About Xiamen Museum

Xiamen Museum

The Xiamen Museum, also known as the Xiamen Municipal Museum, is the principal local comprehensive museum of Xiamen, a port city in Fujian Province in southeastern China. According to the museum's own synopsis, it is one of the important local comprehensive museums of southeastern China, devoted to collecting, protecting, studying and exhibiting valuable cultural heritage, especially the heritage of Fujian and Taiwan. That regional focus gives the institution its distinctive character. Where a national museum might range across all of China, the Xiamen Museum concentrates on the history of one maritime city, the culture of southern Fujian, often called Minnan, and the close historical ties between Fujian and Taiwan across the strait.

The museum was planned from 1983 and first opened to the public in 1988. Its present home is in the Xiamen Culture and Arts Center in Siming District, in a complex converted from a former factory. It administers several related memorial halls and historic sites, and it also serves as the Xiamen Cultural Relics Protection Center. Its collection exceeds 60,000 cultural relics, with particular strength in ancient ceramics, calligraphy and painting, jade, stone carving, folk artefacts of Fujian and Taiwan, and gifts received through international friendship exchanges.

Origins and founding in the 1980s

The Xiamen Museum was planned beginning in 1983, at a moment when Xiamen itself was changing rapidly. The city had been designated one of China's first Special Economic Zones in 1980, and its rapid development created both a need and an opportunity to document its past before older buildings, objects and ways of life disappeared. A municipal museum was the institutional answer to that need: a place that could collect the material evidence of Xiamen's history, protect it, research it and display it to the public.

The museum first opened to the public in 1988. Its first home was the Bagua Building on Gulangyu Island, the small island off Xiamen's old port that is famous for its historic international settlement architecture. The Bagua Building, built in 1907 and recognisable by its red dome, gave the young museum a landmark setting, but it was a historic building designed for other purposes, and over time its limitations became clear. The museum's official history notes two problems plainly: the Bagua Building was not large enough, and its structure and functions were out of date for the conservation and exhibition needs of a growing collection.

From Gulangyu to the Culture and Arts Center

The solution was a move to the mainland side of the city. Between 2004 and 2006, the Xiamen municipal government rebuilt the old factory buildings of the Xiamen Machinery Factory as the Xiamen Culture and Arts Center. The new Xiamen Museum took the northeastern part of that centre. The museum's own figures describe a site occupying about 25,300 square metres, with exhibition halls of about 9,597 square metres and a collection store of about 2,800 square metres. Compared with the previous museum on Gulangyu, the new home was about six times larger.

The conversion is itself a piece of Xiamen history. A machinery factory, a product of the city's industrial era, was adapted rather than demolished, and its buildings became a cultural complex housing the museum alongside other arts institutions. The museum's address is given in visitor information as the Culture and Art Center on Tiyu Road in Siming District. The move allowed the museum to present larger permanent exhibitions, to store its collection in dedicated depots and to handle the visitor numbers of a major city museum, none of which the Bagua Building could comfortably support.

The merger of 2006 and the museum's wider family

In June 2006, with the approval of the municipal organisation authorities, two related bodies were united into the Xiamen Museum: the Zheng Chenggong Memorial Hall and the Xiamen Cultural Relics Protection Center. The merger made the museum more than a single exhibition building. It became the coordinating institution for a small family of memorial halls and protected historic sites across the city.

Current descriptions of the museum list its constituent parts as the Zheng Chenggong Memorial Hall, the Xiamen Special Economic Zone Memorial Hall, the former site of the 1930 Xiamen prison break, the Chen ancestral temple and the former residence of Chen Shengyuan, together with its role as the Cultural Relics Protection Center. The Special Economic Zone Memorial Hall presents what the museum calls the honoured memory of Xiamen's economic reform era, while the Chen sites present stories including Chen Huacheng and the Opium War period in Xiamen. This structure means the museum's work extends from gallery displays to the care of historic sites in the city itself.

The Zheng Chenggong Memorial Hall

The most historically prominent of the museum's branches is the Zheng Chenggong Memorial Hall on Gulangyu Island. Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, was the Ming loyalist commander who made Xiamen a base in the seventeenth century and who expelled the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662. The memorial hall was established in 1962 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of that recovery of Taiwan, and it stands where Zheng's forces were once camped and his navy drilled.

The hall presents Zheng's life through seven exhibition rooms covering his youth, his resistance campaign, the development of Taiwan and his lasting place in national memory. Its holdings include his portrait and handwriting, a jade belt, robes, an epitaph and genealogies, together with military objects such as helmets, shields and armour fragments and artillery, amounting to more than 400 historical artefacts relating to Zheng, supported by a large documentary collection. Under the Xiamen Museum, the memorial hall's publications have included works on Zheng's family trees, his recovery of Taiwan, anecdotes of the sea and the paintings and calligraphy in its collection.

