Shanghai History Museum

The Shanghai History Museum (上海市历史博物馆, Shànghǎi Shì Lìshǐ Bówùguǎn) at 325 West Nanjing Road is the city’s own history museum, set in the former Shanghai Race Club building on the edge of People’s Square. Go to see how the treaty port is told in objects, from the 1843 opening of the port to 1949, and to see the clubhouse itself. No official hours page was reached when this entry was written, so check ahead.

The building comes first. English Wikipedia says the neoclassical Race Club clubhouse was completed in 1934, and that its 10-storey tower was long a landmark of central Shanghai. Chinese Wikipedia lists it as a Shanghai municipal protected cultural relic. After the Race Club, the Shanghai Art Museum used it until 2012, and the building then stood empty for several years. Chinese Wikipedia records that the project to reuse it was approved at the end of 2015.

The museum itself is older than its home and has moved often. It began as an exhibition hall established in 1983 and first opened to the public on 27 May 1984 at the Shanghai Agriculture Exhibition premises. It took its present name in 1991. The two Wikipedias differ on the next steps: English Wikipedia says the main museum closed in 1999 because of land redevelopment, with an exhibition room opening at the base of the Oriental Pearl Tower in May 2001; Chinese Wikipedia says it reopened at the Agriculture Exhibition Hall on Hongqiao Road in October 1994 and closed in March 1999.

The move to People’s Square came in stages. The east wing had a trial opening on 1 October 2017, and Chinese Wikipedia says the whole museum opened free to the public on 26 March 2018. English Wikipedia says about four-fifths of the collection went on display for the first time.

The two sources also give different sizes for the collection. English Wikipedia says over 30,000 items, about 18,000 of them on modern Shanghai, with the oldest relics around 6,000 years old. Chinese Wikipedia gives 110,000 items in 15 categories. Treat the counts as unsettled.

What you are looking at is mostly the period from about 1843 to 1949. English Wikipedia names a pair of bronze lions from the former HSBC Building on the Bund, and boundary markers from the French Concession and the 1893 International Settlement. It also names a bronze cannon called “General Zhen Yuan”, linked to Chen Huacheng, who defended Shanghai in the First Opium War. If you have walked the Bund, the lions and the markers make the street names and borders you saw outside easier to place.

Show the Chinese address on this page to a taxi driver. The Wikidata point used here is shared with the old Shanghai Art Museum item, which is the same building.