As well as shopping last weekend, I did some last minute sightseeing in Shanghai and Suzhou. I visited two very different museums in both cities. The differences lay in the buildings they museums were housed in as well as the content inside them. The first museum was the Natural History Museum of Shanghai, which is housed at the bottom of the Oriental Pearl Tower, probably Shanghai’s best known landmark in the busy skyline. Inside the museum were a series of recreations of different scenes from Shanghai’s past. The English captions were pretty good but the whole thing was a little bit kitsch.
Oriental Pearl Tower in Pudong, Shanghai
Opium smoking wax work men
Mural of old Shanghai
The second museum was the new Suzhou Museum, located in a small alleyway off the main street of Suzhou. IM Pei, who is known for designing the Lourve in Paris, designed the new building for housing the Suzhou collections. The building is simply stunning and I found it much more intriguing than many of the collections inside. My favourite collections were the tiny jade, ivory and bamboo sculptures. The outside garden at the museum was also beautiful and I can imagine it would be very peaceful, had there not been so many people.
Suzhou Museum
Suzhou Museum
Hallways at Suzhou Museum
Guard admires the view into the bamboo garden
Stone carving of Buddha
Black jade carving
Ivory carving
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