Museum buffs try to see every museum wherever they travel.

"But no one can see all of the museums in China in his or her lifetime," said Liu Qiguang.

The sheer number of museums across China, 1,800, is daunting.

But he is not discouraged. Four years ago, Liu and his colleagues started a project to record museums in China on video tape.

"Since we cannot visit all of the museums, we can at least bring some of them to people's homes via TV," said Liu, who is the production's general director.

Their efforts have resulted in the lengthy TV documentary series "Sagas from 100 Chinese Museums," which will be shown on local TV stations across the country starting this week.

A False Start?

"We didn't get off to a good start," Liu said frankly.

After taping the first few museums and even winning the 1999 national Jinying Award for best TV documentary series, Liu and his colleagues discovered that their production was possibly not intriguing to TV viewers.

"We discovered that there is a lack of interest in museums among the population at large," he said.

To many, museums are places where precious relics and documents are preserved for high-brow scholars and researchers, far removed from the daily lives of most people. In short, the most valuable items for the museum documentary series are, to most people, lifeless objects.

"Films and TV need to portray things that are alive," said Yang Enpu, a professor with the Beijing Film Academy.

It was not enough to show artifacts and have researchers give the history of the objects if they wanted to glue people to their TVs.

They needed to approach the project from a wider perspective, making museums come alive and enabling the public to connect museums with their daily lives, Liu said.

So Liu and the script-writers in the crew dug deeper into each museum, into the history of the earth and of humanity from the Jurassic era to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

They conducted field investigations in areas surrounding the museums, traveling 370,000 kilometers and leaving their footsteps over almost every corner of the country, including Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao.

The project, a joint production by the State Cultural Heritage Administration, the Shenzhen Society for Cultural Exchanges with Other Countries and Guangxia (Yinchuan) Industries Co., Ltd, consumed 20 million yuan (US$2.4 million).

It was exciting for the crew to follow the steps of the ancient Chinese and to identify aspects of this history which cannot be moved into museums.

"The culture and society that the ancient Chinese created continues today," Liu said. The researchers' work was to link the present with this splendid past.

Past and Present

The 100 museums were not randomly selected. The selections were the result of the crew's own preferences. From the juxtaposed scenes and interviews, the seemingly lifeless artifacts and documents come alive, telling their own stories to the audience.

History and anthropology are featured prominently on the list of the museums in the series.

The National Museum of Chinese History, the Palace Museum, the Shanghai Museum and other provincial and autonomous regions' museums are included.

The crew also included some less famous museums. At the Zhouyuan Museum in Baoji City, in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, the documentary leads people into the fields where the earliest Chinese ceremonial bronze containers, dating back more than 3,000 years, were discovered .

The documentary goes on, comparing the lives of the ancient Chinese in the Zhou Dynasty (BC1045-BC256) with ours today, helping people to learn about the rich social and cultural legacy left by the ancient Chinese.

Natural science museums offer insights from antiquity and for the future.

At the Dinosaur Museum in Zigong City, in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, the documentary takes audiences back to more than 65 million years, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

But as master of the Earth today, man has to ask himself/herself: "Will there come a day when mankind will vanish forever?"

The more than a dozen folklore and ethnic minority museums take the audience into the homes of Koreans, the Manchus in Jilin, the Yis in Sichuan, the indigenous communities of Taiwan and Anhui provinces, as well as others, where people can see how multi-ethnic cultures have developed and prospered in China.

"The crew has succeeded capturing Chinese history and in making an accountable exploration of Chinese culture," said Yang Enpu.

Museum Staff

Throughout the four years' work, Liu Qiguang and other crew members have come into contact with many museum researchers and workers.

"I have been impressed by the staffs working at the museums," Liu said.

Many of the staffs' members started their careers when they were still in their late teens. To outsiders, they work with lifeless objects. "But a senior museum researcher told me that he discovers new things everyday," Liu said.

Their pride is evident as they catalog the precious relics in their museums' collections.

However, this was exactly what Liu and his crew members tried to avoid in their production.

As a result, many museum researchers initially displayed dissatisfaction with the crew's work.

Even Hu Jun, director of the State Research Institute of Cultural Relics, warned Liu that they should not "nullify the museums."

Liu said it took a lot of persuasion before they convinced staffers that "Sagas of 100 Chinese Museums" should do more than reproduce each museum's video introduction.

"We museum staffers realize today that the development of museums is closely connected to community awareness," said Li Ji, deputy chief curator of the National Museum of Chinese History.

"The 'Sagas' series has the right approach. The documentaries have brought museums into the homes of millions of people."

(China Daily 06/06/2001)