Shenzhen Museum Guide and History | Generated by AI

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Question: What museums does Shenzhen have? Show the history of the Shenzhen Museum and what else is worth knowing beyond it.

Answer:

The flagship is the Shenzhen Museum (深圳博物馆), and its history mirrors the city’s own. It was established in 1981 — just one year after Shenzhen became a Special Economic Zone — and it was the first museum established in Shenzhen, now rated a National First-Level Museum.

It’s actually a system of four venues rather than one building:

  1. Museum of Ancient Art (Tongxin Road) — opened in 1988, one of the eight cultural facilities built in Shenzhen in the early days of reform and opening up, and the original home of the museum.
  2. Museum of History and Folk Culture (Civic Center, Futian) — the main venue most people mean. Opened in December 2008 in Area A of the Civic Center with about 10,000 m² of exhibition space, covering Shenzhen’s ancient and modern history, reform-and-opening history, and folk culture. Its five permanent exhibitions (“Ancient Shenzhen”, “Modern Shenzhen”, “Shenzhen’s Reform and Opening Up History”, “Shenzhen Folk Culture”, and a wildlife specimen exhibition) trace the region from roughly 7,000 years ago to the reform era — a good counter to the idea that Shenzhen has “no history.”
  3. Shenzhen Reform and Opening-up Exhibition Hall — opened in November 2018 for the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up, with 6,300 m² documenting Guangdong’s four decades of transformation.
  4. Former Site of the Dongjiang Guerrilla Command (Luohu) — a memorial museum covering the WWII-era East River guerrilla resistance.

The scale today is substantial: the collection exceeds 228,000 items, including over 27,000 cultural relics, and the museum’s reform-and-opening exhibition pioneered the display of contemporary Chinese history in China. It runs 30+ special exhibitions a year and draws over 3 million visitors annually. Admission is free, though registration via WeChat is required.

Beyond the Shenzhen Museum, the city has a surprisingly deep museum scene: the Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning (MOCAUP), which combines international contemporary art with exhibits on the city’s urban planning (the building itself, by Coop Himmelb(l)au, is worth the trip), plus Zhizheng Art Museum, one of the largest private museums in China with more than 10,000 relics. There’s also the OCT Art & Design Gallery, He Xiangning Art Museum (China’s first national-level museum named after an individual artist), the Nantou Ancient City heritage area (1,700 years of county history predating modern Shenzhen), and the Dapeng Fortress, a Ming-dynasty coastal garrison — “Shenzhen” (深圳墟) itself was just a market town, but the area’s recorded history runs back to the Jin dynasty.

If you visit one, make it the History and Folk Culture branch at Civic Center first (Line 2/4, Civic Center Station, closed Mondays), then MOCAUP next door.

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