About Insect Museum of West China

Insect Museum of West China

The Insect Museum of West China, formally the Chengdu Huaxi Entomological Museum, is a private museum of insects at the foot of Mount Qingcheng in Dujiangyan, Chengdu, Sichuan. Founded by its curator, Zhao Li, it was built and opened free to the public on 1 June 2011 and has been widely described by foreign media as Asia's largest insect museum. Its collection is reported at over one million insect specimens, with more than 20,000 on display, gathered from more than 50 countries and particularly strong in Chinese butterflies. In 2018 it was rated a national second-class museum, among the first non-state-owned museums in China to receive that grade. Three of its holdings hold Guinness World Records certificates, including the world's longest insect and the world's largest aquatic insect. Few private museums anywhere match that combination of scale, specialisation and record-holding specimens.

Founding by Zhao Li at Mount Qingcheng

The museum is the creation of curator and director Zhao Li, whose field collecting and research underpin its holdings. It stands on Qingchengshan Avenue in Dujiangyan, at the foot of Mount Qingcheng, a location chosen within one of China's richest regions for insect diversity. Sichuan has the largest altitude difference in China, Zhao Li has explained, which has bred and preserved extremely rich insect biodiversity and makes the province one of the most abundant areas in the world for insects. The museum was built and opened free of charge on 1 June 2011, and reporting on its tenth anniversary noted that it had received more than 8 million visitors by that point. Free admission has been a defining policy from the start: this is a privately founded museum operated as a public educational resource, a model recognised when it achieved national museum grading despite being non-state-owned.

Asia's Largest Insect Museum

Foreign media have repeatedly described the Chengdu Huaxi Entomological Museum as the largest insect museum in Asia. The basis for that description is the size of its collection relative to other insect museums in Asian countries. Reporting summarised by the museum and Sichuan press puts the collection at more than one million specimens, with more than 20,000 specimens on display — a display total described as second to none among Asian entomological museums. At the same time, Zhao Li has noted that limited exhibition hall area means only about 2 per cent of the collection can be exhibited at present, with many display-worthy specimens kept in storage. The museum's specimens span more than 20 orders of insects, mainly ornamental insects, across tens of thousands of species, and include the national butterflies selected by various countries as well as mainland Chinese species. That depth in storage as well as on display is what sustains both its exhibitions and its research output.

The Butterfly Collection

Butterflies and moths — the Lepidoptera — are the focus of the museum's collection. Its holdings cover over 95 per cent of known Chinese butterfly species, a completeness few collections achieve. Among the rarest exhibits is the only golden-spotted beaked phoenix butterfly held on the mainland that is listed as a first-class protected butterfly; Zhao Li has said the species is so rare that fewer appear in the wild each year than there are wild giant pandas. China's largest butterfly, the golden birdwing, also features in the museum's accounts of Sichuan's protected insects, alongside the black purple butterfly and other species added to national protection lists. The museum launched a National Key Protected Insect Exhibition on International Museum Day, 18 May 2021, after the February 2021 revision of China's List of Wild Animals under National Key Protection raised protected insect species from 21 to 75. Its Lepidoptera strength also drives its publishing programme, including planned research books on the moths of southwest China.

Three Guinness World Records

Three holdings of the museum hold Guinness World Records certificates. The most famous is the world's longest insect, Phryganistria chinensis Zhao, a giant stick insect species discovered by the museum in Guangxi and successfully bred in Chengdu, with a maximum individual length of 64 centimetres — the record holder among nearly one million known insect species. The museum received its Guinness certificate for the species in September 2017, following reporting in August 2017. The second record is the world's largest aquatic insect, Acanthacorydalis fruhstorferi, a dobsonfly found by the museum at Mount Qingcheng and certificated in 2016; a male specimen in the collection reached a wingspan of 21.6 centimetres for the record, and the museum later collected a larger individual with a wingspan of more than 23 centimetres. The third record, certificated in 2018, is the world's largest mosquito. Together the three certificates anchor the museum's claim to hold more than 70 kinds of insects described as the world's largest of their kind.

