About Jilin Provincial Museum

Jilin Provincial Museum

The Jilin Provincial Museum (吉林省博物院) in Changchun is the provincial history and art museum of Jilin province in northeast China. It was founded in 1951 in Jilin City and opened on 27 January 1952; it moved with the provincial government to Changchun in 1954, and its present building at 1666 Yongshun Road in the Nanguan District opened on 28 April 2016. It holds around 120,000 objects and was named a national first-grade museum in 2012. The collections reflect Jilin's position at the crossroads of Chinese, Korean and Manchurian history, with important material from the Goguryeo, Balhae and Buyeo kingdoms and from the Liao and Jin dynasties — including the Bing Wu Shen Gou gilt-silver belt hook of Buyeo. The museum is also a major holder of modern Chinese painting through the collection of the connoisseur Zhang Boju and his wife Pan Su, which includes two scrolls by the Song master Su Shi. The museum is a subordinate unit of the Jilin Province Department of Culture and Tourism.

History: From Jilin City to Yongshun Road

The Jilin Provincial Museum was founded in 1951 and formally opened in Jilin City on 27 January 1952, when Jilin City was still the provincial capital. In 1954 the seat of the provincial government was transferred to Changchun, and the museum followed it to the new capital. In Changchun it occupied, among other homes, the former Manchukuo imperial palace site, and in 2000 it relocated to 3188 Renmin Street; in 2004 it was renamed in its present "Bowuyuan" form. Construction of a new purpose-built museum on Yongshun Road in Nanguan District began in 2007 and took nine years. The museum's roughly 120,000 objects were moved to the new building in December 2015, and it opened to the public there on 28 April 2016, standing alongside the provincial science and technology and optical science museums in the Jingyue development area. In 2012, before the move, the museum had already been listed as a national first-grade museum, the highest grade in China's museum ranking system.

The Collection in Outline

The museum holds approximately 120,000 objects — some accounts give a figure above 128,000 relics — spanning the full history of the Jilin region. Artefacts from the Goguryeo and Balhae kingdoms, together with material of the Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin dynasties, make up a large proportion of the collection. In addition, the museum holds a large number of calligraphic and painted works from various historical periods including the modern era, cultural relics of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, ceramics, and material on the natural and folk heritage of the Changbai Mountain region. Its permanent displays cover the province's archaeology, its revolutionary history and the mountain region's traditions. The collection's double character — an archaeological record of the ancient kingdoms of the northeast, and an art collection of national standing in painting and calligraphy — is what distinguishes Jilin among China's provincial museums, and both strands are represented among its most famous individual objects.

Buyeo, Goguryeo and Balhae: Kingdoms of the Northeast

Jilin's ancient history was shaped by a succession of kingdoms that stood between the Chinese dynasties, the Korean peninsula and the steppe, and their material forms the archaeological core of the museum. Buyeo (Fuyu), the earliest of them, is represented by the museum's celebrated Bing Wu Shen Gou — a silver belt hook with gold gilding whose name records its inscription — counted among the museum's signature treasures. Goguryeo (37 BC–668 AD), whose early capitals and great tomb fields lie in and around present-day Jilin, and Balhae (Bohai, 698–926), which succeeded it in the region, both contribute important holdings, as do the Khitan Liao (916–1126) and Jurchen Jin (1115–1234) dynasties that ruled the northeast in succession. The museum's second-floor ancient history galleries present this sequence from the dawn of civilisation in the region — the early peoples of Yushu and Antu among them — through Buyeo and Goguryeo and the splendours of the Liao, Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing periods, framing Jilin as a borderland shaped by multiple powers in transition and interaction rather than by a single civilisation.

