About Wuhu Museum

Wuhu Museum

The Wuhu Museum is the comprehensive local museum of Wuhu, a prefecture-level city in southeastern Anhui on the south bank of the lower Yangtze River. Known in Chinese as Wuhu Shi Bowuguan, it stands at 50 Renhe Road in Jiujiang District, beside the municipal government cultural centre at the intersection of Zhongjiang Avenue and Renhe Road, and opened to the public in May 2015. It is a modern, purpose-built institution — a 39-mu site with a building area of about 22,000 square metres and five exhibition halls — integrating collection, research, heritage protection, education and science communication. Its permanent history exhibition carries a poetic title that contains the city's whole story: "Jiuzi: Spring and Autumn — the Water Charm of Wuhu." Jiuzi was the ancient name of Wuhu, a settlement of the Spring and Autumn period; water — the Yangtze and its tributaries — made it first a strategic river stronghold contested by Wu and Chu, then one of China's great rice markets and Yangtze ports, and finally a modern industrial city. The museum tells that progression through the objects of each age.

Location and the Museum Building

The museum occupies the southwest side of Wuhu's Government Cultural Center complex in Jiujiang District, adjacent to the city's central green space, at the junction of Zhongjiang Avenue, the district's principal north–south artery, and Renhe Road. Visitor guides list its opening hours as Tuesday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with holiday opening maintained. The building's scale — roughly 22,000 square metres of construction on its 39-mu plot, divided into five exhibition halls — places it among the larger prefecture-level city museums of Anhui, and its functions are correspondingly broad: it is at once the city's collection repository, its heritage protection and research institution, its public education and science communication centre, and a sightseeing and leisure destination within the cultural centre quarter. That combination is characteristic of the generation of Chinese city museums built in the 2010s, of which Wuhu's, opened in May 2015, is a representative example: a single modern building in a new government and culture district, replacing the scattered older premises from which such museums previously worked, and designed from the start for permanent thematic exhibitions of a full city's history.

Jiuzi: The Ancient Name

The museum's permanent exhibition takes its name from the city's first name. Wuhu has been inhabited since at least 770 BC, and in the Spring and Autumn period the settlement was known as Jiuzi — also rendered Jiuci — a name explained by the land itself: the low, marshy country of lakes and ponds around the Yangtze's south bank abounded in turtledoves, the jiu of Jiuzi. The city counts its history at more than 2,500 years from the founding of the Jiuzi settlement in the Spring and Autumn period, and it was early praised in phrases preserved in local histories as a famous district of Jiangdong and of Wu and Chu. The present name, Wuhu, dates from the Western Han dynasty. Naming the permanent exhibition for Jiuzi rather than Wuhu is a deliberate curatorial choice the visitor meets at the door: the museum presents the modern industrial city as the latest chapter of a settlement that began as a dove-haunted marsh town between two contending states, and the exhibition's subtitle — "the Water Charm of Wuhu" — names the constant that links every chapter, the rivers.

Between Wu and Chu: The Strategic Crossing

Jiuzi's first importance was military. In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, Wuhu lay east of Wu and south of Chu — on the frontier between the two great rival powers of the lower Yangtze — and its river crossing made it a strategic stronghold for which the states contended. The Yangtze at Wuhu is joined by tributaries running south into the hills of southern Anhui, so whoever held the town commanded both the great river's navigation and the routes into the interior. The town remained a place of war in the Three Kingdoms period, when it was controlled by Eastern Wu and valued as a strategic river town; in the Eastern Jin, the rebel general Wang Dun is recorded to have built a city here in 322 from which to threaten the capital at Nanjing, downstream. Through these centuries the pattern set itself that the museum's early galleries document: Wuhu as the Yangtze's hinge in Anhui, a place whose value was measured in crossings, garrisons and supply lines long before it was measured in trade.

The Rice Market: Wuhu in the Ming and Qing

Peace and the river made Wuhu rich. Reputed since the Song dynasty as a land of fish and rice, the city developed under the Ming into a major commercial centre and river port and became known above all as a centre of the rice trade. In the Ming, four great rice markets served the empire's grain trade — Wuhu in Anhui, Wuxi in Jiangsu, Jiujiang in Jiangxi and Changsha in Hunan (some accounts name Shashi instead) — and Wuhu was regarded as the first among them, the top of the four rice cities, a position it held into the Qing. Grain from the Anhui hinterland, and goods from further west, converged on its wharves; trade in rice, wood and tea flourished, and Huizhou merchants — the great merchant network of southern Anhui — began many of their businesses from this city. In 1876 Wuhu became a treaty port, opened to foreign trade, with a British concession along the riverfront and the Roman Catholic St Joseph's Cathedral rising in the downtown of that era; it has remained a commercial centre ever since, and its port is today the fifth largest on the Yangtze and the largest in Anhui. This commercial golden age is the centre of gravity of the museum's history exhibition: the port, the grain trade and the merchant city between the Ming and the early Republic.

