About Guangzhou Museum

Guangzhou Museum

The Guangzhou Museum is the comprehensive history museum of Guangzhou, Guangdong, the city historically known in the West as Canton, and one of the earliest museums in China. Established in 1929 and rated a National First-Class Museum, it holds a collection recorded by the museum at some 135,000 pieces and is dedicated to collecting, researching, exhibiting and promoting the historical and cultural heritage of Guangzhou, the place where, in its own description, inland civilisation and maritime civilisation meet. Its centrepiece is the Zhenhai Tower in Yuexiu Park, a five-storey tower first built in 1380 that has long been revered as the landmark of the old Canton city. Around that tower the museum has grown to encompass the Zhongyuan Tower exhibition area and two branch memorial museums devoted to defining moments of modern Chinese resistance and revolution, presenting Guangzhou's excavations, its history as a trading port and its distinctive export arts to visitors climbing, quite literally, through the city's past floor by floor.

One of China's earliest museums

The Guangzhou Museum was established as the Guangzhou Municipal Museum and officially opened to the public on 11 February 1929, placing it among the pioneer museums founded in China in the early twentieth century, before the great expansion of the museum sector after 1949. In 1950 it was renamed the Guangzhou Museum, the name it retains. Its creation reflected the civic ambitions of Republican-era Guangzhou, then a centre of reform, trade and revolutionary politics, whose government chose a historic tower in the city's northern heights as the home for a public collection. That the museum has now operated for nearly a century in the same landmark building gives it a continuity rare among Chinese city museums, many of which have moved repeatedly. The tower was not a neutral container: it stood on the last surviving section of Guangzhou's city wall on Yuexiu Hill, it had watched over the port for more than five centuries, and housing the city's history inside the city's most recognisable historic structure announced that Guangzhou's past and its monument were the same thing. The museum is located at 99 Zhenhai Road in Yuexiu Park, Yuexiu District.

Zhenhai Tower: the five-storey landmark

Zhenhai Tower, which means Tower Guarding the Sea and is also called the Five-Storey Tower, was built in 1380, the thirteenth year of the Hongwu reign of the Ming dynasty, by Zhu Liangzu, Marquis of Yongjia, when he rebuilt the city of Guangzhou, as a city tower on the walls at Panlonggang on Yuexiu Hill. It is about 28 metres high and 31 metres wide in widely published measurements, with its first two floors built of red sandstone and the upper floors of brick, and a pair of two-metre-high red sandstone lions of the Ming dynasty standing before it. The tower was destroyed and rebuilt five times over the centuries and was occupied by British and French soldiers during the First Opium War. In 1928 its structure was changed from wood to reinforced concrete in the reconstruction on which the present building is based, retaining the Ming form. It is now designated a key cultural site under national protection and is celebrated as one of the Eight Sights of Guangzhou and, in museum description, as the sole representative in South China of China's renowned historical storied buildings. Cannons displayed beside it, a barbette on its west side and 23 ancient stone tablets in its stele corridor connect the building to the military and literary history of the city it guarded.

Climbing through Guangzhou's history

The Zhenhai Tower houses the museum's permanent historical exhibition, presented in recent interpretation as City Landmark, City History, which uses nearly a thousand pictures, data items and exhibits, drawn from a much larger reserve, to display the cultural, folk and urban development changes of Guangzhou over five to six thousand years. Visitors ascend through time as they climb. The first floor introduces Guangzhou's geography and development with a geographical model and a diagram of the ancient city. The second floor presents historical relics from about 4000 BC to 589 AD, including unearthed remains of the Neolithic Age and material of the pre-Qin, Qin and Han periods. The third floor continues with relics of the Sui, Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties. The fourth floor is devoted mainly to the Qing dynasty, the era of the Canton trade. The fifth floor displays modern Chinese cultural relics since the Opium War of 1840 to 1842, bringing the story to the revolutionary twentieth century and offering panoramic views over the city whose history the visitor has just climbed through. Special showrooms east of the tower host temporary and commemorative exhibitions, so the tower functions as both a monument that can be entered and a chronological machine that organises the whole museum visit.

Collections in more than a dozen categories

The Guangzhou Museum's collection encompasses 135,000 pieces in museum accounts, spanning more than a dozen categories that include ceramics, bronzes, jade, calligraphy, traditional Chinese painting, woodcarvings, ivory carvings and silk fabrics. The holdings are strongest where Guangzhou itself was strongest: in the arts and crafts of a great port city. Excavated material from ancient dynasties grounds the collection in archaeology, while the decorative arts of the Ming and Qing eras demonstrate the skill of Cantonese workshops in porcelain, enamel, embroidery, lacquer, ivory and wood. A stele gallery beside the Zhongyuan Tower displays stone rubbings and inscriptions of calligraphy by masters from the Jin dynasty to the Qing, including names such as Wang Xizhi, Ouyang Xun, Yan Zhenqing, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, Mi Fu, Cai Xiang and Dong Qichang in exhibition accounts, alongside local historical documents. Together the archaeological, artistic and documentary holdings allow the museum to tell Guangzhou's story from three directions at once: what was dug up in the city, what was made in the city and what was written about the city.

