About Shenzhen Museum

Shenzhen Museum

The Shenzhen Museum is the public municipal museum of Shenzhen, Guangdong, funded by the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government and recognised as a National First-Class Museum, a National Classic Red Tourism Spot and a National Social Science Popularization Base. Founded in 1981, it was the first museum established in Shenzhen, created only a year after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone itself, and its history is inseparable from the reform and opening-up era that transformed a border town in Guangdong into one of China's largest and most innovative cities. Today the museum operates as a headquarters-and-branches institution across four sites, with a total construction area of more than 60,000 square metres and a collection reported by the museum at more than 40,000 cultural relics. It holds more than 30 special exhibitions and nearly 200 educational events each year and receives an annual audience of more than 3.18 million visitors, combining ancient art, city history, folk culture, revolutionary memory and the history of reform itself within a single organisation.

Founded with the Special Economic Zone

Shenzhen's museum was a direct product of the city's founding moment. On 26 August 1980 the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was established. In August 1981 a cultural relics work team from the Guangdong Provincial Museum came to Shenzhen and, together with staff from the Shenzhen Library and other units, carried out a citywide census of cultural relics, archaeological excavation at relic sites and tomb clusters, and the collection of large numbers of objects. To collect, study and showcase those finds and Shenzhen's history and culture, the Shenzhen Establishment Committee approved the establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Museum on 17 October 1981, later renamed the Shenzhen City Museum and, in early 2008, the Shenzhen Museum. The sequence is revealing: even as construction of a new city began, its government created a museum to establish that the place had a past, that human settlement in the Shenzhen area stretched back thousands of years, and that the new zone stood on older communities, tombs, villages and maritime traditions. Archaeology gave the boomtown historical depth, and the museum has performed that bridging role ever since.

The Museum of Ancient Art on Tongxin Road

The original museum building, now the Shenzhen Museum of Ancient Art, stands on Tongxin Road on the north side of Shennan Road in Futian District. Its infrastructure project started in 1982 as one of the eight major cultural facilities built in Shenzhen in the early days of reform and opening up, and it opened in November 1988. It covers an area of 37,000 square metres, with a total construction area of about 18,000 to 18,400 square metres and an exhibition building area of 8,000 square metres. At opening it was honoured as among the most modern museums in China in the 1980s, won the National Public Cultural Facilities Design Second Prize, and was later named one of the ten Shenzhen Reform and Opening-up Historic Buildings, a designation that makes the building itself an exhibit of the era it documents. The original museum holds more than 20,000 historical and cultural relics, the majority originating within the city. Repositioned as an ancient art museum, its four storeys collect, research and exhibit ancient Chinese artefacts, including ceramics, bronzes, paintings and calligraphy. After closure in August 2015 for maintenance and renovation lasting five years, it reopened with thirteen exhibition halls designed with traditional Chinese housing decoration, interactive guidance screens, multimedia displays, anti-reflective cabinet glass and sensor lighting, opening with three exhibitions of 670 pieces from its own collection alongside loan exhibitions organised with partners including the National Museum of China and the Xi'an Beilin Museum.

The Museum of History and Folk Culture at the Civic Center

The museum's headquarters display is the Shenzhen Museum of History and Folk Culture, located in District A of the Civic Center on Fuzhong Road, Futian District, also described as the Jintian Road branch. Completed and opened to the public in December 2008, it occupies 12,500 square metres of land with a construction area of 33,600 square metres. Its exhibition building has three floors, five basic exhibition halls and two special exhibition halls, with an exhibition area of more than 10,000 square metres. Its five basic displays are Ancient Shenzhen, Modern Shenzhen, Shenzhen's Reform and Opening Up History, Shenzhen Folk Culture and a World Wildlife Specimen Exhibition. Together they systematically show the development and historical changes of the Shenzhen area from about 7,000 years ago through the period of reform and opening up: Neolithic and early settlement, the historic county and coastal world of the Ming and Qing, the upheavals of the modern era, the folk customs of Cantonese and Hakka communities in the region, and then the extraordinary three decades in which Shenzhen became a metropolis. The reform and opening-up history display was a pioneer in China in collecting, researching and exhibiting cultural relics of reform history as museum objects, treating documents, products, furniture and vehicles of the 1980s and 1990s as heritage while the era was still within living memory.

