About Wuhan Museum

Wuhan Museum

The Wuhan Museum is the modern comprehensive municipal museum of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in central China, a National First-Grade Museum holding more than 100,000 artefacts. Built on a site of 17,834 square metres with a 6,000-square-metre exhibition area, it stands in a city formed by the meeting of the Yangtze and Han rivers and shaped by the historic towns of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang. Its exhibitions trace ancient and modern Wuhan alongside the cultural relics of past dynasties and the art of ancient ceramics, and its single most famous object, a Yuan dynasty blue-and-white porcelain vase painted with four figures embodying four loves, is recognised as a national treasure and as the treasure of the museum itself. Combining collection, academic research, publicity and education, cultural exchange and recreation, the Wuhan Museum is the principal place where the river city's 3,500 years of urban history and the wider heritage of the Chu and Jingchu cultures of the middle Yangtze are preserved and explained under one roof.

Building the museum: 1984 to 2001

Construction of the Wuhan Museum began in 1984 and the museum opened in 1986, giving Wuhan a dedicated municipal museum during the decade in which Chinese cities were rebuilding their cultural institutions. For its first fifteen years the museum operated in its original building while its collections grew through excavation, transfer and purchase in a city whose construction continually uncovered tombs, kilns and settlements. In 2001 a new building was completed and opened to the public, providing the modern galleries the museum occupies today: a total built-up area of 17,834 square metres, about 191,960 square feet, with display space of up to 6,000 square metres, about 65,000 square feet. The new building allowed the museum to present permanent exhibitions on ancient and modern Wuhan in properly controlled conditions and to develop the temporary exhibition, education and visitor facilities expected of a provincial capital's city museum. In May 2008 the museum was named among the first batch of National First-Grade Museums of China, the highest classification in the Chinese museum grading system, awarded by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage to institutions with comprehensive collections of high historical, cultural, scientific and artistic value, professional staff and strong educational services. In January 2009 the Wuhan municipal cultural relic store was merged into the Wuhan Museum, a consolidation that, as the history of its most famous vase shows, materially enriched the collection.

A collection of more than 100,000 artefacts

The Wuhan Museum holds a collection of more than 100,000 artefacts spanning ceramics, bronzeware, paintings and calligraphy, jade, wood carving, enamelware, seals and bamboo and ivory work, among other categories. The breadth is characteristic of a comprehensive city museum: it must represent the archaeology of its own territory, the art history of China as a whole and the modern history of its city at the same time. Bronze vessels connect Wuhan to the Chu culture of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, when the middle Yangtze was a brilliant, distinctive civilisation known for lacquer, bronze and silk. Ceramics run from early wares to the refined porcelain of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties and include material from Wuhan's own kilns. Paintings, calligraphy, jade, enamel and seals represent the literati and courtly arts, while wood, bamboo and ivory carving preserve the craft traditions of Hubei. Because Wuhan is a city of rivers and lakes, excavation within its districts continues to add to the holdings, and the museum works with the Wuhan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and other units on the excavation, study and display of local sites, making the collection a living research resource rather than a closed store.

The treasure of the museum: the Four Loves vase

The object most closely identified with the Wuhan Museum is the Yuan dynasty blue-and-white porcelain plum vase painted with the Four Loves, the Yuan Qinghua Four Love Tu Mei Bottle. It is described in museum and press accounts as an outstanding representative of Yuan blue-and-white art and as the only surviving Yuan blue-and-white treasure whose theme is figure painting of this kind, identified as a national treasure by experts of the State Cultural Relics Appraisal Committee. Only about 400 genuine pieces of Yuan blue-and-white porcelain survive in the world, and figure-pattern Yuan blue-and-white is rarer still; remarkably, only two Four Loves plum vases are known, and both are in Wuhan, the other being the treasure of the Hubei Provincial Museum. The vase's four panels depict four celebrated lovers of refined pursuits: Wang Xizhi, the calligraphy sage, loving orchids; Zhou Dunyi, the Song philosopher, loving lotus; Tao Yuanming, the poet, loving chrysanthemums; and Lin Hejing, the recluse poet, loving plum blossom and cranes. The Wuhan Museum's vase entered the collection in 1987 in appraisal accounts and, after the Wuhan Cultural Relics Store was merged into the museum in 2010 in the vase's own documented history, became established as the treasure of the town hall, the emblematic object by which the museum is known across China. In May of a recent exhibition year the two Wuhan Four Loves vases were brought together at the Wuhan Museum for their first joint exhibition, an event treated in Hubei as a reunion of national treasures nearly 700 years old.

