Shanghai Museum

Our first morning in Shanghai, Nancy and I followed advice and traveled by taxi to the Shanghai Museum. The museum is located in People’s Square, in the center of the city. Besides the museum, People’s Square houses municipal and other public buildings. It’s brightly landscaped with flowers, though Nancy and I had a hard time taking in the view since rain was pouring down (remnants of the typhoon).

Visiting Shanghai Museum turns out to be a great way to begin touring the city, especially on a rainy day. The building is round, and the exterior resembles a giant steamed bun basket. Inside is tranquil and cool. Our guidebook describes it as airless, but we didn’t find it so.

We managed to view two thirds of the collection before Nancy’s teaching schedule required us to return to the hotel. Ancient bronzes were interesting, but the ceramic exhibit was most attractive to me. Many years ago I learned the business of pottery — the wheel work, the oxides, the firing methods — from my husband the potter. (I met my husband when I took his pottery class at Stanford.) Nancy and I followed the display through the ages of ceramics in China, while I mentally compared what I was seeing with the ceramic museum Wayne and I visited in North Carolina. The art and technique of creating hand crafted ceramics never seems to change: the model kiln displayed in Shanghai Museum looks just like the one in North Carolina, even though they’re modeled on distant cultures separated by centuries.

And as we passed by Shanghai Museum’s large-scale re-creation of a reduction kiln — which includes realistic sound and lighting effects — I was immediately transported to that point in time 25 years ago when I first realized that Wayne intended to stay up all night kiln-sitting, and he wouldn’t listen to my reasonable argument that we could leave the kiln alone for a little while so we could at least get something to eat.

Speaking of which, though Nancy and I were thoroughly impressed by the Shanghai Museum, we do not recommend its restaurant. Next time — we intend to return, sometime in the next couple of days — we’ll try the tea and pasty shop on the second floor.