Shanghai Museum, People’s Square Branch
Located at 201 Renmin Avenue in Huangpu District, Shanghai Museum has a total exhibition area of 12,000 square meters and opened to the public in 1996. According to the museum’s official introduction, the first floor originally housed the Gallery of Ancient Chinese Bronzes, the Gallery of Ancient Chinese Sculpture, and a temporary exhibition hall; the second floor featured the Gallery of Ancient Chinese Ceramics, the Zande Lou Collection of Ceramics, and another exhibition hall; the third floor contained galleries of Chinese calligraphy, painting, and seals from successive dynasties; and the fourth floor presented ancient Chinese jades, Chinese coins through the ages, Ming and Qing furniture, and the arts and crafts of China’s ethnic minorities. In this sense, it is a comprehensive museum.
Because the People’s Square branch was built relatively early and sits in the heart of Shanghai, where space is at a premium, the interior can feel somewhat compact once you enter. Yet it is equally clear that the museum’s long-standing permanent displays no longer fully meet the expectations of contemporary audiences. When I visited, many of these permanent galleries had already been removed or rearranged, even though a number of the old gallery titles still remained above the doors. In their place, the first through third floors had been transformed into a series of exhibition spaces for The Top of the World Tree: Weekly Exhibition of Ancient Civilizations, accompanied by related interactive programs. This exhibition series was jointly organized by the Shanghai Museum, the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico, and the Larco Museum of Peru, and forms a major stop in the Shanghai Museum’s Dialogue with the World: Great Exhibition Series of Cultural Relics and Art.
For most Chinese audiences, knowledge of the ancient civilizations of the Americas is quite limited, with the Maya perhaps the only culture that is occasionally familiar by name. Many of these civilizations emerged very early. The Olmec civilization of ancient Mesoamerica, for example, represented in this exhibition by some of its earliest material, can currently be dated to a period earlier than China’s Shang dynasty. Like all civilizations, however, they passed through long cycles of emergence, growth, florescence, decline, and disappearance, processes that often unfolded over centuries or even millennia. Some overlapped with one another, some developed in lines of continuity, and some arose in roughly the same geographic regions. Together they constitute a brilliant and essential chapter in the history of human civilization.
The first floor is organized around three sections: the Olmec, the Maya, and Teotihuacan. The Olmec, flourishing from around 1600 BCE to 400 BCE along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, are widely regarded as pioneers of early Mesoamerican civilization. Their culture extended its influence across numerous surrounding settlements, and through city-states they produced colossal basalt heads that closely linked royal authority with sacred power. My strongest impression of this section was a sense of monumental stone veneration.
The Maya entered their Preclassic phase around 1000 BCE, roughly corresponding to China’s Zhou dynasty. Maya civilization was not simply a continuation of the Olmec world; it developed independently while also interacting with neighboring cultures. By the Preclassic period, the Maya had already formed settlement-based systems of kingship and were beginning to develop writing and calendrical knowledge. Their achievements in astronomy and mathematics, and the sophisticated cosmological system they built, continue to attract attention today. Just as important, descendants of ancient Maya communities are still rooted in Mesoamerica, carrying forward the customs and spiritual inheritance of this long-lived civilization.
The next section introduces Teotihuacan, which rose in the Basin of Mexico around the turn of the Common Era and became one of the greatest urban civilizations of Mesoamerica’s Classic period. Later the Aztecs revered it as the City of the Gods. The city was planned in accordance with cosmic principles: the Avenue of the Dead linked its monumental pyramids, and the overall layout gives striking architectural form to a vision of the relationship between heaven and earth. At this point my own aesthetic instincts fully awakened. I was especially drawn to the ceramics, murals, stone masks, and shell ornaments of this civilization. Their objects combine austerity and solemnity with an extraordinarily refined decorative sensibility, and I found them endlessly captivating. The technical sophistication of Teotihuacan’s pyramids and urban construction was already remarkably advanced. Compared with the pyramids of Egypt, those of Teotihuacan are richly integrated with totemic sculptural programs, and the veneration of the serpent—an animal both mysterious and dangerous—seems here to reach an especially intense expression.
The fourth gallery devoted to ancient Mesoamerica is on the museum’s second floor and focuses on the Aztecs. The Aztec world represents the final great florescence of ancient Mesoamerican civilization. Guided by divine prophecy, the Mexica founded their island capital of Tenochtitlan, established themselves through chinampa, or floating-island agriculture, and expanded through alliance-building into a powerful empire. Their society was highly stratified, martial in ethos, and grounded in a distinctive cosmology in which human sacrifice sustained the movement of the solar age. One exhibit in particular cannot be overlooked: the skull rack, or “wall of heads,” in which human skulls are threaded in orderly rows onto long poles to form an entire wall. What we confront here is not simply violence, but a profound reverence for cosmic order as understood by this civilization.
On the museum’s fourth floor, the focus shifts to ancient Peru and the peoples of the Andes in the exhibition Masterpieces from Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu, a major peak in the Andes, carries within it thousands of years of Andean cultural development and spiritual belief. What impressed me most was the Andean vision of the cosmos, divided into three realms—underworld, earthly world, and celestial world—symbolized respectively by the serpent, the jaguar, and birds of prey. These animal forms appear again and again in sculpture, in the decoration of everyday objects, and in personal ornaments. In fact, serpents and jaguars also appeared frequently in the Mesoamerican material shown earlier, suggesting possible connections and exchanges among these ancient cultures, or at least certain shared features in their cosmological imagination.
No written account, however vivid, can quite compare with seeing these objects in person—or with renting an audio guide and listening to a professional interpretation on site. A full-price ticket for the entire exhibition costs RMB 148, and to see all the galleries properly you should allow at least two hours.
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