About Ningbo Museum

Ningbo Museum

The Ningbo Museum, also known as the Yinzhou Museum or Ningbo Historic Museum, is the city museum of Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, located in Yinzhou District and opened on 5 December 2008. It focuses on the history of the Ningbo area and its traditional customs, holding a collection reported at more than 60,000 exhibits dating from the Hemudu Neolithic culture of 7,000 years ago to the modern era. Yet the Ningbo Museum is internationally famous first for its building. Designed by Wang Shu, who in 2012 became the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, it is a monumental, mountain-like structure clad in walls built from recycled bricks, tiles and stone salvaged from demolished villages, using the traditional wapan technique of the Ningbo region. The building won the Lu Ban Prize in 2009, China's top architecture prize, and is widely studied as a landmark of sustainable, memory-laden design: a museum whose walls are themselves made of the history displayed inside.

A museum for an ancient port in a new district

Ningbo is one of China's historic port cities, a terminus of the Maritime Silk Road, a centre of Yue celadon production, of scholarship in eastern Zhejiang and of the Ningbo merchant group whose bankers and traders shaped modern Chinese commerce. The museum that presents that history, however, stands not in the old city but in Yinzhou District, the new central district developed south of the historic core, covering a floor space of about 30,000 square metres. When Wang Shu and his studio, Amateur Architecture, won the commission, the surrounding district was largely new and, in the architect's own account, almost without surviving traditional fabric: he described searching a huge district and finding only one traditional village intact, fearing it too would soon be demolished, and designing the museum to bring memory back to a place that had lost it. The museum opened on 5 December 2008, giving the new district an institution that roots it in 7,000 years of regional history, and giving Ningbo, whose older museums and sites are dispersed across the city, a single comprehensive home for its story. It is rated a national 4A-level tourist attraction and serves as the city's principal history museum.

Wang Shu and the idea of mountain, water and ocean

Wang Shu designed the museum as a conceptual combination of mountains, water and oceans, the three elements that define Ningbo's geography between the Siming Mountains and the East China Sea. The first floor is constructed as a unified whole, while from the second floor the building begins to tilt and fracture, its upper levels breaking into five smaller, sharp geometric sections separated by staircases, courtyards and rooftop walkways, so that the mass reads simultaneously as a mountain and as a boat, alluding both to the landscape around Ningbo and to the maritime trade on which the city grew rich. The structure is broken into separate pieces connected through a central courtyard, with the main entrances and administrative offices on the lower united levels and the galleries on the fractured upper levels, creating many different paths through the museum rather than a single procession. Windows are placed in a seemingly random arrangement across each facade, small rectangular openings that punctuate the massive walls. When Wang Shu received the Pritzker Prize in 2012, the Ningbo History Museum was among the signature works cited in international coverage of his achievement, praised by the jury tradition for the freshness and spontaneity that came from his intense collaboration with construction workers.

Wapan walls: building from demolished villages

The most discussed element of the design is its materiality. After the period of rapid growth that followed the opening of Ningbo as a treaty port and, more recently, decades of urbanisation in which many traditional buildings and whole villages around Ningbo were demolished for new construction, Wang Shu collected stone, brick and tile from demolished structures in the surrounding area and specified their reuse as the museum's cladding. Builders were given considerable freedom in arranging the mismatched fragments, using the wapan technique: piecing together pieces of stone or tile of different sizes, shapes and materials with thin layers of lime, creating a strong but flexible wall. Wapan developed historically among the region's farmers as a method of rebuilding villages rapidly after typhoons swept through the Zhejiang coast, using whatever debris was at hand, and only craftsmen in the Ningbo area retained full knowledge of it. Wang Shu had used the technique earlier on the Xiangshan campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, but the Ningbo Museum was its first application at this scale in its place of origin. Individual bricks in the facade can be dated by size and fabric to the Ming and Qing dynasties, and some reportedly to the Tang, so the wall is a legible archive of the vanished villages it commemorates. Other walls are covered in cement formed over bamboo, the choice between recycled masonry and bamboo-concrete decided by the angle of the wall. The museum is reported to have been the first museum built with such a large quantity of used materials, and the technique was repeated in the Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo of 2010.