The Reform and Opening-up Exhibition Hall

The third site, the Shenzhen Reform and Opening-up Exhibition Hall, is located on the fourth and fifth floors of the south district of the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning at 184 Fuzhong Road, Futian, with an exhibition area of 6,300 square metres, and opened to the public on 8 November 2018. Its long-term exhibition, Great Tides Surge Along the Pearl River: 40 Years of Reform and Opening-up in Guangdong, comprehensively demonstrates the course and achievements of Guangdong's forty years of reform and opening up. Among the most evocative objects in the Shenzhen Museum's reform displays are several from Deng Xiaoping's 1992 southern tour, the journey that reaffirmed reform and is a turning point in modern Chinese history: the Flying Sparrow spade Deng used to plant a tree in Shenzhen, the office goods and furniture from Deng's hotel room, and the white Toyota van in which he toured the city. Preserved as museum relics, these ordinary objects carry an outsized historical charge, and their display in Shenzhen, the city most closely associated with the tour, gives the exhibition an authenticity that replicas elsewhere cannot match. At the reopening of the Ancient Art museum, Shenzhen Museum also initiated the Reform and Opening-up Museum Alliance with 46 museums across China, including the Capital Museum, Tianjin Museum and Shanghai History Museum, to collaborate on researching, collecting, displaying and promoting reform-era heritage.

The Dongjiang guerrilla headquarters memorial

The fourth site preserves an earlier, wartime chapter. The Dongjiang River Guerrilla Command Headquarters Memorial Museum, at 13 Nanqing Street in Luohu District, occupies the former headquarters site of the Dongjiang, or East River, guerrillas who fought against the Japanese invasion in Guangdong. The site covers about 240 square metres with a construction area of 794 square metres and is a Shenzhen-level cultural relic protection unit. It was transferred to the management of Shenzhen Museum in 2012, renovated, and reopened to the public in December 2017. Its basic display, General Ye Ting and Shenzhen, concentrates on the military career of General Ye Ting and his bond with Shenzhen during the War of Resistance against Japan. The small memorial balances the vast Civic Center galleries: where those tell the story of a province and a policy, this house-scale site tells the story of a command post, a general and a guerrilla force operating in the villages and hills of what is now urban Shenzhen. Its inclusion in the museum system reflects Shenzhen Museum's status as a red tourism site as well as a city museum, linking the anti-Japanese war, the founding of the People's Republic and the reform era into one institutional narrative of modern Shenzhen.

Collections across seven thousand years

Across its four sites the Shenzhen Museum holds more than 40,000 cultural relics in recent museum accounts, with the Ancient Art museum alone accounting for more than 20,000 historical and cultural relics, mostly originating within the city. The collections span ancient Chinese art, including ceramics, bronze ware, painting and calligraphy shown at Tongxin Road; archaeological and historical material from the Shenzhen area illustrating settlement from about 7,000 years ago; folk culture material documenting the customs, houses, trades and festivals of local communities; wildlife specimens used in natural history education at the History and Folk Culture museum; revolutionary relics associated with Ye Ting and the Dongjiang guerrillas; and a distinctive and growing body of reform and opening-up relics, from early Special Economic Zone documents and products to the Deng Xiaoping southern tour objects. That last category is the museum's most original contribution to Chinese museology: Shenzhen recognised earlier than most cities that the material culture of reform, including hotel furniture, factory products and official vehicles, would become historically irreplaceable, and collected it while it was still in use or in store rather than after it had been discarded.

Exhibitions, education and public programmes

Shenzhen Museum describes its functions as collection, protection, research, display and education, and its programme is correspondingly broad. It holds more than 30 special exhibitions and nearly 200 educational events every year, serving an annual audience of more than 3.18 million. Special exhibitions rotate through the two special halls at the History and Folk Culture museum, the thirteen halls at Ancient Art and the Reform and Opening-up Hall, and have included collaborations with the National Museum of China on Qing dynasty court painting and with the Xi'an Beilin Museum on Tang dynasty poets' tomb rubbings. Educational work ranges from school programmes on ancient Shenzhen and folk culture to public lectures on reform history. The museum's position in the Civic Center, Shenzhen's administrative and cultural core, places its history galleries beside the city's government, concert hall, library and children's palace, so that a visit to the museum is part of a wider civic itinerary. Its official website is shenzhenmuseum.com, through which exhibitions and visits across all four sites are coordinated.

Why Shenzhen needed a museum of itself

Few museums in the world have had to answer so direct a challenge as the Shenzhen Museum: to prove that a city widely described as having appeared overnight in fact possessed a long human history, a folk culture and a revolutionary past, and simultaneously to document a transformation so rapid that its own earliest modern buildings quickly became historic. The museum's four-site structure is its answer. Ancient Art shows that Shenzhen participates in the full sweep of Chinese civilisation. History and Folk Culture shows that people have lived, farmed, traded and worshipped in the Shenzhen area for seven thousand years. The guerrilla memorial shows that the region resisted invasion and contributed to the nation's modern founding. The Reform and Opening-up Hall shows why Shenzhen matters to the whole of China, preserving even the spade, furniture and van of 1992 as national relics. Holding all four stories in one institution, created in October 1981 before the towers rose, the Shenzhen Museum remains both the archive and the argument of its city: that Shenzhen has a past, and that its recent past is itself history worth keeping.