About China Three Gorges Museum

China Three Gorges Museum

The China Three Gorges Museum, also known as the Chongqing Museum, stands at 236 Renmin Road in Chongqing's Yuzhong District, facing the Great Hall of the People across People's Square. It is both a specialist museum of the Yangtze gorges and a comprehensive museum of the history and art of Chongqing, holding around 113,500 pieces and sets of relics together with some 18,000 rare books. Its defining mission is the heritage of the Three Gorges: it is the principal home of the material salvaged ahead of the rising waters of the Three Gorges reservoir, the largest rescue-archaeology programme in Chinese history. Opened in its present building on 18 June 2005, it was the first large museum outside Beijing authorised to carry the name China in its title, and its branches include the Baiheliang Underwater Museum at Fuling, which preserves an ancient inscribed reef beneath the Yangtze itself.

From the Southwest Museum of 1951

The museum's predecessor, the Southwest Museum, was founded in March 1951 to serve the great Southwest administrative region of the early People's Republic. When that region was abolished, the institution was renamed the Chongqing Museum — dated to June 1955 in the museum's founding description and to 1956 in some summaries reflecting the administrative transition. For half a century the Chongqing Museum collected the heritage of the municipality and its hinterland: Ba-Yu bronzes, Han-dynasty sculpture, porcelain, painting and the relics of Chongqing's years as wartime capital.

The transformation came with the Three Gorges Dam. As the reservoir rose, hundreds of archaeological sites, towns and monuments in the gorges faced submersion, and the rescue excavations of the 1990s and 2000s produced an immense new body of material requiring a permanent home. In 2000 the State Council approved the dual name China Three Gorges Museum for the Chongqing Museum — a recognition that the institution's task had become national. The present building, purpose-built for that task, opened on 18 June 2005.

The Building on People's Square

The museum occupies the west side of People's Square in Yuzhong District, opposite the Chongqing People's Great Hall, in one of the city's most formal civic compositions. Published figures for the complex vary by what they count: the museum occupies a site of about 30,000 square metres, with a main building of about 45,098 square metres and some 23,225 square metres of exhibition space in one summary; other accounts give a site area approaching 50,000 square metres, a total floor area of 71,700 square metres including 31,000 square metres of exhibition space, counting the wider complex. By any measure it is among the largest museums in China.

Its exhibition system comprises four permanent (basic) exhibitions, six themed exhibitions, three temporary exhibition halls, a 360-degree panoramic film theatre, a half-scene (diorama) display, and a visitor activity and education centre. The museum attracts large audiences — figures of 1.7 million visitors a year and 2.7 million visitors annually both appear in published summaries from different years — and hosts some ten permanent and fifty temporary exhibitions in its programming. It is recognised as a national first-class museum and serves as a base for patriotic, youth and science education.

The Collections: 113,500 Relics and 18,000 Rare Books

The collections were initially inherited from the Southwest Museum and have grown through the Three Gorges rescue programme and continuing collecting. The museum's own founding figure is around 113,500 pieces and sets of cultural relics and some 18,000 rare books; later summaries count more than 115,000 relics, and some give over 170,000 pieces and sets across the whole complex including its branches. The material falls into categories — thirty-five in one institutional count, twenty-three in another — that range across the museum's whole remit.

The recognised strengths are ancient human fossil material, Three Gorges cultural relics, Ba-Yu bronze ware unearthed in Chongqing, Han-dynasty relics, folk items of the southwestern ethnic groups, historical items of the Great Rear Area during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945), antique porcelain, traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, coins, and guqin zithers. Few museums anywhere hold, under one roof, both two-million-year-old hominin fossils and the documentary record of a twentieth-century wartime capital; the span is the product of the museum's double inheritance, from the Southwest Museum and from the gorges themselves.

The Splendid Three Gorges and the Rescue of a Drowned Heritage

The first of the four basic exhibitions, The Magnificent (or Splendid) Three Gorges, presents the natural environment, history and culture of the gorges region and the dam project that transformed it, with scale models, boat-tracking artefacts and immersive displays on the world's largest hydropower project. The boatmen's world receives particular attention: the cliff walls along both banks of the gorges were scored with deep grooves and gouges cut by the ropes of trackers hauling boats upstream, and the museum presents those marks — and the stilt-house and post-and-beam dwellings of the gorge towns, built against green mountains facing the water — as heritage in their own right.

Behind the exhibition stands the rescue programme itself. Hundreds of archaeological sites were submerged by the reservoir, and many objects were discovered and moved to the museum by teams of scientists and archaeologists working ahead of the water. The museum is, in consequence, a monument of the dam project as well as a museum of the gorges: the institution through which the material memory of the drowned towns, temples, burials and inscriptions was carried into the future. Material in its stores includes Ba-Yu bronzes, Han-dynasty sculpture and cliff-burial material recovered from sites now under the reservoir.

