Culture
Museums across China have unveiled new exhibitions to mark International Museum Day on Sunday, offering visitors diverse cultural treasures and experiences.
Beijing inaugurated its first Museum Festival, which kicked off on May 18 and will run through October 8. Nearly 300 museums in the Chinese capital will present over 200 exhibitions and more than 1,000 events.
The Festival is expected to attract flocks of visitors during peak travel times, including the summer and National Day holidays.
One of the highlights is an exhibition held at the Grand Canal Museum in Tongzhou, Beijing's sub-center in its northwestern part of the Green Heart area.
Named "This is the Shang," it features 338 artifacts of the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC) selected from 28 cultural institutions across the country, including 54 national first-class and key artifacts.
The Hebei Museum, partnering with the Shaanxi History Museum, launched an exhibition on Saturday displaying the treasures of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). It features 220 sets of Tang Dynasty artifacts unearthed in Shaanxi and Hebei provinces, spotlighting the era's various aspects of life, from daily routines to cultural entertainment.
One of the attractions is a gold bowl adorned with mandarin ducks and lotus petals, a prized possession of the Shaanxi History Museum excavated from the Hejia Village site.
"From its material and craftsmanship to its decorative patterns, it represents the highest level of gold and silverware production in the Tang Dynasty," said Zhai Xiaolan, an associate research librarian at the Shaanxi History Museum.
In northeast China's Liaoning Province, the provincial museum started to exhibit 260 sets of artifacts related to Dunhuang on Sunday, 90 percent of which debuted to the public for the first time.
"Liaoning is one of the repositories of cultural relics from the Dunhuang Library Cave. The Dunhuang manuscripts collected by the Liaoning Provincial Museum date from the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589) to the Five Dynasties (907-960). It includes important rare and unique copies, holding significant value for historical and literary research," said Guo Dan, a research librarian.
The exhibition will run for three months, and the Liaoning Provincial Museum will extend its opening hours to 8:00 p.m.