About Shanghai Natural History Museum

Shanghai Natural History Museum

The Shanghai Natural History Museum (Shanghai Ziran Bowuguan) is one of the largest museums of natural science in China. It is a branch of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum and, since April 2015, has been housed in a purpose-built, snail-shell-shaped building in Jing'an Sculpture Park at 510 Beijing West Road, Shanghai. The museum is distinct from both the Shanghai Museum of ancient art and the Shanghai History Museum: its subject is the natural world — the origin of the universe, the evolution of life, the diversity of species and the relationship between humans and the Earth. It holds well over 240,000 specimens and displays some 10,000 exhibits drawn from all seven continents.

The museum's central theme is Nature, Humans, Harmony. Its permanent displays follow three main threads — the Symphony of Evolution, the Picture Scroll of Life and the Historical Epic of Civilization — across ten exhibitions that take the visitor from the Big Bang to the ecology of present-day Shanghai. The new building, with 44,517 square metres of floor space, finally allowed the museum to show far more than the roughly one percent of its collection that could be displayed in its old home.

Origins: Xujiahui and the Royal Asiatic Society

The museum traces its predecessors to two nineteenth-century foundations. The Xujiahui Museum, founded by French Jesuits in 1868, was China's earliest natural history museum, built around collections made in the lower Yangtze region. The Shanghai Museum established in 1874 by the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society assembled further natural history collections in the treaty port. These two strands — missionary science and learned-society collecting — form the deep background of natural history in Shanghai and supplied the tradition on which the modern museum was built.

The Shanghai Natural History Museum itself was established in 1956 in the Shanghai Cotton Exchange Building, a classical British structure built in 1923 at 260 East Yan'an Road. For nearly six decades that building served as the museum's home, even as the collection grew far beyond what its galleries could hold. Specimen collecting across East China, the rest of China and the wider world continued throughout the period, so that by the time of the move the museum held one of the largest natural science collections in the country, most of it necessarily in storage.

The Jing'an building: a green snail in the park

The new museum stands in Jing'an Sculpture Park and opened to the public on 19 April 2015, following an opening on 18 April. The building was designed by the international practice Perkins and Will, working with Tongji University's Architectural Design and Research Institute. Its form is inspired by the pure geometry of the nautilus shell: a white, spiralling structure that curves down toward terraces in the manner of a traditional Chinese garden, and which visitors and the museum itself describe as a green snail rising from the park.

The building is presented as a bioclimatic design with an intelligent building skin that maximises daylight. Its four external walls each emulate a natural element, including a vertical garden on the east wall and a northern stone wall inspired by shifting tectonic plates and canyon walls eroded by rivers. The building covers 44,517 square metres — some accounts give 45,257 square metres — of which about 32,200 square metres are given over to exhibitions, education and service, arranged over five levels: two above ground and three below ground, with a mezzanine. A central landscape area planted with 160 species, distributed in islands like a primeval forest and combined with five lakes, pays tribute to China's architectural traditions. The museum anticipated between 800,000 and 1.2 million visitors a year in its new home; 10,000 visitors arrived on its first soft-opening day alone.

Collections at scale

The museum's own introduction records over 280,000 items in its collections, while other published figures give more than 240,000 samples and, in more recent accounts, over 290,000 or 310,000 specimens as collecting has continued. The collections fall into five major categories: botany, zoology, palaeontology, geology and anthropology. They include over 150,000 botanical specimens — 135,000 plant specimens in the figures most often cited — and in zoology over 62,000 animal specimens in the classic count, including more than 4,000 mammal specimens, around 10,000 specimens each of fish, birds and amphibians and reptiles, nearly 33,000 insect specimens and more than 50,000 invertebrate specimens in fuller breakdowns.

Alongside these are some 700 specimens of the Stone Age, about 1,700 mineral specimens in the older count and over 5,000 geological specimens and 8,000 palaeobiological specimens in the museum's own summary, plus around 3,500 pieces of anthropology and folk culture. The collections come from East China, from across China and from every part of the world, and they include rare species that cannot be found elsewhere outside China. A Natural History Research Center based on the collections supports research on the ecology and species diversity of the city, the biology of the Earth's polar regions, and evolutionary and comparative biology, as well as the museum's collecting, exhibition and education work.

Signature specimens

The largest exhibit is a 140-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis from Sichuan Province, which stands over four storeys high. A Mamenchisaurus model in the River of Life hall animates the same animal, roaring and twisting its long neck. The museum's treasures of the hall, long celebrated in the old building, include the Stegodon zdanskyi, the Yellow River mammoth or Yellow River ancient elephant, displayed with the Mamenchisaurus in the River of Life exhibition.