Painting and Calligraphy: The Zhang Boju and Pan Su Collection

The museum's second great strength is Chinese painting and calligraphy, held through the collection formed by the connoisseur Zhang Boju and his wife Pan Su. Zhang Boju was one of the great collectors of the twentieth century, and the works that came to Jilin give the museum a holding of national importance in this field. The most famous are the two scrolls painted by the Northern Song poet and artist Su Shi — the "Ode to the Spring Scenery of Dongting Lake" and the "Ode to the Pine Wine of Zhongshan" — whose replicas are also shown in the Duan Chenggui Calligraphy Museum on the museum's fourth floor. Other named highlights of the painting collection include the "Hundred Flowers Painting" by the Southern Song painter Yang Jieyu, "Wenji Returns to Han" by the Jurchen Jin-dynasty painter Jin Zhangyu, and "Lin Li Gonglin's Nine Songs" by the Yuan-dynasty painter Zhang Wo — a Jin-dynasty painting being a fitting treasure for a museum whose archaeology is rich in Jin material. The associated Zhang Boju Museum display presents paintings by modern masters including Zhang Daqian and Pu Xinyue (Pu Ru).

Ceramics and the Material Record

Ceramics form a significant department of the collection in their own right. The museum's Exhibition of Chinese Ceramics presents more than 140 pieces in three sections — Prehistoric Discoveries, Monochrome Glazes and Painted Decoration — drawn both from treasured heirloom pieces and from artefacts recovered in documented archaeological excavations in Jilin province, and tracing the development of distinctive glazes across the region's history. The wider material record in the museum runs from prehistoric pottery and stone tools through the bronzes, jades and tomb goods of the kingdom periods to the folk objects of the Changbai Mountain region, whose natural and cultural heritage — the forests, the ginseng country and the traditions of the peoples who live around the mountain — is a standing theme of the permanent displays. Manchu material, reflecting the Manchu heritage of the northeast and Changchun's years as the Manchukuo capital, likewise features in the galleries alongside Korean and Mongol material, in keeping with the museum's presentation of Jilin as a meeting ground of peoples.

Modern History and the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army

The museum's third floor houses the Jilin Provincial Modern History presentation, covering the region's turbulent path from resistance against Tsarist Russia through the Xinhai Revolution, the anti-Fengtian uprisings, the War of Resistance against Japan and the liberation. Central to this narrative is the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, the guerrilla force that fought the Japanese occupation in the forests of Manchuria, whose cultural relics the museum holds in significant number. Changchun's own history gives this section particular resonance: the city served from 1932 as Xinjing, capital of the Japanese-sponsored state of Manchukuo, and the museum itself spent part of its Changchun life housed on the former Manchukuo imperial palace site. The modern galleries thus interpret a landscape the visitor can still read in the city outside — palace buildings, planned avenues and railway heritage — through documents, photographs and the relics of resistance.

Changbai Mountain: Nature and Folk Heritage

The Changbai Mountain region, the great volcanic range on Jilin's border with Korea, supplies the museum's third standing theme alongside archaeology and art. The permanent displays present the region's natural and folk heritage: the mountain forests and their products, and the traditions of the peoples who have lived around the mountain — Manchu, Korean and Han communities among them — whose dress, tools and customs form part of the province's ethnographic record. This regional material gives the museum's story a living counterweight to its ancient kingdoms: the same landscape that produced the capitals and tombs of Goguryeo and Balhae also sustained the hunting, ginseng-gathering and forest cultures of more recent centuries, and the museum treats that continuity as part of Jilin's identity. The Changbai displays also complement the archaeological galleries geographically, carrying the visitor from the Songhua River plains of the early kingdoms eastward into the mountain country where much of the province's folk heritage was formed.

Exhibitions, Setting and Public Role

In its Yongshun Road building the museum presents six permanent exhibition halls alongside temporary and mobile exhibitions. The building stands in the Jingyue Development Zone in Nanguan District, next to the provincial science and technology museum and the optical science and technology museum, the three buildings sharing a related appearance; the museum is reached by light rail to Changying Century City station followed by a walk of about twenty minutes, or by road. Guide accounts of a visit typically move from the ancient history of Jilin on the second floor to modern history on the third and the calligraphy displays on the fourth. As a first-grade national museum and a subordinate unit of the provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, the Jilin Provincial Museum is the central institution for the preservation and interpretation of the province's past — the place where the kingdoms of Buyeo, Goguryeo and Balhae, the art of Su Shi preserved by Zhang Boju's collecting, and the memory of the Anti-Japanese United Army are held together in a single collection of some 120,000 objects.