ABSTRACT
The universe of the provincial museum was the nation. (Fitzgerald 1996: 53)
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the city of Shanghai, the largest in China, was home to perhaps one million Taiwanese. The People’s Republic’s most modern metropolis also boasted the country’s showpiece modern museum. Inspired by the shape of an ancient Chinese bronze vessel – the ding – the Shanghai Museum embodied in its architecture, its state-of-the-art exhibition rooms, and the artefacts on display therein, a vision of a Chinese modernity that incorporates and transcends the nation’s ancient cultural heritage. The Taiwanese visitor would perhaps be struck by the superiority of the Shanghai Museum’s exhibition rooms in comparison to their dingy counterparts in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, but might also reflect on a more fundamental similarity between the two institutions. Both were designed to symbolize the claims of their respective cities to stand triumphantly at the pinnacle of a Chinese cultural tradition stretching unbroken into the immemorial past.
