About Changsha Museum

Changsha Museum

The Changsha Museum, known in Chinese as Changsha Bowuguan, is the municipal history museum of Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. It is a comprehensive local history museum whose work brings together the collection, protection and research of cultural relics with exhibition, publicity and education services. Classified as a national second-class museum, it tells the story of one city — Changsha itself — from the first human activity in the area some 200,000 years ago to the city's peaceful liberation in the modern era. Its present home is a five-storey building in Binjiang Cultural Park, at the Xinhe Delta in Kaifu District, beside the Changsha Library, the Changsha Concert Hall and the Changsha Planning Exhibition Hall. Opened there on 28 December 2015, the new museum holds more than 50,000 objects in its collections and presents Changsha's ancient and modern history in two permanent exhibitions. It should not be confused with the provincial Hunan Museum elsewhere in the city: the Changsha Museum is the city museum, and its subject, scale and founding history are distinct.

From a memorial hall at Qingshuitang

The Changsha Museum was founded in 1986. The original, or old, museum was established on the basis of the memorial hall of the former Hunan District Committee of the Communist Party of China, and it stood at No. 22 Qingshuitang in Changsha. That origin explains the strong place of modern revolutionary material in the museum's identity from the beginning. The Qingshuitang site commemorated by that memorial hall was an important site of the early organisation of the Communist Party of China in Hunan, where the Hunan District Executive Committee was established in May 1922. For almost three decades the city museum therefore grew up in a memorial setting rather than in a purpose-built gallery building, collecting and displaying the material history of Changsha while rooted in one of the city's best-known revolutionary addresses. In May 2009 the museum was listed among the first batch of national second-class museums by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, a grading that recognised the standing it had built up from that modest base. The move to a new building three decades after its founding gave the institution, for the first time, a home designed around the full sweep of the city's history rather than around a single memorial site.

The new museum in Binjiang Cultural Park

The new Changsha Museum opened to the public on 28 December 2015 on the east side of Changsha Binjiang Cultural Park, in the Xinhe, or Beichen, Delta in Kaifu District, on Xiangjiang North Road. The building is five storeys high, with a construction area of about 24,000 square metres and an exhibition area of about 9,000 square metres. It forms part of the riverside cultural complex often described in Changsha as the “three museums and one hall” quarter of Binjiang Cultural Park, alongside the Changsha Library, the Changsha Concert Hall and the Changsha Urban Planning Exhibition Hall. The wider complex stands at the confluence of the Xiang River and the Liuyang River and has been an important cultural landmark of the city since its full opening at the end of 2015. The museum opened with two special exhibitions, devoted to the calligraphy of Hunan celebrities and to Chinese treasures returned through the Poly collection. Its two basic, or permanent, exhibitions followed at the end of 2016, completing the transfer of the city's story from Qingshuitang to the riverside.

A building that looks like hard stone

The architecture of the new museum is itself an exhibit about Changsha. Museum descriptions say the exterior looks like a piece of “hard stone”, with a rough, angular facade that one visitor guide compares to a fragment of ancient bedrock. The exterior wall carries a map of Changsha in the early 20th century, showing the city in its years as a treaty port. Picked out on the facade in old-style Song characters are 18 place names familiar to Changsha people, among them Baishajing, Pozijie and Juzizhou, or Orange Isle. The facade design also uses the image of bamboo slips, the writing material of ancient China, and the Xiang River is shown flowing slowly around the wall. Travel guides to the museum add that the building's exterior takes the shape of the treasure of the museum, the bronze nao bell with an elephant pattern, linking the container to its most famous contents. Inside, the layout is planned by function as well as by display: the four exhibition halls on the first and second floors carry the basic display, two special exhibition halls on the second floor host temporary shows and exchanges, and the third and fourth floors house the cultural relics storehouse and a science and technology protection centre, equipped to give the collections a controlled and secure environment.

More than 50,000 objects, from the Palaeolithic to the present

According to figures published from the museum's own website, the Changsha Museum holds more than 50,000 pieces, or sets, of cultural relics. The collection covers all kinds of objects from the Palaeolithic age to modern times, assembled to document the historical and cultural development of Changsha itself. Four strengths are singled out again and again in museum summaries. The first is bronze ware of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. The second is cultural relics of the Chu and Han dynasties, including the jade ware of those periods. The third is porcelain of the Changsha kiln from the Tang dynasty. The fourth is modern cultural relics that show the recent history of Changsha, the material counterpart to the museum's founding in a revolutionary memorial hall. Around those pillars the wider collection also includes ceramics, calligraphy, painting and other artefacts unearthed from archaeological sites in the Changsha area or preserved as records of the city's life. Together they allow a municipal museum to show Changsha not as a footnote to national history but as a political, economic and cultural centre in its own right, whose development can be traced object by object.

Ancient Changsha: the Xiangjiang River flowing north

The permanent display is presented as the Changsha History and Culture Exhibition, described as the first general history exhibition to systematically display the history and culture of Changsha. It occupies four exhibition halls covering more than 5,000 square metres, displays more than 1,250 pieces or sets of cultural relics, and draws on more than 2,400 documents, materials and pictures. Its first part, on the first floor in Halls 1, 2 and 3, is the ancient history exhibition, whose Chinese title evokes the Xiang River flowing north. It is divided into six sections, tracing some 200,000 years of development. The sequence begins with the earliest human activity in the region and the dawn of settlement along the Xiang River, moves to Changsha as a hometown of bronze culture during the southward expansion of the Shang and Zhou, and continues through the rise of the Chu state and its southern stronghold, the Han dynasty kingdom centred on Changsha, the prosperity of the Tang and Song dynasties, and the establishment of Changsha as the centre of Hunan in the Ming and early Qing, when it became the provincial capital. Major historical events, historical figures and the changing form of the city itself provide the thread that binds the sections together.