Ancient Wuhan and the Chu world

The museum's permanent exhibitions trace ancient Wuhan alongside the relics of past dynasties, placing the city in the long history of settlement along the middle Yangtze. Wuhan claims 3,500 years of city history, and its territory includes Panlongcheng, the great Shang dynasty city outside the Central Plains heartland, as well as the heritage of the Chu state, whose culture dominates Hubei's ancient identity. Museum interpretation introduces visitors to bronze vessels, lacquerware traditions and the musical culture symbolised by bianzhong bronze bell sets in accounts of its Chu galleries, illustrating a civilisation that rivalled the northern Zhou world in artistry. The ancient ceramic art for which the museum is also known provides the second chronological thread, following pottery and porcelain from early kilns to imperial wares. For visitors, the value of these galleries is contextual: objects that might elsewhere appear as isolated masterpieces are here tied to the rivers, lakes and hills of Wuhan itself, showing how a river-crossing settlement became a Chu stronghold, a Han commercial centre and, eventually, the great entrepot of central China.

Kilns of Wuhan: the Husi kiln exhibitions

The museum's research role is well illustrated by its work on the Husi, or Lake Si, kiln site group, described as the most representative folk porcelain kiln site group in the Hubei region. Working jointly with the Wuhan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and other units, the Wuhan Museum created the exhibition Song Kiln Relics: the Husi kiln site group excavated cultural relics and specimens exhibition, presenting for the first time in detail 329 pieces and sets of relics and specimens excavated from the Husi kilns, including nine pieces and sets of national first-class cultural relics. The exhibition reconstructs the face of the Song dynasty porcelain handicraft industry in Wuhan, showing kiln furniture, wasters, tools and finished wares together so that visitors see production as well as product, and demonstrating the wisdom and creativity of Song potters working for a folk, commercial market rather than an imperial court. Such exhibitions distinguish a city museum from a general art museum: they publish the results of local excavation, give scholarly form to sites found under the modern city and return the material to the public in the city where it was made and used a thousand years ago. They also show the museum functioning as Hubei's centre for the study of its own ceramic past.

Modern Wuhan: a city of revolution and rivers

No account of Wuhan can omit its modern history, and the museum's exhibitions on modern Wuhan address the city that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Hankou as a great treaty port and commercial hub on the Yangtze, the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 that began the revolution ending imperial China, and Wuhan's place in the wars and transformations that followed. Museum guides highlight the revolution history galleries for Wuhan's pivotal role in 1911, when the New Army uprising in Wuchang triggered the collapse of the Qing dynasty. The tri-city geography of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, merged as Wuhan, is itself a modern story of bridges, railways, commerce and industry that the museum narrates through photographs, documents and objects. Director Wang Ruihua, editor of the guidebook City of a Hundred Museums documenting Wuhan's museum landscape, has been a prominent voice for this civic mission. Wuhan's proposal since 2012 to build itself as a Museum City, growing from 58 museums to more than 100, places the Wuhan Museum at the head of a dense local museum ecology that includes six national first-class museums, among them the Hubei Provincial Museum and the Wuhan Museum itself.

Functions: research, education and exchange

The Wuhan Museum defines itself as a modern comprehensive museum with functions in cultural relic collection, academic research, publicity and education, cultural exchange and recreation and entertainment. In practice that means conservation and cataloguing of its 100,000-plus artefacts, publication and exhibition research of the kind shown in the Husi kiln project, school and family education, and a programme of temporary exhibitions that brings loan shows to Wuhan and sends Wuhan material elsewhere. Its Four Loves vase, reproduced even on a Wuhan Tong transport card bookmark issued jointly by the museum and the city's transport card operator, shows how a museum treasure can be carried into daily city life, described by the museum as bringing home the city memory. Free admission with identity-verified booking, standard among China's major public museums and noted in visitor guides for the Wuhan Museum, together with opening from Tuesday to Sunday, makes the museum a routine resource for residents rather than only a tourist destination. Cultural exchange exhibitions and participation in the wider Hubei and national museum network complete the picture of an institution that is simultaneously a storehouse, a laboratory, a classroom and a civic living room for a city of more than ten million people.

Wuhan Museum today

Today the Wuhan Museum, at its official website whmuseum.com.cn, stands as the city-level counterpart to the provincial collections across the river, more focused on Wuhan itself, its kilns, its commerce and its revolutions, and anchored by one of the rarest porcelains in the world. Its trajectory, from construction begun in 1984 and opening in 1986, through the new building of 2001, first-grade status in 2008 and the enrichment of the collection by the cultural relic store merger of 2009, mirrors the professionalisation of Chinese city museums over four decades. For the visitor with two to three hours, the essential Wuhan Museum is a progression from Chu bronzes and ancient ceramics, through the Song kilns of the city's own potters, to the modern river metropolis, pausing longest before the blue-and-white Four Loves vase, in which four men's loves of orchid, lotus, chrysanthemum and plum are painted, uniquely, on Yuan porcelain. No other single object better expresses the museum's claim: that Wuhan's heritage, gathered over 100,000 artefacts in a first-grade national museum, belongs among the great city collections of China.