About National Natural History Museum of China

National Natural History Museum of China

The National Natural History Museum of China (Guojia Ziran Bowuguan), at 126 Tianqiao South Street in Dongcheng District, Beijing, adjacent to the Temple of Heaven, is China's only national, comprehensive natural history museum. Until 2023 it was known as the Beijing Museum of Natural History. It is a large natural history museum focusing on specimen collection, scientific research and science education in palaeontology, zoology, botany and anthropology, affiliated with the Beijing Academy of Science and Technology under the Beijing Municipal People's Government. It is distinct from the National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square, which is a museum of history and art: the National Natural History Museum's subject is life on Earth, told through fossils and specimens.

The museum was the first large-scale natural history museum independently built by the new China after 1949. Its main building was inaugurated in May 1958 and opened to the public in January 1959. The museum now holds more than 370,000 specimens — over 200,000 pieces in its principal Tian Jiabing Building store in earlier counts — across a total floor space of about 24,000 square metres, of which some 8,000 to 9,988 square metres are available for display, and it welcomes around 1.8 million visitors a year, making it the most popular natural history museum in the country.

Founding: from Central Natural History Museum to Beijing museum

The museum traces its roots to April 1951, when the Central Ministry of Culture and the Chinese Academy of Sciences founded the Central Natural History Museum Preparatory Office — the Preparation Department of the National Central Museum of Natural History. The preparatory office assembled collections and staff through the 1950s. The current venue was inaugurated in May 1958, its name inscribed by Guo Moruo, then president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and it opened in January 1959 as the first large-scale natural history museum independently built by the new China — in the museum's own framing, the earliest natural history museum in China after the founding of the People's Republic.

In January 1962, during the period of the Great Leap Forward, the museum was transferred to the Beijing municipal government and named the Beijing Museum of Natural History. In 1985 it was transferred to the Beijing Academy of Science and Technology, the affiliation it retains. For six decades the Beijing name carried the institution through its growth into the country's leading popular natural history museum, with laboratories for zoology, botany and palaeontology, advanced instruments, and a research staff described as rigorous yet vigorous.

The 2023 renaming

In January 2023, after receiving an approval reply from the Central Institutional Organization Commission, the Beijing municipal government ratified the museum's application for a name change to the National Natural History Museum of China. The new name was formally unveiled at an opening ceremony on 5 June 2023. The renaming recognised the museum's de facto national role — it is described as China's only national and comprehensive natural history museum, and it chairs the Committee for Natural History Museums of the Chinese Association of Natural Science Museums.

One nuance is regularly noted: despite the word national in its name, the museum remains a municipal public museum affiliated to Beijing's Academy of Science and Technology, rather than a museum directly administered as one of China's central national museums. Its national standing rests on its collections, its research output and its coordinating role among China's natural history museums rather than on a change of administering authority.

Building and layout

The museum stands at 126 Tianqiao South Street, Dongcheng District, on Beijing's southern central axis near the Temple of Heaven and the Tianqiao area. Its major display area is the Tian Jiabing Building, a building invested in by the Hong Kong businessman Tian Jiabing (Tin Ka Ping) and the Beijing municipal government, in which the museum's fine specimens are stored and displayed. The museum covers an area of about 12,000 square metres, with a floor space of some 23,246 to 24,000 square metres arranged over three floors plus a basement level.

On the basement level visitors find the Dinosaur Park, with life-sized animatronic dinosaurs, and an exhibition on exploring the human body. The first and second floors carry the main exhibitions — ancient animals, ancient plants, human origins, and displays such as Mysterious Africa — while the exhibition halls proper comprise the classic permanent galleries of palaeontology, zoology, botany and human evolution. Interactive experiences, including a 4D cinema and virtual reality displays, supplement the specimen galleries.

Palaeontology: the Mesozoic gallery

Three galleries are devoted to palaeontology, and the Hall of Paleontology as a whole presents fossil remains from the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras as a wordless chronicle of prehistoric life flourishing between 500 million and 1 million years ago. In the Mesozoic gallery, a large bronze model of the ancient Earth stands at the entrance. At the centre, a large Mamenchisaurus skeleton is mounted — the museum's famous specimen is 22 metres long and 140 million years old — with multiple small dromaeosaur skeletons darting around it. A Szechuanosaurus is mounted in an upright stance, skeletal mounts of Bactrosaurus and Lufengosaurus are featured, and at the back a Yangchuanosaurus is mounted attacking a Tuojiangosaurus.

