About Inner Mongolia Science and Technology Museum

Inner Mongolia Science and Technology Museum

The Inner Mongolia Science and Technology Museum is a public science and technology museum in Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China. Its Chinese name is 内蒙古科技馆. Located at A18 Beiyuan Street East in Xincheng District, behind the separate Inner Mongolia Museum, it should not be confused with that institution: the Inner Mongolia Museum is a regional history and culture museum founded in 1957, whereas the Science and Technology Museum is devoted to science popularisation, interactive exhibition and science education. The distinction matters in Hohhot, where the two large institutions stand close to one another and are often visited on the same day, but their collections, missions and histories are entirely different.

One of China's earliest science and technology museums

The museum is described in visitor and institutional sources as one of the earliest science and technology museums in China. It was officially opened on 5 December 1983. That early date places its founding in the first years of China's modern science-museum movement, when provincial and autonomous-region capitals began to build dedicated venues where scientific ideas could be presented to the general public through exhibits rather than only through books and classrooms. For Inner Mongolia, a vast region of grassland, desert, mining and pastoral communities spread across northern China, a central science venue in Hohhot gave schools and families a single place where technology, natural phenomena and industrial change could be encountered directly.

From its inauguration in 1983, the museum developed as a key base for science education in the autonomous region. A venue profile recording its early decades notes that, since opening, it had organised more than 200 popular science exhibitions and received more than two million visitors. Those figures, reported in connection with the older museum, underline the scale of its outreach long before its present building existed: touring and temporary exhibitions, as well as the permanent displays in Hohhot, carried its work beyond the capital to a region where many communities are far from a major city.

The old museum and its working life

Before the new building opened, the museum worked from a much smaller site. That earlier building covered a land area of about 1,792.3 square metres, with a construction area of about 7,876 square metres, and could accommodate around 2,000 people for activities. Inside, it housed several departments and facilities, including four exhibition halls, an electronic reading room, classrooms, a small conference room, a multifunctional lecture hall and a scientists' club. The mix is revealing: the museum was never only a display hall. It was also a teaching centre, a meeting place for scientists and a base for the staff who planned exhibitions and education programmes for the whole autonomous region.

The construction of a new museum was supported by the China Association for Science and Technology together with the Party committee and government of the autonomous region. The aim, as described at the time, was a new science and technology museum with outstanding themes, complete functions and an advanced level of display. Planning and construction took years, during which the old museum's exhibition and cinema equipment continued to be upgraded; reports in 2014, ahead of the move, already described previews of the new museum's giant-screen and 4D cinema facilities, indicating how central special-effects film would be to the new venue's offer.

The new museum of 2016

The new museum was completed and inaugurated on 20 September 2016. Photographs published by Xinhua on that day show students touring the new halls in Hohhot as the building opened to visitors. The new museum has a total construction area of 48,300 square metres — more than six times the floor area of the old building — with an exhibition and education area of 28,800 square metres. Sources describe it as a modern, comprehensive science and technology museum integrating exhibition education, public services, business research and management support. In practical terms, that means permanent galleries, temporary exhibitions, cinemas, classrooms and programme spaces operate together under one roof, at a scale the 1983 building could never have supported.

The rebuilding also kept the museum in the same cultural district of Xincheng, behind the Inner Mongolia Museum. A visitor can therefore move in a few minutes between two very different accounts of Inner Mongolia: one told through history, archaeology and ethnography in the Inner Mongolia Museum, and one told through experiment, invention and the natural world in the Science and Technology Museum. Keeping the two apart is essential to understanding either of them.

Exploration, Innovation and Future: halls and themes

The permanent exhibition of the new museum is organised under the concept of “Exploration, Innovation and Future.” It comprises five exhibition halls, together with iconic exhibits placed in the public spaces of the building, covering nine themes with a total of 457 exhibits. Themes named in descriptions of the museum include “Exploration and Discovery,” “Creation and Experience” and “Earth and Home.” The exhibition approach is mainly interactive, deliberately combining science, knowledge and fun, so that visitors learn by operating, testing and observing rather than only by reading labels.

