Some of what was left behind can still be seen today in the National Museum in Beijing, but no museum in China has anything like the treasures in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. In 1948-49, after the Japanese invasion and the outbreak of civil war, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces shipped 230,000 of the best pieces to Taiwan, where they remained after the communists gained power on the mainland.
The great imperial collections of Chinese jade, cloisonné and porcelain were kept in the Summer Palace in Beijing’s Forbidden City and seen by only a chosen few. Public museums have not traditionally been part of Chinese culture. By contrast, in America only 20-40 museums a year were built in the decade before the 2008 financial crash. Last year a record 451 new museums opened, pushing the total by the end of 2012 to 3,866, says An Laishun, vice-president of the China Museums Association. “We’ve seen museum-building booms elsewhere,” Mr Johnson says, “but nothing of this sustained magnitude and pace.”Īccording to the current five-year plan, China was to have 3,500 museums by 2015, a target it achieved three years early. Not just in Beijing and Shanghai but also in the second- and third-tier cities beyond, new museums are hatching out every day, many of them still without collections and curators. It exemplifies what Jeffrey Johnson, director of Columbia University’s China Megacities Lab, calls the “museumification” of China: a building boom so frothy it is running away with itself. The Red Brick was completed more than a year ago by an up-and-coming property developer, Yan Zhijie, from Xingtai, a small town about 350km south-west of Beijing. It is like walking into an empty Olympic swimming pool. Yet, except for a handful of works in one small corner near the entrance, the museum has absolutely nothing on display. Inside the air-conditioning hums throughout the seven exhibition spaces and all the lights are on. The brickwork is shiny, the yellow lettering bright. Despite the unpromising setting, the museum looks as if it had been lowered into place that very morning. Opposite, two dogs lie panting outside the Orchard restaurant where workmen have put down their trowels and are sipping tea in the midday heat. THE RED BRICK CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM can be found beyond Beijing’s fifth ring road, in an area so recently urbanised it is still called Hegezhuang Village.