Guangdong Museum

Guangdong Museum
广东省博物馆

Address: 2 East Zhujiang Road,Tianhe district, Guangzhou, Guangdong province
Hours: 9:00 - 17:00(no entry after 16:00)
Closed Mondays (except for national holidays)
General admission: Free (passport required for entry)

The Guangdong Museum is a comprehensive provincial museum. It was originally installed at the former site of the local Examination Office of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in 1957.In 2003 construction began on the new building in Zhujiang New Town. Close to the Pearl River and situated between the Guangzhou Opera House to the west and the Central Drive to the east,the new museum has a planned area of 41,000 square meters and a construction area of 63,000 sq m.

The building was designed as a rectangular container, with the exterior space’s design inspired by the carved ivory ball which is a traditional handicraft in Guangdong province.

By 2016, the museum had a collection of over 172,700 relics, including 130,785 cultural relics and old books and 41,960 natural specimens and mineral stones. The collections of ceramics, paintings, and calligraphy works in the museum are among the best in China in terms of both quantity and quality. The museum has the finest collections of unearthed cultural relics in Guangdong province, along with gilded woodcarvings and Duan inkstone.

In recent years, the museum has increasingly focused on surveying and collecting folk art from the three main regional ethnic inhabitants (Cantonese, Hakka and Chaoshan people) in order to improve the quality of the museum's collections and strengthen local cultural characteristics.