About Shanghai History Museum

Shanghai History Museum

The Shanghai History Museum (Shanghai Shi Lishi Bowuguan), also known as the Shanghai Revolution History Museum, is the museum dedicated to the history of the city of Shanghai, China. It is distinct from the Shanghai Museum, the city's great museum of ancient Chinese art: where that institution collects bronzes, ceramics and painting from across China, the Shanghai History Museum collects Shanghai itself — the objects, images and documents through which a fishing and market town became one of the world's largest ports and industrial cities. Since 2018 the museum has occupied the club house of the former Shanghai Race Club at 325 Nanjing West Road, in Huangpu District facing People's Square, where about four-fifths of its collection is on public display for the first time.

The museum's collections focus on the roughly one hundred years from the opening of Shanghai's port in 1843 to 1949, the period in which the treaty port, the foreign concessions and China's own industrial and revolutionary movements transformed the city. Its holdings, however, reach much further back: the museum's oldest relics date back 6,000 years, and its permanent display runs from the Neolithic cultures of the Shanghai area to the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Founding and early homes

The museum was established in 1983 as the Shanghai History and Artefacts Exhibition Hall. It first opened to the public on 27 May 1984, on the premises of the Shanghai Agriculture Exhibition. It was later moved to a new location at 1286 Hong Qiao Road and renamed the Shanghai History Museum in 1991. For much of its early life, however, the institution lacked a permanent home of its own on the scale its collection required.

The main museum was closed in 1999 because of land redevelopment, and for years much of the collection was held in storage, with parts shown on loan to other specialist museums in Shanghai and in temporary exhibitions at venues such as the Shanghai Library. That long interval without a full home is an important part of the museum's story: the collection continued to grow and to be researched while public access was limited to a single exhibition room and to loans.

The Oriental Pearl Tower exhibition

Since May 2001 the museum has maintained an exhibition room at the base of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Lujiazui, Pudong, called the Shanghai History and Development Exhibition, where selected items from the collection can be viewed by the public. The exhibition there is divided into five sections titled Trace Back to Huating, Style and Features in the Town, Sketch of the Port-Opening, Foreign Settlement and Old Footsteps in Shanghai — a compressed version of the city's story from its early settlement, named for Huating, the historic county from which Shanghai grew, through the treaty-port era to the old city of the early twentieth century.

The Oriental Pearl Tower room kept the museum visible during its years without a main building and remains part of its public offer. It also illustrates the commercial and practical pressures that delayed a permanent solution: the exhibition contributed to the tower's success as a tourist attraction, while budgetary constraints repeatedly prevented the rebuilding of a full museum elsewhere.

The former Shanghai Race Club building

In 2016 plans were announced to site the rebuilt Shanghai History Museum in the old Shanghai Race Club building, which had stood empty since the Shanghai Art Museum moved out in 2012. The museum reopened in its full and extended size in March 2018 in that building, its latest and permanent home. The neo-classical club house, built in 1934 for the Shanghai Race Club, has an imposing ten-storey tower that was long a landmark of central Shanghai, and the building itself had previously housed, at different times, the Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai Library and the Shanghai Art Museum — a layered cultural history of its own.

Details of the building still recall its racing past, including a spiral staircase with horse-head handrails. The museum occupies an East Building, which serves as the main building with five floors, and a West Building used for separate and special exhibitions. The first floor of the East Building serves as a special exhibition hall, while the second to fourth floors carry the permanent Ancient Shanghai and Modern Shanghai exhibitions. A large screen in the lobby shows a short film outlining Shanghai's history as an introduction to the galleries.

Ancient Shanghai

The permanent display begins long before the treaty port. The second floor presents the archaeology of the Shanghai area, including the Majiabang, Songze and Liangzhu cultural periods, and traces how the low, watery landscape of the Yangtze delta was gradually settled and managed. Accounts of the museum emphasise how well the displays document the ways in which geology shaped early development: the relationship between land and water had to be skilfully managed by the area's inhabitants to make possible the thriving trading settlement Shanghai later became.

