China Museums: At Long Last
CHINA: MUSEUMS
Scala, 384 pages, Feb 2009
Miriam Clifford, Cathy Giangrande and Antony White, all with backgrounds in art history and archeology, have reportedly spent four years combing through China’s hundreds of museums in a search for the most appealing. The result is this in-depth guide to China’s museums that opens up new territories for English-speaking audiences, presumably Western travelers, but for that special, more adventuresome set interested in witnessing China’s cultural growth from a multifaceted perspective. “China: Museums” includes major players, such as the Forbidden City, as well as Chinese equivalents of what could be called “Roadside museums.” Imagine the Squished Penny Museum of Washington DC, translate that into the Beijing Tap Water Museum for an idea of the scale of the many museums referenced here; but then again, our authors have carefully weeded through the deep waters of China’s bowuguan (“museum,” a term that could also be literally broken down to mean an “establishment of ample objects”) to bring us the very best, most socially relevant and worthy selection of China’s ancient memorials, monuments and culturally revealing sites. They prove that lurking behind the Chinglish placards of hundreds of museums across China, there is much to be learned.
With site culled through our authors’ trained, and scrutinizing eyes, “China Museums” is not only a portrait of a nation’s burgeoning museum culture, but a sketchy outline of the earnest efforts of China’s curators or enthusiasts, and a semblance of an infrastructure where we might have assumed there was none. Of course, many Western readers cannot help but judge on appearances when confronted with the widespread curatorial practices Xerox copies glued to walls, or shabby facades and dust-laden velvet curtains, even the sci-fi inspired architecture of modern China can be a turn off. Happily, “China: Museums” doesn’t dwell on superficiality, but delves in at collection highlights, and relevant facts. More than 200 establishments are profiled, and organized across 6 major sections including Beijing and the North, Northeast, Shanghai and East China, the Yangtze, the South and the Silk Road. The book is the appropriately sized for a travel guide, and ample color photos are laid out in appealing designs over glossy pages (Scala is an art publisher, after all). Additional historical background augments the book in sidebars (on Confucius, or Jingdezhen porcelain), and the book is enhanced throughout with photography.
Although the guide doesn’t delve into many conclusions about the general state of China’s museums, as a guidebook resource “China: Museums” shines for its authors’ thorough background research, factually abundant descriptions that truly guide us–instead of merely editorializing–across this often rough landscape. Using a minimum of snark, readers are brought a little closer to informed cultural tourism in China, even if you don’t plan on being in Lushan, or Zigong anytime soon, it is rewarding to know that one can visit Pearl S. Buck’s villa, or that Zigong was a center of salt production whose technology affected the entire global economy, or that in the flooded Three Gorges Dam valley, an underwater museum is being built that preserves rock carvings dating to the Tang Dynasty… it stirs the arm-chair traveler in anyone to get a ticket.
“China: Museums” is available in Beijing at the Bookworm 220 RMB
Thanks to the Bookworm and authors for a lovely presentation at the Bookworm Literary Festival
nice advertisement, I also want to purchase an ad like this for my book, how much?
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