About Hainan Museum

Hainan Museum

The Hainan Museum (海南省博物馆), also rendered the Hainan Provincial Museum, is the provincial museum of Hainan in Haikou, the capital of China's southernmost and youngest province. Its permanent home at 68 Guoxing Avenue, in the Hainan Cultural Park alongside the Hainan Library and the Hainan Centre for the Performing Arts, opened on 15 November 2008, with a second phase opened on 18 May 2017. The museum held some 25,287 pieces and sets by 2019, with more than 20,000 items cited in general accounts, and was named a national first-class museum in 2012. Its defining theme is the sea: Hainan is an island province facing the South China Sea, and the museum's exhibitions on South China Sea maritime civilisation, centred on the Huaguangjiao No. 1 shipwreck, make it unlike any other provincial museum in China.

Hainan was established as a separate province only in 1988, when it was also designated China's largest special economic zone, and it is now being developed as a free trade port. The museum, planned since 1984, is therefore both a history museum and a statement of provincial identity, gathering the island's archaeology, its ethnic cultures and its maritime heritage under one roof for the first time.

Establishment and Building

A preparatory office for the museum was set up in August 1984, four years before Hainan became a province, when the island was still administered as part of Guangdong. For many years the institution worked without a permanent home of modern scale. That changed with the construction of the Guoxing Avenue cultural complex, one of three large public works built alongside one another on the avenue. The facility covers more than 44,500 square metres in total, with an exhibition hall area of about 12,000 square metres, and has been described as one of the most beautiful buildings in Hainan. The first phase opened on 15 November 2008 and the second phase, which greatly expanded the South China Sea displays, on 18 May 2017, International Museum Day.

Since opening, the museum has received large numbers of visitors, including national leaders, and admission is free. Its exhibition system was created under the theme evoking Hainan as a fertile island in the southern seas, organised into maritime civilisation in the South China Sea, the history of Hainan, and the folk culture and customs of Hainan, supplemented by thematic exhibitions and displays of intangible cultural heritage. In recent arrangements the four basic permanent exhibitions have been presented as Collected Cultural Relics, History of Hainan, Minority Nationalities in Hainan and Intangible Cultural Heritage in Hainan, with the South China Sea material forming the museum's signature gallery.

The Huaguangjiao No. 1 Shipwreck

The centrepiece of the museum is the Huaguangjiao No. 1 (Huaguang Reef No. 1), a Southern Song dynasty merchant ship that sank on Huaguang Reef in the Paracel (Xisha) Islands in the South China Sea. The wreck was discovered by Chinese fishermen in 1996, lying about three metres below the surface. It measured about 20 metres long and 6 metres wide, covered some 180 square metres, and is currently the oldest hull China has discovered in the open seas. Although the site had been disturbed and robbed before formal archaeology began, it remained the landmark case for China's underwater archaeology programme in the South China Sea.

On 15 March 2007, a salvage and excavation operation organised by the National Museum of China together with Hainan's provincial cultural administration began work at the reef. The Hainan Museum played an integral role in organising the excavation and became the home of the recovered material. More than 10,000 pieces of pottery and porcelain were retrieved, mainly from Fujian and Guangdong kilns, alongside other cargo and shipboard material. The porcelain, much of it Song dynasty celadon and qingbai ware packed in layers in the ship's cabins, provides direct evidence of a well-established maritime trade route, the Maritime Silk Road, linking China's southeast coast to Southeast Asia and beyond during the Song and Yuan periods. In the museum, the wreck is presented with a reconstructed salvage scene, multimedia including a 360-degree presentation of the recovery, and displays explaining underwater archaeological method: survey, excavation under water, conservation of waterlogged ceramics and timber, and what a cargo can reveal that documents cannot.

Maritime Civilisation in the South China Sea

Around the shipwreck, the museum builds a broader exhibition on South China Sea maritime civilisation. Hainan sits on the western arm of the Maritime Silk Road, the sea route from Guangzhou and other southern ports through the South China Sea to Southeast Asia, India and beyond. Charts, ship models from different dynasties, fishing gear, navigational knowledge preserved by Hainan fishermen in their traditional route books, and material from other South China Sea wrecks place Huaguangjiao No. 1 in context. The galleries address both trade and everyday seafaring: how wooden sailing ships were built and rigged, how cargoes of ceramics, iron, gold and provisions were stowed, and how island communities lived from the sea.

This maritime focus distinguishes Hainan among provincial museums. Where inland museums centre on tombs and cities, Hainan's centres on a reef, a hull and ten thousand bowls. The museum's second phase was planned specifically to restore, protect and display the wreck and its approximately 10,000 pieces of porcelain and related material, together with content on the history of the South China Sea, the Maritime Silk Road, marine organisms and mineral resources. A separate institution, the China (Hainan) Museum of the South China Sea at Qionghai, opened later to extend this work, but the Hainan Museum in Haikou remains the provincial museum where the Huaguangjiao recovery is anchored.