Other Remarkable Specimens

Beyond the three certificated records, the galleries present a parade of extremes. The world's largest cicada, the emperor cicada, spreads its wings to about 20 centimetres and its call can reach 90 decibels. The atlas moth, described in museum reporting as the world's largest moth by wing area, covers 420 square centimetres. Giant beetles on display include the world's longest beetle, Macrodontia cervicornis; the largest beetle in China, Cheirotonus jansoni; the Southeast Asian atlas beetle, Chalcosoma atlas; the African Goliathus orientalis; and the Japanese rhinoceros beetle, Trypoxylus dichotomus. Camouflage specialists are another highlight Zhao Li emphasises: stick insects that simulate tree branches, dead-leaf butterflies that simulate fallen leaves, and orchid mantises that simulate orchid flowers. These displays serve the museum's educational purpose, showing visitors how form follows survival strategy across the insect world.

National Recognition as a Private Museum

In 2018 the museum was rated a national second-class museum by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, and it was one of the first non-state-owned museums in China to be graded at that level. That recognition matters because China's museum grading system was built around state institutions; a private, founder-led collection achieving second-class status signalled that its collection management, display and public service met national standards. In February 2022 the museum was further recognised as a national popular science education base by the China Association for Science and Technology. Its presence on Google Arts & Culture, where its Guinness record specimens are presented under Zhao Li's name, extends that public role internationally. The museum's official site, asia-insect.com, publishes its news and research releases, including Xinhua reporting carried on its behalf.

Research and New Discoveries

The museum is an active research institution, not only a display hall. Its team discovered and bred the record-breaking Phryganistria chinensis Zhao, a new species named for Zhao Li. In December fieldwork in the Anzihe Nature Reserve in Chongzhou, Zhao Li found a rare emperor moth previously recorded in India and known abroad as the rusty emperor moth, the first record of the species in China; because it had no Chinese name, he formulated one — the Himalayan great silkworm moth — from its region and genus. The find, belonging to a group active in early winter in November and December, unlike most moths, was reported by Science and Technology Daily. Such discoveries flow from the same Sichuan fieldwork that built the collection, and the museum's protected-insect exhibitions translate current conservation law and taxonomy into public displays, introducing newly protected species and popularising knowledge of China's protected insects.

Digital Specimens and New Technology

The museum has also moved into digital preservation. Working with a research team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, it has produced digital insect specimens using a three-dimensional display technique described as time-domain technology. Zhao Li has explained that through digital specimens viewers can see even the scales on a butterfly's wings and the fine structure of the scale surface, and the metallic lustre on a beetle can be captured and restored. The process is intensive: scanning a single collection specimen takes 20 to 30 hours and generates more than 100 gigabytes of data, which must then be reprocessed. For a museum that can physically display only about 2 per cent of its million-plus specimens, such digitisation offers a route to make the stored collection visible without new gallery space, and to preserve the finest surface detail of fragile specimens for study.

Visiting the Museum

The museum stands on Qingchengshan Avenue in Dujiangyan City, Chengdu, at the foot of Mount Qingcheng, and navigation services list it under Huaxi Insect Museum. Admission has been free since it opened on 1 June 2011, and more than 8 million visits were reported in its first decade. Visitors see more than 20,000 specimens — butterflies above all, including over 95 per cent of China's known butterfly species, record-holding stick insects, dobsonflies and mosquitoes, giant beetles and cicadas, and masters of camouflage from stick insects to orchid mantises. Behind the galleries sits a research collection of over one million specimens from more than 50 countries. As a privately founded institution that became one of China's first non-state-owned national second-class museums, the Insect Museum of West China demonstrates how a single curator's lifetime of collecting, centred on Zhao Li, can grow into a museum of continental scale.