China Travel Guide

This very brief survey aims to reflect, and to help you to follow, what you are likely to see most of in Chinese provincial and city museums - and to an extent in situ. Many of the museums have a similar layout and similar contents - some of the exhibits being copies of key discoveries from other areas - but often there is little or no explanation in English. In looking at the art displayed in Chinese museums it should be remembered that while for more than two thousand years an empire with a splendid court produced an incredible wealth of art objects, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, many of these were acquired - more or less legitimately - or looted, by Westerners. Later, too, some of the great imperial collections were removed by the Nationalists to Taiwan, where they are now in the National Palace Museum