About Heilongjiang Provincial Museum

Heilongjiang Provincial Museum

The Heilongjiang Provincial Museum (黑龙江省博物馆) in Harbin began as the East Province cultural-relics exhibition hall, opened on 12 June 1923 inside the former Moscow shopping mall, a Russian-built department store of 1904–1906 in the Nangang District whose building it still occupies; after merger with the Songjiang Provincial Museum it took its present name in 1954, and the calligrapher Guo Moruo inscribed its name in 1962. The museum holds well over 110,000 items of history, art and natural history. Its treasures document the Jurchen Jin dynasty, founded in this region: a bronze seated dragon, silk garments from the tomb of the Jin Prince of Qi, and the Tianmen Army seal of the Bohai kingdom. Natural history galleries display duck-billed dinosaur and woolly rhinoceros skeletons from the province's fossil beds. The museum is the oldest major museum in northeast China and the central repository for Heilongjiang's archaeology and palaeontology.

Origins in the Moscow Shopping Mall

The museum's building is itself its first exhibit. The former Moscow shopping mall — a Russian-built department store erected between 1904 and 1906 on what is now Red Army Street in Nangang District, beside Hongbo Square — is a European Baroque-style building, listed as a first-grade building in Harbin and a provincial cultural relic protection unit, and described in Chinese accounts as a national-level protected structure. Into this commercial palace, on 12 June 1923, opened the East Province cultural-relics exhibition hall — formally the exhibition hall of the East Province Cultural Relics Research Society — making the institution the oldest major museum in northeast China. The setting was apt for Harbin, a city built up around the Chinese Eastern Railway and filled with Russian and European architecture: from the beginning, the museum has presented the deep history of Heilongjiang inside one of the most distinctive buildings of the city's railway-era boom.

Becoming the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum

The institution passed through the administrative changes of the northeast in the mid-twentieth century. In 1953 the exhibition hall was renamed the Songjiang Provincial Museum. In 1954, when Songjiang Province was incorporated into Heilongjiang Province, the Songjiang Provincial Museum merged with the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum Preparatory Office to form the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum — the name in use ever since. In 1962 the celebrated calligrapher and scholar Guo Moruo inscribed the museum's name, an honour recorded in the museum's own history. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the museum stood among the first batch of provincial-level comprehensive public-welfare museums, charged with the protection, excavation, collection, research and display of historical relics, revolutionary relics, ethnic relics and natural specimens across Heilongjiang Province — responsibilities it still carries from its historic building in central Harbin.

The Collection in Outline

The museum's holdings are counted in two complementary ways in published accounts. Older profiles record more than 107,400 pieces and specimens of cultural relics, including 84 first-level collections, together with more than 40,000 volumes of books; within that total are more than 70,000 natural specimens of rocks, minerals, soils, flora, fauna and palaeontology, and more than 30,000 pieces of historical artefacts, paintings and ethnic heritage. A more recent visitor account of the museum describes over 630,000 items across four major series — history, nature, art and documents — spanning 52 categories, a figure that reflects the museum's broader counting of specimens and documents. By any measure, the collection's strengths are consistent: Jin-dynasty (1115–1234) and Hezhe (Nanai) ethnic material are especially abundant; the natural history holdings are among the largest parts of the museum; and the painting collection is rich in modern works, with many pieces by the master Pan Tianshou and early prints such as "Great Northern Wilderness" among its features.

The Jin Dynasty Bronze Seated Dragon

The treasure of the museum is the bronze seated dragon of the Jurchen Jin dynasty. Cast in brass, 19.6 centimetres high and weighing 2.1 kilograms, it was unearthed in 1956 at Bai Chengzi in Acheng District, Harbin — the site of Shangjing Huining Prefecture, the first capital of the Jin empire, founded after the Jurchen leader Aguda established the dynasty in 1115. The dragon sits upright: its left foreleg is raised and linked by a cloud scroll to the left hind leg, the right foreleg rests on the ground, the tail curls outward, and a long mane rises over the shoulders, answering the mane on its head. The figure combines features of dragon, unicorn, lion and dog in a single design of high sculptural quality. It was a royal artefact of the early and middle Jin court: the Jin History's treatise on carriages and dress records seated dragons among the ornaments of the imperial crown wheel and golden carriage, and the Shizong emperor's regulations of 1166 concerning the dragon on the golden chariot are part of the object's documentary background. The dragon is a first-grade national relic and the museum's emblem: in 2006 a monumental enlargement of it, 9.99 metres high and the largest bronze seated dragon in China, was cast as the "Jinyuan Shenlong" sculpture standing with eight smaller dragons at the Harbin–Acheng highway entrance, its head turned toward Beijing. The museum gave the original a special display for International Museum Day in 2021.