Modern Changsha: striking the water in midstream

The second part of the permanent exhibition, in Hall 4 on the second floor, is the modern history and culture exhibition, whose title evokes striking the water in midstream — an image of resolve drawn from Changsha's own revolutionary vocabulary. It is divided into seven parts. They cover the advocacy of practical governance and statecraft, the leading of new policies and reform, Changsha's early response to the Revolution of 1911, the city's pioneering role in the founding of the Communist Party of China, the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan and Jiangxi, the uniting of the city in resistance against foreign aggression and humiliation, and finally the peaceful liberation of Changsha. Museum interpretation presents this gallery as a record of the contribution made by the people of Changsha, through national responsibility, the pursuit of progress and the fight for independence and liberation, at critical periods of modern Chinese history. Exhibits singled out in guide accounts include a manuscript collection of poems of martyrs of the Boxer Rebellion period. Read together, the ancient and modern exhibitions do what the museum's founders intended: they present a single urban biography, in which a bronze-age river settlement becomes a Chu and Han stronghold, a Tang commercial city, a provincial capital and a revolutionary city.

Treasures of the collection

Three objects are repeatedly named as the rare treasures of the Changsha Museum. The first and most famous is the bronze nao with an elephant pattern, a large percussion bell of the Shang and Zhou period. Museum guides describe it as the largest bronze nao of the Shang and Zhou dynasties found in China so far, decorated with a pair of elephants raising their trunks towards each other, and it is the object from which the new building's exterior is said to take its shape. The second treasure is an agate seal inscribed with the words “Cao Zhuan”, with “Qie Zhuan” also engraved on it; square in form and polished smooth, it is considered one of the finest Han dynasty seals. The third is an openwork jade ring with a dragon and phoenix design, unearthed at Doubishan in Changsha in 1975 and described as one of the finest jade rings of the Western Han dynasty. Other selected exhibits in the ancient halls include a bronze box with a dragon and phoenix design and a bronze sword with its sheath. A long corridor displaying poems and couplets adds a literary layer to the galleries, inviting visitors to meet Changsha's past through its writing as well as its artefacts.

Changsha kiln porcelain and the Tang city

The Tang dynasty porcelain of the Changsha kiln holds a special place in the collection because it is the city's own ceramic art, made at the Tongguan kilns north of Changsha. Changsha ware is recognised as a milestone in the history of Chinese ceramics. At a time when single-colour wares dominated, Changsha potters pioneered underglaze painted decoration in brown and green, using iron and copper oxides beneath a transparent glaze, and they brought poetry, calligraphy and painting into the decoration of porcelain. A special exhibition at the museum devoted to poetry and inscriptions on Tang dynasty Changsha ware presents pieces bearing poems and other writings, including examples produced for export, as glimpses of daily life in the Tang and as evidence of the kilns' role in cultural exchange. People's Daily's account of Tongguan describes the kiln as the birthplace of colourful underglaze ceramics in the world, whose products were sold to 29 countries and regions along what has been called a maritime road of ceramics. In the Changsha Museum, that export story is told from the home city: the same Tang prosperity displayed in the ancient history galleries was fired, painted and shipped from kilns in Changsha itself.

Special exhibitions and cultural exchange

Beyond its permanent galleries, the museum maintains an active programme in its two special exhibition halls on the second floor, used for cultural and artistic exchanges with museums at home and abroad. From its opening on 28 December 2015 to 31 May 2020, museum records count 24 special exhibitions. They ranged widely: calligraphy by Hunan celebrities, returned Chinese treasures, Han dynasty fan screens, the unearthed relics of Sanxingdui and Jinsha and the mystery of ancient Shu, Chinese export silver, ancient calligraphy and painting, Yaozhou kiln ceramics, a virtual-reality encounter with Van Gogh, bronzes of the Zhou dynasty, relics from the tomb of Fu Hao, prehistoric painted pottery from the Yellow River valley, gold and jade work of the Song and Ming, and a full-immersion cosmology experience on Hawking and George's universe. The programme has continued in the same spirit. “Treasures of the Silk Road: From the Mediterranean to China”, shown from 13 June to 8 October 2020 with 192 pieces from the Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum, was described as the museum's first Sino-foreign cooperative exhibition since opening. In December 2023 the museum hosted 149 selected Zhou dynasty relics from Shanxi tracing six hundred years of the Jin state, with art installations, digital multimedia displays and interactive walls designed for visitors of different ages, open free of charge until 17 March 2024.

Education, visiting and a necessary distinction

Education is built into the museum's public role. On 6 December 2017 it was listed by the Ministry of Education among the first batch of national primary and secondary school students' research and practice education bases, formalising the school and youth programmes that a city history museum is expected to provide. For the general visitor, the museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:30, and it is closed on Mondays except for public holidays. Admission to the permanent exhibitions is free, although special exhibitions may be treated differently and booking arrangements have applied, including advance reservation through the museum's official channels. Two to three hours is the recommended time for a visit. The museum is reached by Metro Line 1 to Beichen Delta station, a short walk away, and by buses serving Riverside Culture Park and Beichen Times Square. One distinction is worth making clearly for first-time visitors, because confusion is common enough to feature in visitor reviews: the Mawangdui Han tombs and the celebrated relics of Lady Dai belong to the provincial Hunan Museum, at 50 Dongfeng Road, not to this museum. The Changsha Museum's achievement is different and, for understanding the city itself, indispensable — a complete, object-led history of Changsha, from Palaeolithic tools to the manuscripts of its modern revolutionaries, told in the city that made it.