subject: Tianjin Natural History Museum - One Of The First And The Best Of Its Kind In The World [print this page] The Tianjin Natural History Museum is the first museum of its kind in China, and enjoys the privilege of being one of the first national standard museums in the country. It has undergone at least three incarnations since its founding in 1927 by a French missionary, the most recent one emerging after the completion of government renovation of the museum in 1998. Since this most recent opening, the museum has drawn an approximate total of 2 million tourists and is now known for integrating spiritual development and patriotism with tourism generation and outreach education. The institution, which is found to the west of Machang Road, specializes in the collection of fossils pertaining to paleontology and paleo-anthropology, most of which are rare extractions from various provinces of Northern and Northwest China, placing emphasis on the Chinese Cenozoic Era.
The four principal displays hosted by the museum are animals, plants, paleontology and paleo-anthropology covering subjects from animal ecology to aquatic and insect organisms. The institution is also keenly aware of its responsibility towards education and public welfare; to this end, they have instated a variety of small-time street exhibitions of butterflies, birds, animals and basic conservation scattered throughout different parts of the nation.
The sheer volume of the Natural History Museums specimens makes for impressive numbers: over 400,000 collections in total, 1300 of which are first and second grade masterpieces. It spans a floor space of over 20,000 square meters and consists of a four-tiered functionality of galleries, business premises, library collections and a botanical garden. The main building takes the symbolic shape of sea shells, seeming to convey that the museum is as a pearl on the beaches of Bohai Sea. The Ocean World aquarium opened in 2004 to great acclaim, as it was intended to meet Tianjins need for a suitable aquarium.
The museum also employs a professional work staff with expertise in explanation and counseling in collection and research related matters, as well as over 100 volunteers from grade schoolers to retirees. Their contribution is tremendous as this institution bears the burden of a number of ongoing research projects and activities as well as keeping the museum open to the public all year round.
You can easily visit the Museum of Natural History when you stay at a Tianjin hotel in the city center. For travelers looking for a luxury hotel in Tianjin, they can scarcely do better than find accommodation at Raffles Tianjin, one of the most accessible and centrally placed luxury hotels the city has to offer.
