Rich picks for culture vultures who avoid tourist traps
Newcomers to Beijing or business travelers to the capital looking to fill up a free weekend with a cultural primer on China often head straight to Tian’anmen Square where the country’s two most famous museums await them.
Flanking the eastern side of the world’s largest public square is the National Museum of China, a must for aspiring Sinologists.
Meanwhile, after crossing Chang’an Avenue, or “enduring peace road” to the north of the square is the Forbidden City, also known by its less forbidding name, the Palace Museum.
However, if one wishes to avoid crowds and become immersed in a more focused facet of the country’s millennia-old history and culture, there are three lesserknown, more intimate institutions in the capital that can make for a very satisfying half-day’s academic adventure.
For one heck of a tech trek, try the China Science and Technology Museum. First opened to the public in 1988, the facility is “the only comprehensive museum of science and technology at the national level in China”, the Beijing municipal government says on its official website.
Besides the discovery, invention and/or development of paper, silk, tea and gunpowder, widely attributed to ancient Chinese alchemists, horticulturalists and scientists, we soon learn at this museum that other technologies we often take for granted also emerged from Middle Kingdom minds.
These include indispensable technologies like the mechanical clock, movable type printing, the compass, acupuncture and the seismograph.
When sundials were still the go-to timepieces, pre-Timex tinkerers toiled away until time could be told after dark, most notably Yi Xing, a Buddhist monk (and inventor) in AD 725, with Su Song improving on the prototype about a century later.
Long after our ancestors sailed blindly on reed rafts into the great blue yonder, and well before the advent of GPS systems, the compass was invented during the reign of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), but not to help us get to grandma’s house for Spring Festival. Instead, we learn it was used by seers to make predictions and auspicious auguries. A millennium later, the Chinese improved on the gadget by adding a magnetized needle that was used for navigation purposes.
Of course, the China Science and Technology Museum is dominated by 20th and 21st century electronic and engineering marvels that have improved lives around the world, and helped lift hundreds of millions of Chinese from poverty over the decades.
But it’s nice to surround oneself in exhibits extolling the ancients and their technological breakthroughs, because one well knows that one’s handset is burning though its battery in our pocket, and will be whisked out in a few minutes when we e-pay our way through a Coke and Kit-Kat at the museum concession stand. But for a precious moment, signal-free non-electrified inventions are a comforting blast from the distant past.
The museum’s official website says, “Through scientific, informative and interesting exhibition contents designed to invite visitors’ participation and interaction, the museum presents scientific principles and technological applications, and encourages visitors to explore and practice with their own hands in its efforts to popularize scientific knowledge, scientific thinking, scientific methodology and scientific spirit.”
It has five major thematic exhibitions, namely Science Paradise, The Glory of China, Science & Technology and Life, Explorations and Discoveries as well as Challenges and the Future. For your viewing pleasure, there are four special-effect theaters — Dome Theater, Giant Screen Theater, 4D Theater and Motion Theater.
Another museum worthy of a day’s perusal is one dedicated to the splendor of flora and fauna that are completely independent of humanity’s feverish flurry of technological innovation.
The Beijing Museum of Natural History, founded in 1951, purports to serve three main scholarly services — specimen collection, academic research and the popularization of paleontology, zoology, botany and anthropology. More than 200,000 items are on full display, and all of the long-departed beasts of the air, sea and land available for meticulous viewing — as well as the substantial flora exhibited — have never found the need to use compasses, mechanical clocks, seismographs and certainly not gunpowder.
Cats are said to have built-in seismographs. Check archived newspaper classified ads from a week or so before major tremors, and you’ll find a lot of notices about lost kitties. Felines have apparently evolved to find their way home by electromagnetic stimuli, and these signals are often crossed when our planet’s tectonic plates begin grinding against one another prior to a big earthquake.
Finally, for the movie buffs, I would recommend a visit to the China National Film Museum — the largest professional museum of its type in the world. Opened in 2005, CNFM covers the art of the moving photograph from daguerreotype to digital Imax.
Whether you’re an aficionado of 4th and 5th generation filmmakers from the city’s vaunted film schools, or you have a DVD collection collecting dust and causing your bookshelves to creak, this museum has everything a cinephile craves.
However, one dispiriting word of caution is necessary. Before venturing out to any of these three cornucopias of cultural and scientific treasures, it is highly advisable to contact them first, as COVID-19 era restrictions still wreak some havoc on scheduling and visitor numbers.