Its rich collections have made it one of the top history and art museums in the country and a must-see tourist attraction in Nanjing, now capital of East China's Jiangsu Province and former capital of many dynasties.

It is widely known that China's cultural relics, except those scattered abroad, are mainly stored in three museums: the Beijing-based Palace Museum, the Taipei Palace Museum and the Nanjing Museum.

Located at the foot of the beautiful Zijin Mountain, Nanjing Museum, built in 1933, was called the Central Museum of China before 1950. Its first curator was Cai Yuanpei, a renowned Chinese scholar and educator during the influential New Culture Movement early last century.

The museum today boasts 420,000 items, including 340,000 implements, 27,000 paintings and calligraphy works, and 31,000 historic documents.

One-third of these collections were inherited from the former Central Museum, half were collected after the founding of the People's Republic of China. The others were those transported from the Palace Museum in 1931 to Nanjing, the national capital until 1949, when the Japanese occupied the Northeast China six years before they launched an all-out war invading into the other parts of China.

During the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-45), the museum's collections were moved and kept in Chongqing in Southwest China until the war ended.

When the Kuomintang authorities retreated from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan in 1949, they selected a number of treasured relics from museums around China, gathered them in the Nanjing Museum and planned to transport them all to Taipei in three groups.

However, according to Xu Huping, present director of the museum, the liberation of Nanjing came so rapidly that the Kuomintang authorities had to leave a large part of the third group behind in the museum.

A new building in the yard of traditional style old mansions is very eye-catching and blends in with the architecture of the old main building of the Nanjing Museum.

This forms the museum's recent expansion, a facility displaying more than 5,000 pieces of works of art in 11 galleries.

The galleries include ancient calligraphy and painting, modern art, private collections of modern celebrities, folk art, embroidery and netting, lacquer art, ceramics, bronzes, porcelains from official kilns, jade and other treasures.

Many of the collections are being shown to the public for the first time since the establishment of the museum.

Visitors will be especially surprised by the digital management systems used in the galleries and the stylistic installation of the exhibits, unusual in Chinese museums. The lights on the top automatically turn brighter when visitors approach an exhibit. If someone gets too close to a treasure, a surveillance system sounds a warning.

Besides being displayed in glass windows, some exhibits have been installed in a more user-friendly way. For example, girls dressed in traditional costumes perform the process of netting cloth on a wooden netting machine.

As well as being a venue that educates the public, the Nanjing Museum has also been a major force in archaeological studies since New China was founded in 1949.

It has played a role in the excavation of many ancient tombs and published a large number of books and magazines based on the academic research of its curators and researchers.

"Nanjing Museum, carrying out its studies for history and art's sake, is to compete with the world's established museums in professional research and management," said Xu.

(China Daily 05/26/2001)