Sichuan Museum

Chengdu, China

Chinese Museums Association Most Innovative Museums in China 2017

 

Continuous Innovation, Endless Civilization

 

 

The Honorary title of Most Innovative Museums in China is given under the leadership of State Administration of Cultural Heritage. It is established and named by the Chinese Museums Association, which is designed to promote Chinese museums, better serving local cultural careers, as well as encouraging museums to conduct academic research and innovations. The prize was initiated in 2002. It is usually announced on the day of International Museum Day and has extensive influence in China. In 2017, Sichuan Museum and Zhejiang Museum of Natural History were conferred the title of Most Innovative Museums.

Sichuan Museum, located in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, is the largest comprehensive historical museum in Sichuan Province. It was founded in the 1940s and the collection of the cultural relics is mainly Bashu culture, which can be traced back to the Paleolithic era, and the variety of the cultural relics is complete and abundant. The current collection includes the pottery, porcelain, tablets, coins, stone carvings, bronzes, calligraphy and painting, Tibetan Buddhist relics, Buddhist statues of the Southern Dynasty, modern cultural relics, and cultural relics of national folklore, and there is a total of 191265 pieces (in sets, the actual quantity is 328345 pieces). Of these, 750 pieces are Chinese first class cultural relics (Set), 2186 of the state's second-class cultural relics (Set), and 42669 are the state's third-class cultural relics (Set).

In 2009, the current President of Sichuan Museum, Mr. Sheng Jianwu (Professor) put forward the idea of the museum "Going out of the ivory tower and going to the big world, and the public's demands are the pursuit of the Sichuan Museum". In fact, this is the embodiment of the inclusive value of the museum as a regional historical and cultural service institution and educational institution. For the history and experience created by the predecessors, the future generations have equal, free and creative right to inherit and utilise. Learning history does not mean staying in the past. Inspiration and innovation are the main direction of the museum as a cultural service and educational institution.

How to realise the inclusive value of the museums, is the motivating question of our exploration and practice.

Sichuan, China, is a multi-ethnic region with a vast territory, including Chinese, Tibetan, Miao, Yi, Hui and other languages; it is is culturally diverse and integrated. However, the mountains, canyons, rivers, plains and other geographical environment have formed a traffic inconvenience, and there is an old saying: "Shu Road is difficult, which is more difficult than to go to the sky". The meaning of the inclusiveness lies in the cultural transmission between the nationalities and regions. In the highland mountain areas, people's rights to the museum culture have long been restricted to poverty and inaccessibility. Therefore, the Sichuan Museum set up the "Caravan" Mobile Museum, just to bring the historical relics, knowledge booklets and wonderful presentations to these areas. This has been welcomed by people and governments in these areas, who will provide enough space for the display to allow people access to the information of the mobile museum exhibitions and give them more time to prepare to visit. Of course, it's free.

At present, Sichuan Museum "Caravan" Mobile Museum journey has reached 200,000 kilometers with an audience of 1.3 million people.

Since the 21st century, thanks to the convenience and low cost of the Internet, we have begun to build a digital "Wisdom" Museum. By means of information technology, the preservation of the cultural relics and the transfer of the cultural relic's knowledge have become more timely and adequate. We are trying to provide the most favorable micro-environment for the cultural relics in the storerooms and exhibition halls. By using the latest technology and numerous probes, we can grasp the light, temperature, humidity, air composition and other data of the cultural relics in real time. And through the intelligent control of the computer of the museum environment monitoring station, the data of the small environment can be kept in the normal range.

Similarly, our goal of inclusion has grown considerably with the support of the information technology. Sichuan Museum Institute of Education was established to promote this purpose in a wider range of more complete realisation. Based on the combination of the cultural relics and historical knowledge, we develop school-based courses for young people and offer them to all schools in the fastest and most public way. We have developed video courses, sometimes even live micro classrooms; we have developed the textbooks, which are accompanied by the development of teaching aids; we have tried to trace the development of the ancient Chinese sports civilization from the cultural relics and the first time to achieve the beyond the region, beyond industry, beyond time to explore cooperative research on the origin of human sports civilization, and current research is underway, of course, we look forward to more efforts to participate in this study.

Innovation is the source of the development of human civilization. The rich geographical conditions and national culture of Sichuan, China, have never stopped gestating and innovating in the long river of history, where the ancient stone tools, pottery, metal ware, planting, villages, beliefs, and the earliest paper money in human history were born. Bashu culture has organised the social, economic and cultural life of this area methodically since it was born. Here is the inspiration from historical wisdom: Continuous innovation, endless civilization.