A collection of more than 60,000 relics

The Xiamen Museum currently houses more than 60,000 cultural relics. The focus of the collection, in the museum's own summary, is on ancient ceramics, calligraphy and painting, jade artefacts, stone carvings, folk artefacts and international friendship gifts, which are described as the most distinctive features of the holdings. An earlier official synopsis gave a smaller figure of about 20,000 objects, of which 3,983 were certified as rare cultural relics, which reflects the growth of the collection over the museum's decades of collecting.

Each strength connects to the region the museum serves. Ceramics speak to the kilns and export trade of Fujian, a province whose wares travelled by sea for centuries. Stone carving reflects the strong stone-working tradition of southern Fujian, visible in temples and ancestral halls across the region. Folk artefacts document the everyday and ritual life shared, in many respects, by communities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The international friendship gifts record a different strand of history: Xiamen's modern role as a port and Special Economic Zone in contact with the wider world.

Permanent exhibitions

The museum's permanent, or basic, exhibitions are built around four main presentations. The Exhibition on Xiamen History traces the development of the city itself. The display of Ancient Stone Sculpture of Fujian and Taiwan presents the carved heritage of the region. The Folk Exhibition of Fujian and Taiwan presents the customs of the two places side by side, underlining their shared Minnan cultural roots. The Masterpieces of the Museum exhibition selects highlights from across the collection.

The folk exhibition has a particular distinction in the museum's history. In 1998, the Folk Exhibition of Fujian and Taiwan was prized as one of the best exhibitions in China, according to the museum's official synopsis. That national recognition, won while the museum was still based in the Bagua Building, established the Fujian-Taiwan folk theme as one of its signature contributions. Alongside the permanent displays, the museum mounts temporary exhibitions; its own history lists past subjects including the museum's jades, art works of Xiamen, buildings of Gulangyu, ancient ceramics from southern Fujian, the construction of the Xiamen seawall, family-tree documents of Fujian and Taiwan, and book, tea and flower themed masterpieces from the region.

Research and publication

Research is one of the four functions in the museum's stated mission, alongside collection, protection and exhibition, and its staff have produced a body of published work. The museum's synopsis lists books published by the museum itself or with partner organisations, including a volume of collection works marking ten years of the museum, research on ancient ceramics in southern Fujian Province, and a volume of the museum's valuable relics.

The merged institutions added their own publication programmes. The Zheng Chenggong Memorial Hall published studies and popular works on Zheng Chenggong, and the Cultural Relics Protection Center published a work on the historical buildings of Xiamen, as well as a guide to Gulangyu's buildings and its ancient sites. This publishing record matters because a local museum's research is often the primary scholarship on its own city: the documentation of historic buildings, local ceramics and regional folk practice produced in Xiamen feeds directly into heritage protection decisions as well as gallery labels.

Heritage protection work

Because the Cultural Relics Protection Center is united into the museum, the institution carries responsibilities beyond its own walls. Its remit connects it to the identification, documentation and protection of cultural relics and historic buildings across Xiamen, a city whose heritage ranges from the Gulangyu historic international settlement, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017, to temples, ancestral halls and former residences in the older districts.

The museum's administered sites illustrate that range. The former site of the Xiamen prison break of 1930 is a revolutionary historic site. The Chen ancestral temple and the former residence of Chen Shengyuan preserve the memory of nineteenth-century figures and events, including the Opium War in Xiamen. By holding these sites within one institution, the museum links the objects in its cases to the places where Xiamen's history actually happened, and visitors can move between the central galleries and the branch sites to build a fuller picture of the city.

The museum and its city

The Xiamen Museum's biography mirrors the modern history of Xiamen itself. It was conceived in 1983, just after the city became a Special Economic Zone; it opened in 1988 in a colonial-era landmark on Gulangyu; and it grew, in 2006, into a large converted factory complex with a merged family of memorial halls and a citywide protection role. Its exhibitions perform the same balancing act as the city: presenting an ancient regional culture of ceramics, stone carving and folk custom alongside the very recent history of reform, opening and international exchange recorded in the Special Economic Zone Memorial Hall and the friendship gifts.

For visitors, the museum offers the most systematic available introduction to Xiamen's past in one place: the history exhibition for the narrative, the stone sculpture and folk exhibitions for the region's material and living culture, and the masterpieces display for the collection's highlights. For the city, it serves as memory institution, research centre and heritage guardian at once. Its official website is xmmuseum.com, where its synopsis, exhibition information and branch details are published.