Shanghai Museum

Shanghai Museum is a treasure house of Chinese cultural essence with a rich collection of 120,000 valuable antique items. Together with the museums in Beijing, Xian, Nanjing, the four are honored as the China's four major museums. Shanghai Museum is especially famous for its treasures of bronzes (bells, knives, axeheads, chariot ornaments), ceramics, Chinese calligraphy and traditional paintings.

Shanghai Museum is a must-see for foreign visitors to Shanghai. It was built in the 1930s, formerly occupied by Zhong Hui Bank owned by a Shanghai celebrity Yuesheng Du. In 1952, it was converted into a museum. The five big gilt characters on the lintel were written by Yi Chen, the first mayor of Shanghai after the founding of new China.

Occupying a land of 0.8 hectares with two floors underground and five floors above in height of 29.5 meters, the new museum building was erected in September 1994 and most of the facilities were installed in 1995. It was entirely opened on October 12.

The new Shanghai Museum has ten special galleries of bronze, calligraphy, ceramics, furniture, jades, minority art, paintings, sculpture, seal carvings, coins and arts and crafts, together with a special gallery of donated relics and three temporary exhibition halls.

Shanghai Museum has installed advanced security and fire alarm systems, educational services, a computerized library and an automation system. Besides this, Shanghai Museum has facilities for multimedia guide, an information center, a High Definition Graphics system, an audio tour, the lecture room equipped with a system of spontaneous interpretation. You can check out a device that allows you to hear a description of an item after punching in the item number. The audio tour is available in eight languages. The library in the museum has 200,000 volumes of books in collection.