That interactive emphasis runs through accounts of visits to the museum. Visitors describe simulated space flight, robot performances and hands-on experimental links that let children work equipment themselves. A recurring feature of holiday reporting from Hohhot is children experiencing the museum's “time tunnel” and participating in experiment shows, model aircraft competitions and stacking-cup competitions during festival programmes. Such activities are part of the museum's method: short, lively, participatory formats are used to draw young visitors toward the larger themes of the permanent halls, from the Earth as a home to the exploration of space.

The special-effects cinemas

Film is a major part of the new museum. It is equipped with three special-effects venues: a digital stereoscopic giant-screen theatre, a 4D dynamic theatre and a digital dome theatre, together providing an immersive viewing experience that complements the galleries. The giant-screen theatre's screen is 23 metres wide and 16 metres high. Technical reporting published when the new museum's cinemas were being prepared put the giant-screen theatre's construction area at about 1,005 square metres with capacity for 292 people, using high-brightness, high-definition 4K projection, dual-polarisation three-dimensional playback and 7.1-channel high-fidelity sound. The dome theatre uses full spherical screen projection technology to surround the audience with the image.

The 4D dynamic theatre adds physical effects to the film. Its seats move with three degrees of freedom, and environmental effects described for the theatre include wind at the ears, water, leg sweeps and ball effects, synchronised with the picture. The museum programmes its cinemas in seasons: during one National Day and Mid-Autumn holiday period, for example, five special-effects films were shown in the theatre, among them titles on sea turtles, predators, space exploration and birds, alongside a 4D film programme for younger audiences. A later “Science of Cinematography” series paired 4D films with explanatory activities led by the museum's exhibition and education staff, using a Hollywood-animated bird film to teach natural history. The cinemas are thus treated as teaching spaces, not merely entertainment.

Exhibitions, programmes and popular-science work

Beyond its permanent halls, the museum runs an extensive programme of popular-science work. Its record of more than 200 popular science exhibitions and more than two million visitors, accumulated from its early decades, has continued in the new building through temporary exhibitions, festival events and themed activity weeks. During the holiday period described above, the museum staged its first “Science Naadam,” borrowing the name of Mongolia's traditional festival of games for a celebration of science. The programme included popular science dramas rehearsed and performed by the museum, among them “Legend of the Elven Magic” and “Pippi Epidemic Prevention,” alongside science experiment show performances and competitions that attracted large numbers of children and parents.

School and family learning sits at the centre of this work. The museum's exhibition and education department originates much of the cinema-linked and drama-linked teaching, and the building's classrooms and lecture spaces support organised visits. In a region where winter weather and long distances can limit school trips, concentrated, high-quality programme days in the capital carry particular weight, and the museum's combination of galleries, films and live shows is designed to make a single visit serve many curriculum points at once.

Equipment and standards

As an important base for science popularisation and a public-benefit venue, the museum maintains high standards for its technical equipment. A case study of its exhibition systems, published in 2018, describes the care taken over the display and projection installation used to present its interactive exhibits, reflecting the dependence of a modern science museum on reliable audiovisual engineering: when an exhibit stops working, the lesson it teaches stops with it. The museum's investment in 4K giant-screen projection, spherical dome projection and synchronised 4D seating belongs to the same concern — keeping a large, heavily used interactive museum operating at a consistently high technical level for school groups and the general public alike.

Place in Hohhot and Inner Mongolia

Today the Inner Mongolia Science and Technology Museum stands as the autonomous region's principal dedicated science centre. Its history falls into two clear chapters: the pioneering museum opened on 5 December 1983, which for more than three decades introduced science to generations of visitors from a modest building, and the comprehensive new museum completed on 20 September 2016, with 48,300 square metres of construction area, five exhibition halls, nine themes, 457 exhibits and three special-effects cinemas. For visitors to Hohhot, it offers the scientific counterpart to the city's historical museums; for Inner Mongolia, it remains a central instrument of public science education, bringing exploration, innovation and a sense of the future within reach of the region's children and families.