Export art and the fusion of East and West

Guangzhou's defining historical role was as China's principal maritime trading port, for a period the only Chinese port open to Western trade under the Canton System, and the museum's second exhibition area is devoted to that world. The Zhongyuan Tower, or Zhongyuan Building, on the east side of Zhenhai Road, was built in 1930 as the Zhongyuan Library in memory of Deng Zhongyuan, a revolutionary general of the 1911 Revolution, designed by the Guangdong architect Yang Xizong in a style imitating the Hall of Literary Glory in Beijing's Forbidden City while blending Chinese and Western elements, with green glazed tiles, flying eaves and a granite base; it is now a Guangdong provincial cultural relic protection unit and the museum's art gallery. Its long-term exhibition, Treasures of Maritime Trade: Guangzhou Export Artworks from the 18th to the Early 20th Century, displays ivory carvings, Canton embroidery, silk textiles, Guangcai painted porcelain, lacquer work and export paintings made for Western markets. Since the late Ming dynasty Guangzhou had been an important port for foreign trade on the Maritime Silk Road, and its delicate crafts, adapted in pattern, form and subject to European and American taste while retaining Cantonese technique, became famous overseas. The museum presents these export arts as its signature: the distinctive products of the Ming and Qing eras that show, more clearly than any text, the fusion of East and West in a single object.

The Sanyuanli memorial and the Opium War

The museum also operates the Memorial of Sanyuanli People's Struggle during the Opium War, one of its two branch museums. Sanyuanli, then a village north of Guangzhou, was the site in 1841, during the First Opium War, of a celebrated spontaneous resistance in which local people confronted British troops, an event honoured in Chinese history as the first great popular anti-imperialist struggle of modern China. The memorial is based in the Sanyuan Temple, originally a Taoist temple worshipping the North Emperor, in front of which the people of Sanyuanli were rallied for the resistance. In 1961 the temple was listed among the first group of national-level protected cultural heritage sites published by the State Council and was subsequently converted into the Sanyuanli anti-British museum. Its exhibits include the triple-star flags under which the villagers rallied, weapons, shell trumpets, notices and posters used in the struggle, and British rifles, knives and uniforms captured by local people, together with a vivid depiction of the rally before the North Emperor statue. Administered by the Guangzhou Museum, the memorial extends the Opium War gallery on Zhenhai Tower's fifth floor to the actual ground where Guangzhou's people fought.

The March 29th Uprising headquarters memorial

The second branch is the Memorial of the March 29th Uprising Headquarters. The March 29th Uprising, also known as the Huanghuagang Uprising, was the revolutionary rising in Guangzhou on 29 March 1911 in the lunar calendar reckoning, 27 April 1911 in the Gregorian calendar, led by Huang Xing under Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement in the months before the Wuchang Uprising and the Xinhai Revolution that ended imperial rule in China. Its headquarters site preserves the organisational heart of an uprising whose martyrs, the 72 Martyrs of Huanghuagang, became foundational figures of the Republic of China. By administering this memorial alongside the Sanyuanli memorial, the Guangzhou Museum binds together the two bookends of Guangzhou's modern revolutionary identity: popular resistance to foreign invasion in 1841 and organised revolution against the Qing dynasty in 1911. Together with the Zhongyuan Library's commemoration of Deng Zhongyuan, a general of the 1911 Revolution, the museum system makes clear that in Guangzhou, trade history and revolutionary history are displayed by the same institution and understood as parts of a single city story.

Research, exhibitions and the maritime city

Beyond its permanent displays, the Guangzhou Museum presents temporary exhibitions in the halls east of Zhenhai Tower and in the Zhongyuan Tower area, which also neighbours natural history displays in Yuexiu Park. Its stated mission, to collect, research, exhibit and promote the heritage of the place where inland and maritime civilisations meet, shapes a programme that moves between archaeology, art and modern history: excavations within the modern city continually add material, as Guangzhou's construction uncovers tombs, kilns and wharves, while the export art collection supports research into the Canton trade, the Maritime Silk Road and Chinese-Western cultural exchange. The museum's presence on Google Arts and Culture, where it presents itself as one of the oldest museums in China and introduces the Zhenhai Tower to a global audience, extends that mission online. For scholars of the port, the museum offers primary evidence in porcelain, painting, ivory and silk of how Guangzhou saw its foreign customers and how those customers wished to see China; for general visitors, it offers the most direct available survey of why Canton mattered to the world.

Visiting Guangzhou Museum today

Today a visit to the Guangzhou Museum typically combines the Zhenhai Tower exhibition, climbed floor by floor over two to three hours, with the Zhongyuan Tower export art galleries across Zhenhai Road, set within the greenery of Yuexiu Park, Guangzhou's largest urban park and the historic northern edge of the old city. The tower remains Guangzhou's emblem, reproduced in the city's imagery as the Five-Storey Tower and still commanding views from Yuexiu Hill toward the Pearl River. Almost a century after it opened on 11 February 1929, the museum has lost none of its original logic: the city's history is best understood from inside its landmark, surrounded by the objects its merchants, craftsmen, villagers and revolutionaries left behind. With 135,000 pieces, two revolutionary memorials and the finest survey of Canton export art in its home city, the Guangzhou Museum stands as both archive and symbol of a trading metropolis whose connections, by river and by sea, shaped China's encounter with the wider world.