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Links between a nation's past and future

Pallavi Aiyar

An ongoing exhibition in Beijing highlights India's rich past, but it also spotlights China's impressive present. Whatever the problems with the Chinese way, India has much to learn from it.

GRACEFUL PARVATIS hewn out of stone; bronze Natarajas, powerful and elementally male; rotund Ganeshas; serene Buddhas; and coquettish apsaras: thousands of years of Indian history brought to life and lit to perfection. The two-month-long exhibition of the "Treasures of ancient India" currently open at the Beijing Capital Museum is a visual feast, displaying some 100 antiquities from between the 3rd century BC and 18th century AD.

The awe with which Chinese visitors to the exhibition take in the artistry of the pieces should be a source of deep pride for any Indian who happens to be present. But instead of pride there is a sense of embarrassment.

The pieces have been gathered from the obscurity of musty, under-funded, genteelly crumbling museums across India — Nalanda, Amarvati, Deogarh, Sarnath — and given the kind of limelight they deserve, but in Beijing not New Delhi.

Each sculpture in the exhibition is mounted with care and illuminated with sophistication. Deep blue fabrics, elegantly draped and backlit in buttery hues, form the backdrop for the exhibits. Interspersing the pieces are luminous large-scale photographs of India's top historical and archaeological sites. Interactive touch-screen displays provide detailed information on every piece and its corresponding period of history, at the tap of a fingertip. This is world-class museology.

Thus, even as the exhibition highlights India's rich past, it also spotlights China's impressive present. A present where after years of neglect and even harm, museums are being reinstated as spaces that serve as a country's soul and form a vital link between a nation's history and its future.

China is not known for its museums. Given the country's recent history of revolution, its attitude to its own past has been complicated. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) an attempt to destroy everything associated with China's imperial past led to the widespread loss of historical treasures.

Even after the start of economic reforms, Chinese museums remained neglected, in similar condition to those south of the Himalayas in India. The typical Chinese museum in the 1990s was a motley collection of badly labelled, dust-gathering objects lumped together in austere whitewashed rooms.

The majority of China's ancient artefacts remained locked away in the vaults of the Forbidden City museum, due to the lack of ability to preserve them properly and for want of an appropriate space in which to display them. It was in London and Washington DC, not Shanghai and Beijing, that Sinophiles could get a quality fix of Chinese antiquities.

In both China and India, nationalistic rhetoric claimed back lost treasures "plundered" by colonial powers over the centuries. But when the countries themselves could do little with these treasures save either lock them away or consign them to neglect, at least the former colonial powers did the antiquities justice and allowed people from across the world to admire them in the way they deserved.

For decades, good museums have been the monopoly of the West. In addition to allowing peoples to understand and take pride in their own and the wider world's history, these have generated top tourist dollars and occasionally transformed the fortunes of otherwise obscure cities (think Bilbao and the Guggenheim).

As China opens up to the world, it is anxious to project itself as a modern nation and architectural prestige projects are part of this effort. Many of the shiny new buildings in gravity defying designs that are mushrooming across China's major cities have to do with the arts. Museums are, in fact, the big beneficiaries of this building spree, combining as they do prestige with commercial potential.

Thus, while most cities would be satisfied if able to open a multimillion-dollar museum once a decade, Beijing just unveiled two in this past year — the Beijing Capital Museum and the Museum of Chinese Film. Only a year earlier, another top quality museum, the Beijing Urban Planning Museum, opened its gates just south-east of Tiananmen Square.

Among future plans is the construction of a new wing for the China National Art Museum and an expansion of the National Museum that when complete would make it the largest museum in the world. The 1.8 billion yuan ($221.9 million) expansion project is expected to finish by 2010.

In fact, the Chinese capital announced an investment of 7 billion yuan ($854 million) in building and renovating museums between 2003 and 2008. In 2003, Beijing had a total of 118 registered museums. Its goal was to increase this number to 130 by the time it hosted the Olympic Games in 2008, a goal already reached this year, two years ahead of time.

Beijing is not even the museum capital of China. It may have the most in number but Shanghai's outdo Beijing's in quality. The two best museums in China are by far The Shanghai Museum and the Shanghai City Planning Museum.

The Shanghai Museum's modernisation began in 1992 and $542 million later was completed in 1996. It is a compact museum but with a superb and alluringly idiosyncratic collection of ancient Chinese bronzes, Ming and Qing furniture, jades, ceramics, and calligraphy. The calligraphy display room is installed with motion-sensitive lights, so that each exhibit is softly lit as the visitor stands in front of it. Once the visitor moves on, the lights slowly dim. A superb audio guide in Chinese and English is also available to give in-depth information on a selection of the exhibits.

Recently the Shanghai government announced plans to build 100 new museums by 2010 when the city will hold the World Expo.

And it's not only the big cities that have been overcome with museum fever. This correspondent has visited excellent, newly renovated museums in cities from Wenzhou in the south to Zhengzhou in the centre. Even the northern city of Shenyang, little known to the outside world, has decided to build, a la Shanghai, 100 new museums to add to its existing 20 over the next four years. According to Xinhua news agency, a spokesperson for the Shenyang government said the reason behind this planned museum extravaganza was the "need to polish the city's image."

The criticism

Critics complain that China's new appetite for museums is only skin deep. While driven by "image considerations" glitzy, impressive buildings may be going up across the country, the contents housed inside are often of dubious value. China's recent history remains largely unexamined in these museums and troubling questions are ignored. A unitary, "official" interpretation of the past, lacking nuance, is usually all that is on offer.

Moreover, the majority of China's museums still lack professionally trained curators and while exhibits are increasingly mounted with skill, they sometimes lack sufficient explanatory information. Exquisite objects might simply be marked as "stone artefact," for example, without further information regarding dates or origins.

Added to all this, there is also the troubling attitude still common in China that accords an uncritical primacy to modernity even at the expense of its history. In the Beijing Capital Museum, for example, there are several reconstructions of the graceful courtyard homes traditional to the Chinese capital.

Living as your correspondent does in one such home, she can't help but ponder the irony of a situation where the authorities are bulldozing genuine historic architectural treasures to rubble in the name of the Olympic Games, while at the same time making fake ones for a museum. Almost all of Beijing's courtyard homes have in the last decade been demolished to make way for expensive new developments, so that after having survived centuries they are today on the verge of extinction.

Nonetheless, while China's museums may still have some way to go to being truly world-class, what's impressive is both how far they have come along in recent years as well as the attention they are getting from local governments. China, like India, has no dearth of stunning antiquities given its 5,000-year history. And now it is finally building spaces where these proud pieces can be displayed.

Whatever the remaining problems with Chinese museums, it's doubtful the Natarajas, Parvatis, and Buddhas on display in Beijing are complaining. For them, the next two months are a time of luxury only dreamt of back home.

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