About China Railway Museum

China Railway Museum

The China Railway Museum, in Chinese Zhongguo Tiedao Bowuguan, is China's only national specialist railway museum. Its stated task is to collect, preserve, research and display railway cultural relics and scientific and technological achievements — in the words of its own summaries, to be responsible for the collection, storage, exhibition and research of railway heritage. The museum operates three sites in Beijing: a locomotive exhibition hall at Dongjiao, in the eastern suburbs; the Zhengyangmen Branch in central Beijing near Tiananmen Square; and the Zhan Tianyou Memorial Hall at Badaling, by the Great Wall. Together the three sites cover the machines, the history and the founding engineer of Chinese railways. Its official website is china-rail.org.cn. Because no other Chinese institution holds this national railway brief, the museum functions as the custodian of the material memory of a network that grew from a few thousand kilometres at the end of the Qing dynasty to the largest high-speed system in the world.

Origins in the 1950s

The museum's origins lie in the 1950s, when the Ministry of Railways created a temporary exhibit for the Economic Achievements Exhibition in Beijing, held to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The lineage then ran through institutions concerned as much with information as with objects: the ministry founded the Central Technical Library in 1958 to promote scientific and technological advancement and support the growth of the Chinese railway industry. Exhibition and documentation bodies within the ministry carried the collecting impulse forward over the following two decades. In 1978 the Ministry of Railways Science and Technology Museum was established, giving the future national museum a formal institutional ancestor and a name that reflected its initial emphasis on railway science and technology rather than on history alone.

Becoming the China Railway Museum

The decisive step came at the start of the twenty-first century. On 2 November 2002 the Science and Technology Museum's locomotive exhibition hall opened to the public — the date from which the museum's establishment is usually counted — and on 1 September 2003 the institution was officially renamed the China Railway Museum. Some accounts date the Dongjiao hall's formal public opening to that September day. The renaming mattered: it signalled a shift from a ministry science museum to a national museum of the railway as a whole, with a remit covering cultural relics as well as technical achievements. In October 2009 the museum expanded further when the Beijing Railway Museum, which had opened in 2008 in the former Zhengyangmen East Station, was merged into it and became its Zhengyangmen Branch.

The Dongjiao Locomotive Hall

The museum's best-known site is its Dongjiao, or Eastern Suburbs, branch in Chaoyang District, some 15 kilometres north-east of downtown Beijing, inside the circular test track of the China National Railway Test Centre. The site covers about 61,942 square metres, with a building floor area of some 21,149 square metres, including an open locomotive hall of about 16,500 square metres with eight exhibition tracks. More than 100 locomotives and items of rolling stock from different periods of Chinese railway development are displayed — sources give figures of over 100 types, and nearly 100 for the locomotive and rolling stock hall alone. A comprehensive exhibition hall complements the locomotive hall. The location inside a working railway test loop gives the collection an authenticity few transport museums can match: the exhibits sit within an active railway landscape rather than a neutral exhibition park.

Signature Locomotives

The treasures of the Dongjiao collection are named in every account of the museum. Foremost is China's oldest preserved locomotive, the No. 0 steam locomotive, built by a Scottish locomotive builder in 1882 and used on China's first domestically built railway, the Tangshan–Xugezhuang line. Alongside it stand the famous named steam locomotives Mao Zedong and Zhu De, named after revolutionary leaders in modern Chinese history, and other named engines such as Guo Qin. The hall also holds the first locomotives of several Chinese types — classes whose names translate as Liberation, Victory, People, Qian Jin and Jian She — as well as diesel and electric locomotives including Dong Feng, Dong Fang Hong, Beijing and Shao Shan types, reflecting the growth of China's own manufacturing capacity. Individual engines carry their own engineering stories, such as the KF1 class designed in 1933 by Chinese engineer Ying and built by Vulcan Foundry in 1936, and the Shao Shan electric locomotive representing China's first generation of domestically developed electric traction.

The Zhengyangmen Branch

The Zhengyangmen Branch occupies the former Zhengyangmen East Station of the Peking–Mukden Railway — also rendered the Beijing–Fengtian or Jingfeng Railway — just south-east of Tiananmen Square, at Qianmen in Dongcheng District. The station, operational from 1906, witnessed many historic events in twentieth-century China. The surviving building is a reconstruction story in itself: the construction of Beijing Subway Line 4 in 1979 required most of the old station to be demolished, and the historic facade was reconstructed, in mirror image, on the opposite side of the clock tower. The Beijing Railway Museum opened in the building in 2008, became the Zhengyangmen Branch in October 2009, and the branch's exhibition opened in its present form in October 2010 across some 5,042 square metres. This part of the museum contains only one full-size historic locomotive, a nineteenth-century 0-6-0 tank engine; its strength is documentary rather than mechanical.

Telling Railway History Since 1876

The Zhengyangmen exhibition presents the history of Chinese railway development in five chronological parts: Chinese railways from 1876 to 1911; from 1911 to 1949; and onward through the decades after 1949, the reform and opening-up era from 1978, and the railway's future. Using large numbers of photographs, documents and historical materials, the halls trace an arduous trajectory — a network of only about 5,000 kilometres by 1911 and some 20,000 kilometres by 1945 — through to the remarkable achievements of recent railway construction, including models of lines such as the Beijing–Shanghai railway and the Qinghai–Tibet railway. The branch serves as a popular-science education base and a patriotic education base in Beijing. Its central location, a short walk from Tiananmen Square, makes it the museum's most accessible site for general visitors, while Dongjiao serves the locomotive enthusiast.

The Zhan Tianyou Memorial Hall

The third site, the Zhan Tianyou Memorial Hall at Badaling in Yanqing District, north of the Great Wall and opposite the ascending cable car stop, was established in 1987 by the Ministry of Railways to commemorate Zhan Tianyou (1861–1919). Zhan is honoured as a pioneer and national hero of Chinese railways: the engineer of the Beijing–Zhangjiakou Railway, the first major railway designed and built by Chinese engineers, whose switchback alignment at Badaling became a symbol of Chinese engineering capability. The memorial hall holds a collection described as more than 6,000 exhibits across the museum's halls and presents Zhan's life and work in the landscape his railway crossed. Including a memorial site within a national museum gives the institution a biographical anchor: the story of Chinese railways is told not only through machines and documents but through the career of its founding engineer.

Collection and Research Role

Across its three sites, the museum's collection spans locomotives and rolling stock of steam, diesel and electric eras, foreign-built engines that worked in China, the first examples of domestically built types, documents, photographs, models and personal material connected with figures such as Zhan Tianyou. Its mission statements consistently combine four verbs — collect, preserve, research (or compile) and display — which marks it as a research institution as well as a visitor attraction. Museum staff have contributed to international surveys of railway museums, presenting the collection's features to a professional readership abroad. For historians of transport, the museum is the principal public repository where the material evidence of China's railway development — from an 1882 Scottish-built engine to the age of high-speed rail — is held together under one institution.

The Museum Today

Today the China Railway Museum presents itself, in official tourism and services information, as comprising its three iconic Beijing sites, each with a distinct character: Dongjiao for the locomotives, Zhengyangmen for the narrative history, and Badaling for Zhan Tianyou. The Zhengyangmen Branch in particular draws families and general visitors in the city centre, while the scale of the Dongjiao hall — more than a hundred locomotives on eight tracks — rewards the dedicated trip to Chaoyang. From a temporary ministry exhibit in the 1950s, through a technical library and a science and technology museum, the institution that took its present name in 2003 has become the national memory of Chinese railways, preserving the machines and the record of how a railway system central to China's modern history was built.