Reception, controversy and the Lu Ban Prize

The Ningbo Museum won the Lu Ban Prize in 2009, the top prize in Chinese architecture, within a year of opening. Its reception was not uniformly warm at first. Critics of the design objected to the use of hundred-year-old materials for new construction in a district intended to look modern, arguing that the museum would hold the new Ningbo back in the past. Wang Shu answered that demolishing history in order to develop was the greater danger. Over time, the verdict of visitors and of the profession settled in the museum's favour: many visitors report that the salvaged materials create a direct connection between the new building and the history of the region, making the exterior a fitting preface to the historical museum inside. Architectural writers describe the rich, hand-laid detail of the tile walls complementing the hulking mass of the building, and the walls themselves as a haunting reminder of the past, encapsulating the remains of vanished villages in a monument that pays respect to the history it has, in part, superseded. That debate, between development without memory and development that carries its past in its fabric, is now central to the museum's meaning and to Wang Shu's international reputation.

The history of Ningbo: from Hemudu to the Republic

The museum's main permanent exhibition, the Ningbo History Exhibition, is located on the second floor and shows the history of Ningbo from the Hemudu culture until the Republic of China, using artefacts, historic photographs and models across a permanent exhibition space shared with the third floor of about 5,400 square metres. Hemudu, excavated near Ningbo and dated to about 7,000 years ago, is one of the foundational Neolithic cultures of the Yangtze delta, famous for early rice cultivation and stilt houses, and it gives the exhibition a starting point far earlier than the city itself. From there the narrative follows ancient cultures of the region, the celebrated Yue celadon porcelains fired in local kilns, the expansion of Ningbo, then known as Mingzhou, as a major port, its role on the Maritime Silk Road, the scholarly traditions of eastern Zhejiang, the development of the Ningbo Commercial Group whose merchants and financiers operated across China and overseas, and the city's opening and transformation in the modern era. A model of Tang dynasty Ningbo illustrates the walled port at its medieval height. The collection behind the display numbers more than 60,000 exhibits, including bronzes, ceramics, bamboo carvings, jade, calligraphy and paintings and gold and silver ware, drawn from across the Ningbo area.

Customs of old Ningbo and the bamboo collection

The third floor presents the human texture behind the history. The Ningbo Custom Exhibition, titled in Chinese Ala Ningbo, meaning Our Ningbo, recreates a traditional commercial street using wax figures, mock buildings and modern electronic techniques, displaying the intangible cultural heritage of the city: its shops, crafts, festivals, foodways, dress and domestic customs as they were lived in the late Qing and Republican periods. Walking the recreated street, visitors encounter the Ningbo of shopkeepers, sailors, bankers and artisans that the second floor narrates in documents and objects. Also on the third floor is the Bamboo Art Exhibition, displaying old bamboo artefacts and bamboo carvings donated by Qin Bingnian, son of the collector Qin Kangxiang. Bamboo carving is one of Ningbo's refined craft traditions, and the donated collection gives the museum a specialist display of carved bamboo works of art alongside its gold-and-silver, ceramic and jade holdings. Together the two third-floor exhibitions balance the museum's programme: history above all chronological and civic, customs immersive and social, and bamboo art connoisseurial, a reminder that Ningbo's heritage includes the cultivated arts of its scholars and collectors as well as the commerce of its port.

The Li Yuan Photography Arts Museum

The museum family includes a satellite pavilion. The Li Yuan Photography Arts Museum, also designed by Wang Shu using materials similar to the main Ningbo Museum, opened on 28 September 2013 as a separate pavilion of about 1,000 square metres, located by the north gate of Yinzhou Park in the Wusanfang area in museum accounts. It is named after the Chinese photographer Li Yuan, who was born in Ningbo, and is used primarily for temporary photography exhibitions. The pavilion extends the main museum's architectural experiment into a smaller, intimate building and gives Ningbo a dedicated venue for photography, a medium in which the city's modern history, from treaty port streetscapes to reform-era construction, is exceptionally well documented. Its existence as a designed companion to the main building, rather than an unrelated annex, reinforces the identity of the Ningbo Museum as an architectural ensemble as much as a collection.

The museum today: architecture as exhibit

Today the Ningbo Museum, whose official website is nbmuseum.cn, occupies a double position in Chinese culture. As a city museum it performs the standard functions of collection, research, exhibition and education for a major port city, telling the story from Hemudu rice farmers through Mingzhou's Maritime Silk Road trade to the Ningbo merchants of the modern age. As a building it has become a pilgrimage site for architects and students from around the world, the work that, more than any other, explains why Wang Shu received the Pritzker Prize and how recycled material, traditional craft and contemporary form can be fused. Visitors commonly experience the building first as sculpture, studying the Ming and Qing bricks in its wapan walls at close range, before discovering that the same argument, that Ningbo's past is not lost but built into its present, structures every gallery inside. In a new district that its architect feared had no memory, the museum manufactured memory at monumental scale, and in doing so became the most eloquent exhibit in its own collection.