At the foot of the Oriental Pearl Tower there is a real time machine – you can travel to ancient China at the Shanghai History Museum. And everything will be very believable: life-size people, in real costumes and surrounded by household items from that time. And even the sounds around you are those from past eras!
A trip to this museum is strikingly different from the dreary excursions that used to be mandatory in the school curriculum. All the exhibits are “alive,” which makes getting acquainted with them vivid, memorable, and desirable. For example, the bartender in one of the historical exhibits styled like a tavern is made so realistically that most visitors greet him. In fact, all the figures are made of wax.
In the museum, you can see everyday scenes from the lives of a rickshaw puller, a geisha, or a nun. Opium evenings are not the kind of images China can be proud of, but at the same time, they are also history and, above all, the history of the struggle for the nation’s health. And to keep children from interfering with work, they were seated in barrels. You will also see these joyless moments here.
In general, the collections of 30 thousand different museum items are divided into 5 main zones. All these exhibits are devoted to different aspects of the history of the ancient great state: “Style and Everyday Life of the City,” “The Open Port Period,” “Foreign Settlements,” “Traces of Old Shanghai,” “The Road to Huating’s Past” (now the Songjiang district in Shanghai; during the Ming period, one of the largest cultural centers of China).
