The museum was established in 2003 by the merging of the two separate museums that had occupied the same building since 1959: the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in the northern wing and the National Museum of Chinese History in the southern wing. The building was completed in 1959 as one of the Ten Great Buildings celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. It complements the opposing Great Hall of the People that was built at the same time. The structure sits on and has a frontal length of, a height of four stories totaling, and a width of. The front displays ten square pillars at its center. , in 2014|alt=A large whitish interior space with a very high ceiling lit by many windows on its left stretches off into the far background. There are people walking around within. At left in the foreground is a large dark wooden model of a round three-tiered pagoda After four years of renovation, the museum reopened on March 17, 2011, with 28 new exhibition halls, more than triple the previous exhibition space, and state of the art exhibition and storage facilities. It has a total floor space of nearly 200,000 m2 to display. The renovations were designed by the German firm Gerkan, Marg and Partners.
Collections
The museum, covering Chinese history from the Yuanmou Man of 1.7 million years ago to the end of the Qing Dynasty, has a permanent collection of 1,050,000 items, with many precious and rare artifacts not to be found in museums anywhere else in China or the rest of the world. Among the most important items in the National Museum of China are the "Simuwu Ding" from the Shang Dynasty, the square shaped Shang Dynasty bronze zun decorated with four sheep heads, a large and rare inscribed Western Zhou Dynasty bronze water pan, a gold-inlaid Qin Dynasty bronze tally in the shape of a tiger, Han Dynastyjade burial suits sewn with gold thread, and a comprehensive collection of Tang Dynasty tri-colored glazed sancai and Song Dynasty ceramics. The museum also has an important numismatic collection, including 15,000 coins donated by Luo Bozhao. The museum has a permanent exhibition called The Road to Rejuvenation, which presents the recent history of China since the beginning of the First Opium War, with an emphasis on the history of the Communist Party and its political achievements.
A three-month exhibition of the luxury brandLouis Vuitton in 2011 led to some complaints of commercialism at the museum, with Peking University professor Xia Xueluan stating that as a state-level public museum, it "should in fact only be dedicating itself to non-profit cultural promotion." Yves Carcelle, chairman and chief executive officer of Louis Vuitton Malletier, defended the exhibition by stating: "What's important is what you are going to discover. I think before money, there's history: 157 years of creativity and craftsmanship." Some critics have also alleged the museum's modern historiography tends to focus on the triumphs of the Communist Party, while minimizing or ignoring politically sensitive subjects such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