The Tomb of the Prince of Qi and Jin Silk

The second great Jin treasure group is the silk clothing from the tomb of the King — or Prince — of Qi of the Jin dynasty. The tomb was a wooden-coffin burial of a man and a woman together; the man was elderly and bearded, wore a short knife with a jade handle, and was buried with rich grave goods. The excavated clothing is singled out in accounts of the museum for its variety and completeness: the full range of garment types and materials survived, made with superb textile technology, exquisite workmanship and gorgeous patterns, and the assemblage is considered particularly precious among excavated relics of its period anywhere in China. Preserved Jin silk of this quality is rare, because textiles seldom survive burial; the Qi prince's garments therefore give the museum a direct record of Jurchen court dress, weaving and dyeing that complements the bronze and ceramic evidence of the dynasty displayed around them, and they anchor the museum's claim to hold the finest material from the Jin homeland, whose first capital stood at Acheng within modern Harbin.

Bohai and the Tianmen Army Seal

Before the Jurchen Jin, the region was the heartland of the Bohai (Balhae) kingdom, and the museum holds its official relics as well. The Seal of the Tianmen Army was excavated in April 1960 at the Bohai site at Jinglongquan in Ning'an County, Heilongjiang — in the area of Bohai's capital region — and, after a period in the Bohai cultural centre, was transferred to the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum on 11 August 1963. Military seals of this kind are primary evidence for the administrative and army organisation of the Bohai state, which ruled the northeast from 698 to 926. Together with the museum's Jin-dynasty landscape and figure story mirrors — counted among its national treasures — the seal represents the succession of regional states, Bohai and Jin, whose archaeology the museum exists to preserve, both of them founded in what is now Heilongjiang before the region's later history as a frontier of the Ming, Qing and modern Chinese states.

Natural History: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and the Northern Wilderness

Natural history is one of the museum's four great series, and its fossil galleries are among its most popular. The signature specimens are Cretaceous duck-billed dinosaur skeleton fossils and Pleistocene woolly rhinoceros skeleton fossils from the province's fossil beds, together with mammoth bone fossils and a Northeast China bison skeleton. Heilongjiang's river terraces and plains have yielded abundant Ice Age fauna, and the museum's more than 70,000 natural specimens — rocks, minerals, soils, plants, animals and fossils — make it the central repository for the province's palaeontology as well as its archaeology. The art collection gives the natural theme a modern echo: the museum holds paintings and calligraphy by Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong and Pan Tianshou, Deng Sanmu's calligraphy and seal carving, and Yu Zhixue's ice-and-snow landscape paintings — a school of painting devoted to the Heilongjiang winter — while the early print "Great Northern Wilderness", depicting the reclamation of the province's northern plains, is a recognised feature of the collection.

Departments, Displays and the New Museum

The museum is organised in departments for nature, history, custody, mass work, display production and business technology, reflecting its combined roles in research, conservation and public education. Its permanent displays present Heilongjiang's ancient history and its natural world, and its temporary exhibition programme is frequently renewed, with exhibitions of celebrity calligraphy and crafts and of local cultural relics; a "Harbin Memories" gallery evokes the city's railway age of steam trains and the Songhua River iron bridge. Because the historic Moscow mall building constrains expansion, a new Heilongjiang Provincial Museum has been planned and under construction at Moon Bay in Songbei District, across the Songhua River, on a planned site of some 120,000 square metres with a construction area of about 50,000 square metres. Until that new home is complete, the museum continues its work from the Baroque landmark it has occupied since 1923 — the oldest major museum in northeast China, still presenting the Jin dragon, the Qi prince's silks and the province's dinosaurs under one historic roof.