subject: Top Ten Museums in China (First Five) [print this page] China is a great country enojoying long history and rich culture. There are thousands of museums in China owning the historical relics and cultural items. Seeing the historical tools or relics is the best way to learn the history of China and history of Chinese. Here are some of the top museums in China including Shaanxi History Museum, Shanghai Museum and so on.
1. Shaanxi History Museum
Shaanxi History Museum, which located to the northwest of the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda in the ancient city Xi'an, in the Shaanxi province of China, is one of the first huge state museums with modern facilities in China. The museum houses over 300,000 items including murals, paintings, pottery, coins, as well as bronze, gold, and silver objects. The modern museum was built between 1983 and 2001 and its appearance recalls the architectural style of the Tang Dynasty.Shaanxi History Museum was constructed from 1983.
2. Beijing Capital Museum
The Capital Museum located at 16 Fuxingmenwai Dajie, Xicheng District is an art museum in Beijing, China. It opened in 1981 while the present building was built in the late 1990s and it houses a variety of items from imperial China as well as other Asian cultures. Part of the museum's collections were formerly housed in the Confucius Temple on Guozijian Road in Beijing. The Capital Museum today contains over 200,000 cultural relics in its collection, only a small fraction of it are exhibited, and a significant percentage of the museum's art collection came from artifacts unearthed in Beijing.
3. Shanghai Museum
The Shanghai Museum is a museum of ancient Chinese art, situated on the People's Square in the Huangpu District of Shanghai, People's Republic of China.The museum was founded in 1952 and was first open to the public in the former Shanghai Racecourse club house, now at 325 W. Nanjing Road. In 1959 the museum moved into the former Zhonghui Building at 16 S. Henan Road, which previously housed insurance companies and bank offices. In 1992, the Shanghai municipal government allocated a piece of land on People's Square to the museum as its new site.
4. Sanxingdui Museum
Sanxingdui is the name of an archaeological site and its deduced culture in China, now believed to be the site of an ancient Chinese city. The previously unknown Bronze Age culture was re-discovered in 1987 when archaeologists excavated remarkable artifacts, that radiocarbon dating dated as being from the 12th-11th centuries BCE. Leaving behind nothing in the historical record, not even in myth, the unknown culture that produced these artifacts is now known as the Sanxingdui Culture. A museum housing the artifacts is located near the city of Guanghan.
5. Henan Provincial Museum
The Henan Museum or Henan Provincial Museum located in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China, is a history and art museum. It has a collection of more than 130,000 pieces of cultural relics through the ages. In addition to its collection of human history the museum is also home to many relics of natural history including dinosaur bones and fossils. Henan Museum's present building, which opened in 1997, occupies an area of more than 100,000 square meters, with a total floor space of 78,000 square meters.
