Nanjing Museum

Explore China’s Rich History with China Tour

Nanjing museum, one of the oldest museums in China, is an impressive provincial museum of history and art, which is as famous as the Forbidden City in Beijing and Shanghai Museum.

Located on Zhongshan East Road, the Nanjing Museum covers about 32 acres (130,000 square meters) where enormous collections of Ming and Qing imperial porcelains are well preserved.

Construction on the museum began in 1933 under the administration of Cai Yuanpei, one of the greatest educators in China, who was the first chairman of the board of directors of the museum. The Nanjing Museum is a perfect combination of Chinese and western architectural styles. The structure of front section of the museum includes a golden tile roof in the Chinese traditional style, while the back section is a western-style flat-roofed.

Nanjing museum presently hosts 420,000 diverse collections and more than 2,000 are national cultural relics, among which are such rare national treasures as Mao gong tripod, a portrait of emperors from different dynasties, the picture of Tangminghuang Emperor’s Heading to Sichuan on Horse are the most famous.

In addition, Nanjing Museum is also home to such exclusive treasures as archaeological discoveries, the cultural relics of the local ethnic minorities, foreign cultural relics, imperial palace utensils, paper-works of the Qing dynasty, and relics of the Japanese surrender ceremony in World War II. 300,000 valuable books from China and abroad are also preserved in the Nanjing Museum.