Exhibits on this floor include archaeological finds, maps and dioramas that carry the story from Neolithic farming communities through the town's growth under the Ming and Qing dynasties, when Shanghai was already a significant cotton and trading centre. The museum's oldest relics, dating back 6,000 years, belong to this deep layer of the city's past, and they set up the central contrast of the museum: a place with ancient roots whose modern form was created with extraordinary speed after 1843.

Modern Shanghai: the treaty port century

The third and fourth floors focus on the century from the opening of the port in 1843 to 1949, the core of the collection. The story covers the Opium Wars and the treaty settlement that followed, the growth of the International Settlement and the French Concession, and the commerce, industry, finance and everyday life of the port city that resulted. British, French and American dominance in the nineteenth century, and the way the Opium Wars shaped Shanghai's wealth and devastated parts of its population, are documented through objects, images and recreated street scenes.

The museum holds more than 30,000 items in total, of which about 18,000 pertain to the modern history of the city; a portion of those modern relics came to the museum from the governors of the foreign concessions. Displays address the history of art, culture and industrialisation in Shanghai alongside politics: the city's printing, film, department stores, utilities and factories, and its role as a centre of publishing and revolutionary organisation, all figure in the galleries. Interactive digital displays, maps and recreations of Shanghai street scenes support the objects.

Signature objects

Several exhibits have become the museum's best-known pieces. They include a bronze cannon known as General Zhen Yuan that belonged to Chen Huacheng (1776–1842), the Qing dynasty general responsible for Shanghai's defences during the First Opium War, and a cannon used in that war more generally cited among the museum's emblematic objects. A sedan chair represents the transport and ceremonial culture of the old city.

The pair of bronze lions that once stood at the entrance of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building on the Bund — among the most recognisable symbols of treaty-port finance — are held by the museum, as are boundary markers from the French Concession and the Shanghai International Settlement. Earlier treasures include Gu embroidery of flowers, insects and fish by the Ming dynasty embroiderer Han Ximeng, celebrated as a needle saint; a scroll by Hou Tongceng; and the Golden Sutras of the Qibao Temple. Together these objects span the museum's range, from devotional and craft art of the Ming and Qing to the material remains of the concession era.

Special exhibitions and research

Alongside the permanent Ancient Shanghai and Modern Shanghai displays, the museum mounts special exhibitions in the East Building's first-floor hall and in the West Building. Recent special exhibitions recorded in visitor accounts have included a display on the Peking opera master Mei Lanfang and his close relationship with Shanghai, an exhibition on modern patriotic entrepreneurs from the Shanghai metropolitan area, and an exhibition on Zhang Jian, the industrialist and education reformer presented as a pioneer of China's early modernisation. Exhibitions on women in Jiangnan during the Qing dynasty, such as March Flowers, One Life, show the museum using its social-history strengths beyond the political narrative.

The museum's research and collecting continue to centre on modern Shanghai: photographs, trade objects, municipal documents, personal effects and industrial products that document how the city worked and how its people lived between 1843 and 1949, supplemented by archaeological material from the Shanghai area. Its dual name — Shanghai History Museum and Shanghai Revolution History Museum — reflects that double remit, covering both the general history of the city and its place in China's revolutionary history.

Visiting the museum

The Shanghai History Museum stands at 325 Nanjing West Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, facing People's Square and People's Park, in one of the most central locations of any Chinese city museum. The permanent exhibitions occupy the second to fourth floors of the East Building; visitors are advised to allow a couple of hours for the full circuit of archaeology, concession-era galleries and street-scene recreations, and the building's fifth floor has hosted a restaurant, Roof 325, in the former club house space.

The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and admission to the permanent displays is free. For readers of this directory, the Shanghai History Museum is recorded as the city history museum of Shanghai, China, holding more than 30,000 items and presenting 6,000 years of the Shanghai area's history with a focus on the century from 1843 to 1949 — and it should not be confused with the Shanghai Museum of ancient art or with the Shanghai Natural History Museum, its sister institutions in the same city.