Ancient Ba-Yu: Fossils, Bronzes and Wushan Man

The second basic exhibition, Far-Ancient Ba-Yu (Ancient Ba-Yu Civilisation), traces Chongqing from the Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age kingdoms of Ba and Yu. Its most famous single exhibit is the left mandible fossil of Wushan Man, discovered at Longgupo in Wushan — an early Palaeolithic hominin site in the gorges. The fossil has been presented as evidence that the emergence of early humans in East Asia reaches back not hundreds of thousands but some two million years, making the gorges a contender in the global story of human origins; the museum displays the Wushan material as the starting point of its human narrative.

The Bronze Age galleries present the Ba and Shu kingdoms through tiger-shaped chunyu bells, bird-shaped wine vessels and other Ba-Yu bronzes, and treasures such as the Three-Goat Vase, unearthed in 1980 at Lijiatang along the Daning River in Dachang Town, Wushan County, 42.8 centimetres tall and transferred to the museum in June 2005 from the Wushan County cultural relics office. In the Three Kingdoms period the region belonged to the Shu kingdom, and Shu-Han relics continue the sequence. The exhibition establishes the essential point of the museum's archaeology: the gorges were not a wilderness between greater centres, but a homeland — of early humans, of the Ba kingdom and of a river civilisation of trackers, salt traders and boat towns.

Han Sculpture, Porcelain, Painting and Coins

Among the six themed exhibitions, the Sculptural Art of the Han Dynasty displays stone que gate-towers, carved bricks and tomb sculptures depicting myths and daily life — the carved stone tradition for which the Chongqing and Sichuan Han tombs are famous. Han-dynasty sculpture is one of the museum's named collection strengths, and the gallery shows gate towers, tomb figures and relief carving together as an art of the afterlife, built to furnish and guard the burials of the region's Han elite.

The remaining themed exhibitions cover Porcelain (Chinaware) Through the Ages — including Song-dynasty celadon and Ming-Qing blue-and-white porcelain — Paintings and Calligraphy of Past Dynasties, Coins Through the Ages, the Customs (Culture Relics) of the Southwest Minorities, presenting the folk heritage of the region's ethnic groups, and the contributions of the collector Li Chuli. The museum's guqin collection, among the finest holdings of the ancient zither in the southwest, belongs to this art-historical side of the institution. Together the themed galleries make the museum comprehensive as well as specialist: a visitor who came for the gorges leaves with a survey of Chinese porcelain, painting and money.

Chongqing: Urban Development and the Wartime Capital

The third and fourth basic exhibitions belong to the city itself. The Urban Development of Chongqing (Chongqing in Ancient Times and its urbanisation, in different translations) narrates the growth of the mountain city from Ba-Yu settlement to treaty port, industrial centre and modern municipality. The Anti-Japanese War exhibition — Times of the Anti-Japanese Aggression War — records Chongqing's years as China's wartime capital, when the Nationalist government moved upriver to the city and Chongqing endured years of bombing as the Great Rear Area of the resistance. Bombing footage, wartime documents and artefacts of the rear-area years form a collection strength inherited directly from the Southwest Museum, whose founders lived that history.

These galleries explain why the museum carries two names. As the Chongqing Museum it is the city's memory: its urban history and its finest hour are displayed here. As the China Three Gorges Museum it is a national institution, holding the gorges' rescued heritage for the whole country. The dual name approved in 2000 is not a formality but a description of two real, coexisting museums within one building.

The Baiheliang Underwater Museum and the Branches

The museum complex comprises five venues: the Main Museum; the Baiheliang Underwater Museum at Fuling; the Soong Ching Ling Memorial Hall, installed in the former residence of Soong Ching Ling as the former headquarters of the China Defense League; the Tushan Kiln Site; and the Chongqing Three Gorges Cultural Relics Conservation and Technology Center. Of these, Baiheliang is internationally famous in its own right.

Baiheliang — White Crane Ridge — is a rock ledge in the Yangtze at Fuling that emerged in low-water seasons and gathered inscriptions over more than 1,200 years: 165 engravings including poems, fish carvings recording low-water years and Avalokiteshvara images, among them one of China's most important ancient hydrological records — a stone fish whose appearances marked the river's lowest levels. When the reservoir submerged the ridge beneath some forty metres of water, engineers preserved it in place: a protective underwater structure with corridors and an exhibition hall was built over the rock at a reported cost of some twenty million yuan, and visitors now descend by escalator to the riverbed and view the inscriptions through eighteen observation windows, in what is described as the world's only underwater museum of its kind. Opened as part of the Three Gorges Museum complex, Baiheliang embodies the institution's philosophy at its most ingenious: heritage need not always be moved to be saved.

A Monument of the Three Gorges Project

The China Three Gorges Museum describes itself, in closing, as not only the symbolic museum of the Three Gorges in collection, research and exhibition, but also an immortal monument of the Three Gorges Dam Project. The claim is fair. No other institution holds together the full arc its galleries display: a two-million-year-old fossil jaw from Longgupo; the bronzes of the Ba kingdom; the carved stones of Han tombs; the porcelain, painting and coins of imperial China; the documentary record of the wartime capital; and the salvaged heritage of the gorges, crowned by an inscribed reef still lying in the Yangtze, visited through glass beneath the river. Its official website is 3gmuseum.cn. For anyone seeking to understand Chongqing — and the river that made it — the museum at 236 Renmin Road is where the story is kept.