The Shanghai Museum

A lovely park...

Downtown Shanghai centers on contiguous and beautiful parks like People's Parks - parks that have displaced thousands of families with a few high-beaked swans, and lovely urban achievement.

...where  4,387 families had lived...

There, in People's Square, the square rose-stone museum stands, while inside its tiers have hanging gardens dripping from Ming wood carving. The four levels are clearly and pedagogically arranged to present the glories of Chinese aesthetics - Bronzes, Ceramics, Calligraphy, Painting, Jade carving, Furniture and Currency in clear sequences of a not huge nor brilliant collection, but a beautifully presented one where lights rise as you approach a work.

11th c. BC food vessel

China's early and fastidious technique yielded bronzes and jades so extraordinary and brought procelain to the world in the 1st AD. The early stylized beauty - like Mayan designs - becomes more delicate and intricate with time, but is never matched by figurative brilliance.

Around the 21st c. BC China entered the Bronze Age. The earliest Chinese bronze culture is of the late Xia dynasty (21st-16th c BC). Ritual bronzes had animal masks and were sometimes inlaid with turquoise. A second flowering began in the 7th c BC-221 BC, as ritual functions gradually diminished with new and delicate daily utensils. Decorative dragon paterns became minute and intricate, and scenes of daily life were used for the first time.

Tomb Guardian - 608-917 AD

"Pottery belongs to all mankind, but porcelain is China's invention," the museum declares. The earliest Neolithic pottery in China dates from about 10,000 years ago. The Shang period (16-11th c BC) used high fire glazes, and potters' wheels appeared in the 3rd millennium BC.

Jade was being mined 10,000 years ago, and carvings of beauty emerged by 5,000 yr BC. An aesthetic took shape and never radically changed. China has an 8000 year history of jade carving, beginning with ritual and ornamental jades with strong regional features. Distinctive among them were the jades produced by the Neolithic cultures, with zoomorphic and geometric shaped forms.

Jade man, 2000 BC

Jades had an early ritual use in political power, frnom the 21st c. BC-771 BC, and later became decorative, their design more creative.

In the Han Dynasty, (206 BC-420 AD) jades were increasingly part of elaborate burials, and there was a magical belief in jade amulets. But the warring period blocked transportation of the stone from western Asia, leading to a decline

The sculpture exhibit is brief, considering the huge amount of Buddhistic stone carving the rest of the world has obtained from China. The beautiful ones must have been stolen. (But the museum is a pleasure with its unified highly polished wood and reliable cheap shops of small, gorgeous knick knacks.)

13th-11th c BC dragon in jade

Furniture had appeared as early as the Han Dynasty (180 BC-220 AD), but its flowering was in the Ming Dynasty (14th-17th c.). The museum's furniture exhibtion, of mainly Ming and Qing, is exquisite, design that easily surpasses the Western equivalents.

Jade dragons, 206 BC-408 AD

The currency exhibit traces China's cowrie and crude money back to Neolithic times. Paper money came earlier than the West. But this civilization that had such technical sophistication became petrified. With the perfectiib if inner details, it lost its outer resilience. Money from the Silk Rd, however, had vitality with the magnificent heads of rulers.