The Permanent Exhibition: 'Jiuzi: Spring and Autumn'

The museum's permanent history exhibition, "Jiuzi: Spring and Autumn — the Water Charm of Wuhu," follows the city's past in sequence through its five-hall building: from the Wu–Chu contention for the Yangtze crossing, through the prosperity of the great Yangtze port and rice market, to the modern industrial city. It is the anchor display around which the museum's other exhibitions are arranged, and its two-part title structures the visitor's understanding — "Spring and Autumn" for the depth of the past, reaching back to the settlement of the Spring and Autumn period itself, and "water charm" for the riverine character that connects ancient Jiuzi to contemporary Wuhu. Around this core, the museum mounts special and thematic exhibitions; among those recorded in its programme are "The Great River Flows Eastward," a Yangtze River water culture exhibition that extends the permanent display's river theme, and exhibitions devoted to particular crafts and collections of the region — bronze casting, textiles and porcelain among them — which are treated in the following sections.

Highlight Exhibits: Bricks, Mirrors and a Bronze Ox

Among the objects the museum itself highlights from its history galleries, three illustrate the range of the collection. The Eastern Han agricultural pictorial bricks are moulded bricks bearing images of farming life from the Han dynasty — evidence, in decorated clay, of the agricultural wealth of the Han-period Yangtze valley on which Wuhu's later rice trade was built. The Danyang mirrors are bronze mirrors of the kind for which the Danyang tradition was known, representing the bronze-working skill that runs through Wuhu's history from sword casting to mirror making. The shell-storing bronze ox is a bronze in the form of an ox used for storing cowrie shells — in early China, a form of wealth — an object that speaks simultaneously to the region's bronze craft and to the antiquity of its commerce: money kept inside a bronze animal, in a city that would one day measure its wealth in rice. Together the three pieces state the museum's thesis in miniature — agriculture, craft and trade, the three foundations of Wuhu's prosperity, each present in its galleries in original objects.

Gan Jiang and the Bronze Casting of Wuhu

Wuhu's bronze tradition has a founding legend, and the museum gives it an exhibition of its own: "Gan Jiang Casting Swords — Bronze Casting in Wuhu." Gan Jiang, the master swordsmith of the Spring and Autumn period, is said by the tradition recorded in the Anhui historical records to have taken iron from Iron Mountain and cast his swords on the mountain joined to Red Casting Mountain — Shen Mountain — where a place of sword-testing and Gan Jiang's tomb are located on Red Casting Mountain to this day. The exhibition places this legend in its technical frame: bronze as an alloy of copper, tin and lead, and the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties — China's Bronze Age — as the age of bronze ritual vessels, musical instruments and weapons. Wuhu's long local history of bronze casting, kept alive from the age of Gan Jiang through the mirror-makers to the city's later metal crafts, makes the theme a natural one for its museum; the city's most famous modern craft, its iron pictures — paintings wrought in iron by blacksmiths, for which Wuhu is nationally known as a hometown — descends from the same local mastery of metal that the bronze exhibition celebrates.

'Wuhua Tianbao': The Porcelain Exhibition

The museum's porcelain exhibition, titled "Wuhua Tianbao" — "the products of Wuhu are heaven's treasures," in the phrase's sense — shows wares of successive dynasties. Porcelain in a Wuhu museum is not an arbitrary collecting field: the city was a great entrepôt, and ceramics moved through its wharves in quantity along with rice, wood and tea, while Anhui itself, with the kilns of the wider region, contributed wares of its own. A dynastic sequence of porcelain — the celadons, white wares, blue-and-white and coloured wares of successive periods — lets the museum show both the development of the Chinese ceramic art and the taste of the merchant city that traded in it: the bowls, vases and vessels that furnished the houses of the rice merchants are part of Wuhu's social history, not merely its art history. The exhibition's honorific title makes that claim openly, presenting the porcelain as evidence of the richness — material and cultural — that the river trade accumulated in the city across the imperial centuries.

Textiles, Dyeing and the Huizhou Merchants

A further strand of the museum's displays concerns the industries of the Ming city. During the Yongle period of the Ming dynasty, large numbers of Huizhou merchants set up cotton textile workshops in Wuhu, promoting the rise of the city's cotton textile industry; by the middle of the Ming, Wuhu's starch dyeing industry was famous — its dyed and finished cloth, and products such as its coloured papers, traded widely. Textiles and dyeing, with printing — the Ming technological encyclopedia Tiangong Kaiwu treated Wuhu as a printing centre of the country — formed, with the grain trade, the industrial base of Ming Wuhu, and the merchant network behind all three was the same: the Huizhou merchants, whose guilds and capital made the city a workshop as well as a wharf. These displays matter to the museum's story because they explain the modern city. Wuhu's later identity as an industrial city — in textiles first and in much else since — begins in these Ming workshops, and the museum's progression from rice market to industrial city, with which its permanent exhibition closes, rests on the dye vats and looms as much as on the grain ships.

The Museum's Role in Wuhu Today

Since May 2015 the Wuhu Museum has served as the prefecture-level city's central institution of memory: collecting and protecting its relics, researching its past, and presenting both to the public through its five halls, its permanent "Jiuzi: Spring and Autumn" history exhibition, its porcelain, bronze and craft displays, and a changing programme of special exhibitions such as the Yangtze water culture show. Its position beside the government cultural centre, in the Jiujiang District cultural quarter, makes it a routine destination for the city's schools and for visitors to the city alike. What it offers, taken as a whole, is the most concentrated available account of how a Spring and Autumn marsh settlement named for its doves became, by turns, a Wu–Chu fortress, the first of China's four great rice markets, a treaty port of 1876 and a modern Yangtze industrial city — and why, through every one of those transformations, the water that named its permanent exhibition remained, as the exhibition's title insists, its charm and its fortune.