cities like Beijing and Hong Kong could choose from a fairly large selection of art at their disposal, but museums in smaller districts did not have the same luxury.
Lack of funding is not the only reason that many museums struggled to fill their vast exhibition spaces. From 1966–1976, China’s Cultural Revolution aimed to destroy traditional Chinese culture. Temples were ransacked, books destroyed, and homes searched for cultural symbols that could be threatening to the regime. Only 2,000 of Beijing’s 7,000 “historical interest” sites stood at the end of 1976. If artifacts were not destroyed, they were confiscated. Many traditional Chinese relics now reside in Europe and the United States, while China has little to show for its thousands of years of recorded cultural heritage.