The gallery also features many feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning, including specimens of Confuciusornis, Microraptor and Anchiornis — the feathered dinosaur material for which the museum's research is internationally known, including the world's first feathered full-body restoration of Anchiornis huxleyi and the fossil of Juravenator, cited among its most treasured specimens. The Mesozoic gallery connects to a large exhibit with animatronic dinosaurs and a smaller gallery housing dinosaur eggs. The wider Dinosaur World displays have been presented in Jurassic Park and Cretaceous Park sections recreating the ecology of 140 million years ago, with Mamenchisaurus, Tuojiangosaurus, Lufengosaurus, the flesh-eating Yangchuanosaurus (Yongchuan dinosaur in some translations) among the animals shown, alongside a flying pterosaur and a swimming plesiosaur-type reptile of the same era.

Palaeontology: early life, the Cenozoic and the Yellow River Elephant

A further gallery showcases early life on Earth, with a large sculpture introducing the first organisms. The Cenozoic gallery has multiple mounts of Paraceratherium — the largest land mammal known to have existed — Stegodon and Megaloceros, a skull of a woolly mammoth, a skeleton of an entelodont in a glass case, and skulls of prehistoric mammals including Homotherium, Megaloceros and Elasmotherium. The museum's single most famous fossil is the skull of the Yellow River Elephant, a Stegodon whose remains were excavated in China, counted among the specimens in a class by themselves at home and abroad.

Other treasures cited across accounts of the museum include a 26-metre-long dinosaur fossil and what is described as the unique mummy fossil of a dinosaur in China. Together with invertebrate fossils, early human fossils and reptiles, the palaeontology holdings form the research backbone of the museum: its scientists have published in leading international journals including Nature and Science, and the feathered dinosaur and early bird material from Liaoning has given the museum a profile in vertebrate palaeontology well beyond its role as a public gallery.

Zoology, botany and human origins

The permanent exhibitions are arranged according to the evolutionary trend of organisms, showing biodiversity and its relationship with environments and establishing a panorama of the emergence and development of life on Earth. The Hall of Zoology reconstructs the environments of representative wild animals, showing their beauty and variety; the museum's zoological collections cover ornithology, mammals and invertebrates in depth. The Hall of Botany — the World of Plants Hall, one of the museum's four classic permanent exhibitions, covering over 850 square metres and displaying more than 1,200 specimens of plant fossils and modern plants — is described as a green epic narrating plants' millions of years of evolution.

The Hall of Mankind Evolution, or Hall of the Origins of Mankind, reveals the process by which human beings stem from the animal world, tracing human evolution and, in the basement, the anatomy of the human body. The museum also contains a large collection of minerals, and a display of naturally carved and polished stones used in the traditional Chinese art of miniature rockery — a reminder that the institution's remit includes geology and anthropology as well as biology. The Mysterious Africa display on the upper floors extends the zoology galleries to the fauna of another continent, broadening the museum beyond its Chinese core collections.

Research, publications and science education

The museum describes itself as built around three functions: specimen collection, scientific research and science popularisation. Its research groups work in palaeontology, zoology and botany, equipped with zoological, botanical and palaeontological laboratories, and the museum regularly holds academic exchange activities, inviting renowned experts and scholars to lecture. Its collection work has built the holdings from the tens of thousands recorded in early accounts — more than 80,000 precious items in one early summary — to the more than 370,000 zoological and other specimens recorded today.

The museum has published the bimonthly journal Da Ziran (Great Nature) since 1980, its flagship popular science magazine. Its earlier publications include Nature (in the museum's publication list) and the Research Report of Beijing Natural History Museum. Through Da Ziran, its exhibitions, its 4D cinema and VR displays, and its school programming, the museum reaches the roughly 1.8 million visitors a year who make it the most visited natural history museum in China.

Visiting and identity

The museum is open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday and on national holidays, and closed on Mondays. Its official website is nnhm.org.cn. For readers of this directory, the National Natural History Museum of China is recorded at 126 Tianqiao South Street, Dongcheng, Beijing, China — founded in 1951 as the Central Natural History Museum preparatory office, opened in 1959, known from 1962 to 2023 as the Beijing Museum of Natural History, and renamed in 2023. It should not be confused with the National Museum of China, the history and art museum on the east side of Tiananmen Square, nor with the Geological Museum of China, Beijing's specialist geology museum at Xisi, with which it shares the fields of palaeontology and mineral display but not collections or administration.