Although the Wikipedia article hasn’t realized it yet, there are currently *two* Shanghai Museum locations: the old one on People’s Square on the west bank of the river in Huangpu District, which opened in 1996 and is shaped like a ding (an ancient round bronze cooking vessel), and the extremely new huge rectangular one in the east in Pudong New Area, which opened in phases in 2024 (February, June, December). The museum (in both incarnations) is dedicated to ancient Chinese art, and has galleries displaying bronze, calligraphy, paintings, seals (stamps or chops), ceramics, numismatics, and jade. It is waaay too big to see everything in one visit!
On our visit to the new location in the east, we borrowed some audioguide devices and went through the ceramics gallery and the jade gallery—and that was all we had time and energy for before dinner.
Casting around for a restaurant, we wound up at what turns out to be Tripadvisor’s first-ranked mid-range dinner restaurant recommendation for the whole city of Shanghai! It’s a Turkish restaurant called Efes, and it was fantastic.
See below for photos of the museum, lots of porcelain, and a bit of jade. Plus, read about what I discovered when I looked through photos from my visit to the old Shanghai Museum in 2010.
Continue reading The Shanghai Museum