The Shandong Museum () is the principal museum of

Shandong Shandong ( , ; ; alternately romanized as Shantung) is a coastal province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the East China region. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history since the beginning of Chinese civilizati ...

Province A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or sovereign state, state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''Roman province, provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire ...

. It is located in the City of

Jinan Jinan (), Postal Map Romanization, alternately romanization of Chinese, romanized as Tsinan, is the Capital (political), capital of Shandong province in East China, Eastern China. With a population of 9.2 million, it is the second-largest city i ...

, China. It is one of the

largest Large means of great size. Large may also refer to: Mathematics * Arbitrarily large, a phrase in mathematics * Large cardinal, a property of certain transfinite numbers * Large category, a category with a proper class of objects and morphisms (o ...

museums in the country. The Shandong Museum occupies a building with 82,900 square meters of spaceOfficial web site (in Chinese)
/ref> and houses a collection of more than 210,000 historical artifacts. Highlights of the historical collection include relics from the

neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts ...

Dawenkou and Longshan cultures,

bronze Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids such ...

artifacts from the

Shang The Shang dynasty (), also known as the Yin dynasty (), was a Chinese royal dynasty founded by Tang of Shang (Cheng Tang) that ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and f ...

and Zhou Dynasties, stone carvings from the

Han Dynasty The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a warr ...

, and paintings from the

Ming The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last ort ...

and

Qing The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speaki ...

Dynasties. The natural history section features fossils from

Shanwang The Shanwang National Geology Park () is located in central Shandong province, People's Republic of China, about from Linqu County. It has an area of about . The Park is well known for its fossil bearing diatomitic deposits, one of only a few such ...

and a fossil skeleton of

Shantungosaurus ''Shantungosaurus'' (meaning "''Shandong Lizard''") is a genus of very large saurolophine hadrosaurid dinosaur found in the Late Cretaceous Wangshi Group of the Shandong Peninsula in China, containing a single species, ''Shantungosaurus giganteu ...

. The forerunner of the Shandong Museum, the Yidu Museum, was established by the British Baptist missionary John Sutherland Whitewright in

Qingzhou Qingzhou () Wade–Giles: Tsing-chou, sometimes written as Ching-chow-fu, formerly Yidu County (Yitu) (), is a county-level city, which is located in the west of the prefecture-level city of Weifang, in the central part of Shandong Province, Chin ...

in 1887. The museum moved to Jinan in 1904 and was renamed to Guangzhi Yuan. In 1942, the museum expanded to a building in the compound of the

Red Swastika Society The Red Swastika Society () is a voluntary association founded in China in 1922 by Qian Nengxun (錢能訓), Du Bingyin (杜秉寅) and Li Jiabai (李佳白). Together with the organisation's president Li JianChiu (李建秋), they set up their e ...

on Shangxin Street. When the Shandong Provincial Museum () was founded in 1954, its collection of historical artifacts occupied the compound of the Red Swastika Society, whereas the Guangzhi Yuan housed its natural history collection. In August 1991, construction on a new building for the museum started in the south of Jinan, at the intersection of Li Shan Road and Jing Shiyi Road, near the Thousand Buddha Hill. The building was completed in October 1992, its street address is: Number 14 Jing Shiyi Road, Lixia District, Jinan. In December 2007, ground was broken for a new, significantly larger museum located on Yaojia Street in the Lixia District to the southeast of Jinan's city center. This new museum building was opened to the public on November 16, 2010. The official name of the new museum was shortened from "Shandong Provincial Museum" to "Shandong Museum".

References

Museums in Shandong Natural history museums in China Tourist attractions in Jinan National first-grade museums of China {{PRChina-museum-stub

See also

References