The Historical Development of Museums in China

The notion of the museum as a public institution has a relatively short history in China, having been imported by the colonial powers Great Britain, France and Japan. Indeed, ‘Asian nations are still struggling, with mixed results, to domesticate this somewhat exotic transplant’ (Kahn 1998, 226). Referring to museums in early 20th-century China, the Chinese museologist Guo Changhong (2008, 80) notes that, in China, the museums of the time were frequently viewed as ‘imported wonders’. The effort to educate the Chinese people, safeguard cultural artefacts and promote research through museums can be directly attributed to an increasing acceptance of Western ideas in early modern China, as well as to the institutional transformations Chinese society underwent in the wake of the Revolution.

In the evolution of museums in China, three phases can be identified. The first phase is associated with forms of proto-museums, such as the Temple of Confucius. Although Chinese museology considers these to be the origins of the institution, strictly speaking, museums did not appear in China until the second half of the 19th century. The establishment of the first museum open to the public, in 1868, marked the dawn of a second phase in the history of Chinese museums. The spread of museums accompanied the transition from the imperial to the republican system, as marked by the emblematic transformation, in 1925, of the Imperial Palace (Forbidden City) into a public museum.