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Wuxi City Museum

 

The Wuxi City Museum, located at the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province, is a local comprehensive museum of China. It was prepared in 1957 on the basis of the Exhibition of Relics Unearthed during the Capital Construction Engineering of Wuxi City. It was completed and opened to the public in August in 1958 at the Zhaozhong Memorial Hall of Huishan Mountain, moved to the new site at Heliekou and opened to the public in March 1986. The new Museum is a polygonal modern building. Zhou Peiyuan's Painting Collection Hall is inside the Museum while Zhou Huaimin's Painting Collection Hall is located at the north side of the new Museum.

The Museum has collected over 10,000 items of collection, including ceramics, stone and jade articles, gold vessel and silverware, lacquerware and wooden articles, carvings, painting and calligraphy, embroidery and revolutionary relics, of which over 100 items belong to Class One Collection. The relics are mainly local historic relics and painting and calligraphy. The rare collections include the porcelain Zun (a kind of wine vessel used in ancient times) from the Western Zhou Dynasty (c.1100-771BC), the black enameled pot with a chicken's head from the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-320), wooden figurines from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the plum-colored stove in the shape of Li (ancient cooking tripod with hollow legs) from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), the gold and silver household utensils and jade jewelry from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), the paper money from the Yuan Dynasty, the Collection of Yulin (Fish Scale) from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1391), the white porcelain bowl from the end of the Ming Dynasty and the painted clay figurines of Flat Peach Party from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The modern relics feature the national industrial, commercial and revolutionary relics of Wuxi. The collections of painting and calligraphy are rather plentiful. The rare collections include the Huanianjing (a Buddhist scripture) in Kaishu (a regular script in Chinese calligraphy) from the Song Dynasty; the Painting of Four Happiness from the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279); Zhao Mengfu's Copy of Lantingxu in Xingshu (running hand in Chinese calligraphy) and the Painting of Moss Mark and Tree Shadow by Ni Zan from the Yuan Dynasty; the Painting of Singing at Mountain Foot When Drunk by Xu Ben from the turn of the Yuan Dynasty and beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the Personally Written Order of King Wu by Zhu Yuanzhang, the emperor of the Ming Dynasty; Xu Youzhen's Cihan Volume in Caoshu (a form of Chinese calligraphy), Tang Yin's Painting of Solitary Walker in Autumn Forest and Dong Qichang's Painting of Mountain Dwelling from the Ming Dynasty; and Hong Ren's Painting of Rock Terrain at Shuke and Hui Shouping's Painting of Camellias and Winter Sweet from the Qing Dynasty. The collections of painting and calligraphy in the Museum also include the artworks of native artists of Wuxi through the ages such as Wang Fu's Painting of Withered Tree, Bamboo and Rocks from the Ming Dynasty and Zou Yigui's Painting of Five Men of Virtue and Qin Yi's Painting of Furong Lake from the Qing Dynasty as well as the rare collections of modern paintings and calligraphies by Qu Guandai, Hu Tinglu, Ding Baoshu, Qin Guliu and He Tianjian.

The basic exhibition of the Museum is the Display of Wuxi History, divided into the ancient Wuxi and the modern Wuxi. On display are over 500 items of exhibits supplemented with photos, charts, models and captions, reflecting in a concentrated way the brief history of development of Wuxi from the primitive society to the founding of the People's Republic of China. The Museum holds frequently exhibitions with its collections on various kinds of special topics such as painting and calligraphy, ceramics, coins, handicraft articles, the clay figurines of Huishan Mountain as well as the revolutionary relics and materials, over one hundred exhibitions in total since the founding of the Museum.

The publications edited or published by the Museum are the Paintings Collected by Zhou Peiyuan, the Paintings Collected by Zhou Huaimin, the Painting and Calligraphy Collections of Wuxi Country Worthies through the Ages, the Catalog Index of Papers on Wu (a name for an area comprising southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang) Culture, the Volume 3 of the Selections of Cultural Materials of Wu and a quarterly the Wuxi Wenbou.