About Shanghai Science and Technology Museum

Shanghai Science and Technology Museum

The Shanghai Science and Technology Museum is a large science museum at 2000 Century Avenue in Pudong, Shanghai, beside Century Park. Planned as a key project for popularising science in the Yangtze River Delta, it stands on the western side of Century Square, which was built in 1995, as part of the Huamu civic centre intended to help drive Pudong's development beyond Lujiazui and the Huangpu riverfront. Invested in by the Shanghai Municipal People's Government to implement a strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education, and affiliated with the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission, the museum works to the theme of “Nature, Humanity, Technology” — also rendered as the harmony of nature, mankind and technology. Its official website is en.sstm.org.cn. The institution also administers branch museums, including the Shanghai Natural History Museum and the Shanghai Astronomy Museum, making it the centre of a wider museum family rather than a single building.

Origins and Construction

The Shanghai municipal government formally established the museum project in March 1996, and construction started on 18 December 1998. The total investment is recorded as 1.755 billion yuan, including sums for civil construction and for the first and second phases of exhibition work. The building was basically completed in April 2001. The scale was substantial from the outset: the main building covers more than 68,000 square metres, with about 98,000 square metres of floor space and some 65,500 square metres of exhibition space, and a planned visiting flow of two to three million visitors a year. Those figures placed the museum among the largest science-popularisation projects undertaken by a Chinese city at the time, and they explain why its opening was staged in two phases rather than all at once.

The APEC Leaders' Meeting of 2001

Before the exhibitions opened, the museum's conference and meeting halls were completed in time to host the APEC Leaders' Meeting on 20 and 21 October 2001. That gathering, the ninth informal leaders' meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, brought Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, Russian president Vladimir Putin and United States president George W. Bush to the unfinished museum, along with leaders from across the forum's member economies. The APEC main venue and its associated halls remain part of the building's identity. Hosting a summit of that profile as its first major event gave the museum an unusual birth: it functioned as a diplomatic stage before it functioned as a gallery, and the association with APEC China 2001 is still cited in accounts of both the museum and the meeting itself.

Opening in Two Phases

The first phase of the project was completed and opened to the public on 18 December 2001, exactly three years after construction began. The second phase opened in May 2005. At that point the museum was described as the first science and technology museum in China certified to ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 quality and environmental management standards — a distinction its own histories still emphasise. The phased opening allowed the earliest halls, concentrated on the first floor, to welcome visitors while later exhibition areas were finished. Ahead of Expo 2010 in Shanghai, parts of the museum were refreshed: from January to May 2010 the children's activity area and the Light of Wisdom exhibition were renovated, keeping the decade-old displays current for the Expo-year crowds.

Architecture and Scale

The museum occupies a prominent site at the south-eastern end of Century Avenue, west of Century Square and south of Century Park in the Pudong New Area. Contemporary descriptions stressed the combination of a very large single building with a landscaped setting beside one of Shanghai's largest urban parks. Inside, the building is divided into themed exhibition areas, science cinemas and gallery corridors, together with the APEC conference spaces and leisure halls inherited from its first use. The sheer floor area — close to 100,000 square metres — allowed the museum to combine permanent exhibitions, temporary exhibition halls, cinemas, education spaces and conference facilities under one roof, a breadth that distinguishes civic science museums of this generation from smaller, single-theme science centres.

Permanent Exhibitions: Nature and Life

The museum is dedicated to the popularisation of science, and its permanent exhibitions — sources variously count eleven, twelve or thirteen main halls as displays have been added and renewed — interpret that mission across nature, earth science and human health. Spectrum of Life imitates the scenery of Yunnan Province and displays its diversity of creatures. The World of Animals presents animals from different continents and environments and how they adapt to them, while a dedicated Spiders Exhibition examines the lives of spiders. Earth Exploration addresses the crust and the planet's interior, Home on Earth considers humanity's planetary home, and Human and Health turns to the body. Together these halls anchor the “nature” side of the museum's stated theme, using habitat scenes, specimens and interactive displays rather than text panels alone.

Permanent Exhibitions: Technology and Exploration

The technology side of the theme is carried by halls such as Information Era, World of Robots and Space Navigation. World of Robots is themed on the development and application of robotics, displaying fixed-programme robots, intelligent-control robots, special robots and robots for everyday settings. Light of Wisdom uses a large number of interactive exhibits to demonstrate typical phenomena and basic principles of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, while Light of Exploration showcases human scientific achievements of the twentieth century. The Cradle of Designers — also called Cradle of Design — lets visitors use CAD/CAM tools to design and build small objects, and Children's Rainbow Land, also described as a children's science and technology park or Children's Science Land, serves younger visitors. Space Navigation presents aerospace themes, completing a progression from the earth sciences through information technology to flight beyond the atmosphere.

Galleries of Chinese Science

Three gallery corridors give the museum a historical dimension. The Chinese Ancient Science and Technology Gallery showcases ancient Chinese inventions and works. The Explorers' Gallery features distinguished Chinese and foreign explorers and scientists, and the Academicians' Gallery presents contemporary scientists from China, particularly Shanghai, including members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. These galleries connect the hands-on exhibition halls to a longer story: that modern science in China builds on an indigenous tradition of invention and on named individuals, past and present. For school groups — a core audience for a science-popularisation institution — the galleries supply the biographical and historical framing that interactive exhibits by themselves do not provide.

Science Cinemas

The museum houses four science-themed cinemas: an IMAX 3D theatre, an IMAX dome theatre, an IWERKS theatre and a space theatre. Museum descriptions have called the group the largest science educational cinema complex in Asia, with thousands of screenings a year — figures of 8,000 to 10,000 annual projections appear in different accounts. The cinemas extend the museum's education work into film, a format particularly suited to subjects such as spaceflight, oceans and natural history that cannot be brought into a gallery at full scale. Alongside the permanent and temporary exhibitions, the cinemas help explain the museum's very high visitor throughput in its first decade and its continuing role as a leisure destination as well as a school resource.

Visitors and Recognition

The museum attracted visitors in exceptional numbers from the start. It had received more than 18 million visitors by the end of 2009, and 19.5 million between opening and 2010, according to its published summaries — a record that made it one of China's most-visited museums. It is rated a national AAAAA tourist attraction, the highest grade in China's scenic-area rating system, and is described as an important science education and leisure base. That dual status, as both an educational institution and a graded tourist attraction, reflects the founding brief: a major social and cultural project invested in by the city government to raise citizens' scientific and cultural literacy and to sharpen Shanghai's comprehensive competitiveness.

The Wider Museum Family and Role Today

The Shanghai Science and Technology Museum does not stand alone. Sources describe the Shanghai Natural History Museum as a branch of the institution, and the museum also administers the Shanghai Astronomy Museum, giving the parent body responsibilities across natural history and astronomy as well as general science and technology. Within its own building, the museum continues to arrange temporary exhibitions through the year alongside its permanent halls. Its functions, as its own introductions put it, span education, research, leisure travel, cooperation and exchange, collection and production. More than two decades after the APEC leaders met in its unfinished halls, the museum remains the flagship science-popularisation institution for Shanghai and the wider Yangtze River Delta, and a reference point for how a Chinese megacity presents science to the general public.