Niko wang, a man in his 30s with thick black glasses, has his own marketing business. This affords him the flexibility to go to museums during the week—an essential ability for culture vultures in China. Its big museums have become almost too crowded to visit on weekends and holidays. On a recent Thursday morning at a new branch of the Zhejiang provincial museum in Hangzhou he pointed to a digital sign indicating that there were just 400 people in the museum at that moment, well below capacity. “What a treat!” Mr Wang said. Booking entries for China’s most popular museums, he sighed, is now almost as difficult as buying train seats during the annual crush for the Lunar New Year. You need to be logged onto the museums’ apps, with a fast trigger finger, as soon as tickets become available.
A decade ago the “museum boom” in China was a term of scorn. In their headlong pursuit of growth and modernity, officials around the country had funded grand new museums. Many sat empty. Today, China is again in the grips of a museum boom. But this time it means something else: a giant increase in visitors and a big leap in exhibition quality, especially of ancient splendours.
In 2007 China had about 1,700 museums attracting some 250m visits per year. Since then the number has more than quadrupled to 7,000, while annual visits are up nearly six-fold to 1.5bn. Some museums are packed. The most prominent extend their opening hours into the evening during public holidays. An exhibition on ancient Egypt in Shanghai this past summer drew so many people that the museum kept it open for 168 straight hours in its final week. A new scandal over allegations that a former director of the Nanjing Museum stole a Ming masterpiece—and perhaps more—in the 1990s shows that museums are squarely in the public eye as guardians of Chinese cultural heritage. (He denies wrongdoing.)
For the state, the museum push has a strong ideological element. That is clearest in exhibitions extolling the greatness of the Communist Party (none focuses on its blunders, of course). Yet these often evoke muted enthusiasm from visitors. It is easy to get close to displays of the party’s flag in the National Museum in Beijing. By comparison, it is an hour’s wait in the very same museum to see the sapphire-and-ruby-encrusted crown worn by a Ming empress four centuries ago.
Somewhat more subtly, exhibitions about pre-modern China also have a political agenda, presenting unified narratives that weave together disparate regions and peoples into a harmonious tapestry that culminates in the present. One repeat visitor is Xi Jinping. In 2012, shortly after taking power, he used an exhibition about the party’s revolutionary roots as a backdrop for his first speech about the “Chinese dream” of rejuvenating the nation. He has since been to more than a hundred cultural and historical sites, and often shows one or two to visiting foreign leaders—a reflection of his pride, but also a message about the weight of China’s 5,000 years of history.
Nevertheless, to stop at politics would be to miss the bigger trend. People are free to choose how to spend their leisure time in China. The fact that they are opting in ever-bigger numbers to go to museums is revealing. Patriotism is part of it. “Following the rise of the Chinese economy, many people have naturally wanted to learn more about their own history and culture,” says Jing Zhongwei, an archaeology professor at Zhejiang University, which also hosts an excellent museum.
What’s more, the price is right. Since 2008 China has made most of its public museums free. With Mr Xi’s support, they can count on stable funding. China’s private art museums are, by contrast, worse off. They have lost benefactors. And they charge. That’s a hard sell in a slowing economy—especially when public museums are so good.
China’s history museums used to feature dreary displays of dusty artefacts in dimly lit cases. Now visitors are treated to cutting-edge exhibitions. In recent travels your correspondent checked out a dozen. In Beijing 3D printings form full-scale replicas of Buddhist cave walls from China’s far west. In Hangzhou augmented-reality glasses bring ancient street scenes to life. In Chengdu a giant hologram-like video shows how archaeologists peel back the soil to reveal relics at each stratum.
Keep digging
Allied to this is a spate of discoveries that have generated remarkable new content for China’s museums. Famously, the Nationalists moved the country’s finest imperial collections to Taiwan when they fled there from the mainland in 1949. Yet they also left countless treasures underground. Modern archaeology had just got started in China in the 1920s, and was then set back by war and revolution. Only in the past four decades have archaeologists worked intensively and continuously throughout the country. That enabled major excavations, from the bronze-age wonders of Sanxingdui in Sichuan to the 5,000-year-old Liangzhu settlement in Zhejiang and the Shimao pyramid in Shaanxi. Each of these—and many more—now has its own museum. Some display artefacts almost as soon as they are dug out. “Everyone wants to see what’s hot,” says Mr Jing.
These findings provoke fascinating debates about history. Gone is the traditional view of the plains near the Yellow River as a single source of Chinese civilisation. The question now among historians and others is to what extent various regions evolved independently. The Communist Party’s preferred narrative is that a central influence, an essence of modern China, coursed through them all. With so many invaluable items on display and more emerging from the ground all the time, China’s museum-goers can draw their own conclusions.
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