History of Hainan

The history galleries trace the island from prehistory to the present. Hainan was known to Han-dynasty administrators, who established commanderies on the island, and was used for centuries as a place of exile for officials who fell from favour, most famously the Song-dynasty statesman Su Shi (Su Dongpo), whose years on Hainan in the 1090s left a lasting cultural legacy. Displays cover the island's administration, agriculture, salt and fishing industries, its role in coastal defence, and the development of Haikou as a treaty-era port, whose arcaded qilou streets reflect trade with Southeast Asia. Twentieth-century galleries address Hainan's revolutionary history, including the Qiongya guerrilla forces, and the island's transformation after 1988 as a province and special economic zone, and more recently as a free trade port.

Among the distinctive collected relics cited for the museum are a Tang dynasty sancai (three-colour glazed) horse and a sword associated with the ancient state of Qi and the King of Yue from the Warring States period, objects that illustrate the museum's wider collecting of Chinese art alongside its island material. Temporary exhibitions, some twenty thematic shows in the museum's early years, have ranged from displays of Hainan's achievements in two decades of province-building to national treasure exhibitions and Asian watercolour art.

Peoples of Hainan: Li, Miao and Hui Cultures

Hainan has long been a place of cultural exchange, home to Han, Li, Miao, Hui and other groups for hundreds or thousands of years. The Li are the island's earliest known inhabitants, with a culture centred on the Wuzhi Mountain region of the interior: rice cultivation, distinctive textiles woven on waist looms, bark cloth, pottery, and tattooing traditions recorded in historic sources. The museum's minority nationalities galleries display Li dress, woven textiles with geometric and ancestral patterns, tools, musical instruments and reconstructions of boat-shaped houses, the traditional Li dwelling form. Miao communities, who migrated to Hainan in the Ming period and served in mountain garrisons, and Hui communities of the Sanya coast, descended in part from Cham and Arab maritime traders and known as fishermen and sailors, are presented with their own costumes, crafts and religious life.

Intangible cultural heritage displays complement the objects with film, sound and demonstration: Li traditional spinning, dyeing, weaving and embroidery techniques, inscribed by UNESCO as heritage in need of urgent safeguarding, Li bamboo and wood music, dances, festivals and oral traditions. Together the galleries argue that Hainan's island culture was created by integration among its peoples and between the island and the sea routes that touched it.

Huanghuali and Agarwood: Treasures of the Island

Two thematic exhibitions are devoted to materials for which Hainan is prized across China: huanghuali wood and agarwood (chenxiang). Hainan huanghuali, a fragrant rosewood from the island's forests, is known as the queen of woods, valued for centuries for fine furniture and carving because of its dense grain, lustrous figure and durability. Hainan agarwood, resinous incense wood formed in wounded aquilaria trees, is ranked first among incenses and was historically tribute material, used in medicine, ritual and perfumery. The museum's exhibitions explain the botany, harvesting, grading and craft of both materials, displaying furniture, carvings and incense objects. The importance of the theme to the province is underlined by the later Hainan Huanghuali Agarwood Museum project launched in Haikou, planned as a dedicated museum of about 13,000 square metres for these collections.

Collections and Signature Relics

Beyond the shipwreck, the museum's collected relics illustrate the breadth of its remit as a comprehensive provincial museum. General accounts cite more than 20,000 items including cultural relics and multimedia, rising to 25,287 pieces and sets by 2019 as the South China Sea collections grew. Ceramics from Fujian and Guangdong kilns raised from the sea form the largest single group, but the stores also hold Hainan archaeology, historic documents and photographs, ethnic textiles and tools, natural specimens and modern material recording the province's development since 1988. Rotating displays of collected cultural relics allow objects that cannot be shown permanently, including fragile textiles and waterlogged material under conservation, to be seen in turn, and national treasure exhibitions hosted by the museum have brought major loans from other Chinese museums to Haikou.

Education, Research and the Free Trade Port Era

The museum anchors heritage work for the Hainan Free Trade Port era. It supports underwater archaeology in the South China Sea, conserves waterlogged material, and researches Hainan's history, ethnic cultures and natural environment, including the island's volcanic geology and tropical ecology presented in its galleries. Educational programmes, guided audio tours in multiple languages and bilingual interpretation make it one of the most accessible provincial museums for international visitors, reflecting Hainan's ambition as an international tourism and consumption centre.

For visitors, the essential route runs through the South China Sea and Huaguangjiao galleries on the first floor, the history display, and the folk and intangible heritage galleries with their Li textiles and huanghuali and agarwood exhibitions. Two to three hours allows a full visit. The museum's achievement is to give China's youngest province one of its most distinctive museums: nowhere else does a single Song shipwreck, raised from a remote reef and displayed in the provincial capital, carry so much of a region's history, trade and identity.