Other signature specimens include a giant salamander, a giant panda and a Yangtze alligator — species emblematic of China's fauna — and, among stranger holdings, two mummies and several human embryos retained from the museum's historic anatomical collections. A later addition made national news: the 24-metre fin whale skeleton installed in 2021, described as the longest of its kind in China, prepared from a whale found dead in March 2017 where the Yangtze meets Hangzhou Bay and suspended in the museum's atrium so that visitors can walk beneath it. An animatronic oviraptor and a sabre-toothed cat, Smilodon, are among the reconstructions visitors most often single out, alongside an ocean sunfish and a recreation of an African savannah.

The ten permanent exhibitions

The permanent displays present ten exhibitions organised in three systems: natural evolution, life environment and human civilisation. Mysterious Beginnings, on the second floor, takes the course of human exploration of the universe as its main line, displaying models of astronomical telescopes from ancient times to the present with introductions to astronomy, and opens the visitor route at the top of the building, from which the tour descends floor by floor. The River of Life, on the first floor, classifies and displays a large number of animal specimens — snakes, monkeys, peacocks and many others — around the great dinosaur and mammoth mounts.

On the first basement level, Ways of Evolution presents the whole context from the Cambrian explosion of life to the appearance of humans through animal skeletons and fossils, including a wide variety of dinosaur fossils. The second basement level is the richest in the museum, carrying five themes: Earth Treasures, on geology and minerals; Colorful Life, on biodiversity; Ecological Diversity; Survival Skills, also rendered as Wisdom of Survival; and Tied to Earth, on agriculture and human settlement. A mezzanine between the basement levels carries Shanghai Environs, on the natural environment of the Shanghai region itself, and Future Pathways, on the first basement level, addresses the choices facing humans and nature. Rediscovering Nature displays support the main route.

Education, theatres and exploration spaces

The museum was designed as a centre for the popularisation of science and a platform for social and cultural exchange, not only as a specimen gallery. Its facilities include 4D theatres on the second floor, exploration labs on the second basement level, an outdoor exhibit garden, lobbies and education spaces integrated with the permanent route. Multimedia shows combine science and technology, art and the humanities to interpret the specimens, and hands-on and participatory elements run through the galleries — a deliberate contrast with the glass-case character of the old Cotton Exchange displays.

School and family audiences are central to the museum's work: the scale of the dinosaur, savannah and ocean displays, the animatronic models and the exploration labs are all aimed at making evolutionary and ecological ideas tangible to children, while the research centre's programmes connect the public displays to current work on urban ecology and biodiversity. Temporary exhibitions and science communication events supplement the permanent ten exhibitions through the year.

A landmark within Jing'an Sculpture Park

The museum's setting is part of its identity. Jing'an Sculpture Park places the spiralling building among lawns, trees and outdoor sculpture in one of Shanghai's densest central districts, and the building's terraces and planted central landscape — 160 species distributed in islands with five lakes — extend the park into the museum itself. Commentators at the opening singled out the contrast between the old Cotton Exchange galleries, where only one percent of the collection could be shown, and the new park building, where visitors move from a Big Bang gallery through a lifelike African savannah to models of early Chinese agricultural communities within a single visit.

Access reinforces the landmark role: the museum's east facade connects directly to the exit of Natural History Museum Station on Metro Line 13, a station named for the museum, at 510 Beijing West Road. The combination of a striking bioclimatic building, a park setting and a dedicated metro station made the museum, from its first soft-opening day — when 10,000 visitors arrived and most were asked to return another day — one of the defining public buildings of its part of Shanghai.

Place within Shanghai's museum system

Administratively, the Shanghai Natural History Museum is a branch of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, the municipal science museum system that also operates the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in Pudong and the Shanghai Planetarium. Within that system the natural history museum carries the life- and earth-science remit, holding the historic specimen collections that predate the system itself by more than a century when its Xujiahui and Royal Asiatic Society predecessors are counted.

Its move to Jing'an in 2015 was one of the major museum openings of its decade in China, both for the architecture — a landmark green building set in a sculpture park, directly connected to the Natural History Museum station on Metro Line 13 — and for the change in what could be shown: from one percent of the collection on view to some 10,000 exhibits from all seven continents. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., closed on Mondays, and visitors are advised to allow at least four hours, and up to a full day, for the galleries. Its official website is snhm.org.cn. For readers of this directory, it is recorded as the natural history museum of Shanghai, China — distinct from the Shanghai History Museum, which tells the city's human story in the former Race Club building.