Orient Orientation: I hope I don’t come back as a cicada

Catching up on some of my posts today. Here are my adventures from Saturday, October 6, 2012.

My intended itinerary was to walk to a few streets with great architecture recommended to me by someone who lived in Shanghai for eight years. The Shanghai Museum was on the way to those streets, so I thought, “why not see how bad the lines are today?” Hardly any lines at all, despite the same sign about a one-hour wait for entrance that I saw the previous day. This is not to say that the museum wasn’t crowded, it was—Chinese, foreigners in tour groups, small children everywhere. The museum is a popular place.

Jasweck in front of the museum.

Established in 1952, the museum houses about one million pieces in its collection in categories such as artifacts of China’s ethnic minorities, jade and ivory works, ancient Chinese currencies, ceramics, calligraphy, paintings, and seals. Exhibits throughout the four floors of the museum give visitors a glimpse into China’s long and artistic history. Most of the informational signs within each exhibit are presented in Chinese and English, and pamphlets for each exhibit are available in Chinese, Japanese, and English. The museum also has audio guides in a wider variety of languages.

One of my favorite galleries was the Chinese Minority Nationalities’ Art Gallery. Of China’s 1.3 billion people, about 92% are ethnic Han, and the remaining 8% consist of 55 other ethnic groups. The gallery reminded me a bit of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. (but on a much smaller scale), with traditional clothing, textiles, crafts, and metal and wood works on display for the various ethnic groups.

My favorite costume in the exhibit. Men's embroidered outfit from the Yi ethnic group
in the late 20th century. Unfortunately, the sign with the exhibit did not explain the
purpose of the decorated stick protruding from the headdress.

Polychromatic batik decorative apron (top) and batik quilt facing (bottom).
Miao ethnic group, late 20th century.

Folding wooden bookshelf. Uygur ethnic group.

Tibetan mask.

The Ancient Chinese Jade Gallery was also interesting. Of the over 300 pieces of jade displayed in the gallery, spanning from the Neolithic Age to the more recent Ming and Qing dynasties, it was the jade cicada that caught my attention. During the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) Jade carved in the shape of a cicada was placed in the mouth of the deceased upon burial to express the wish of those still living that the deceased would revive as a cicada.

Jade cicada.
Photo courtesy of the website of San Francisco's Asian Art Museum.

By far, I think my favorite galleries were those for Chinese Calligraphy and Chinese Painting. My mother, who is currently taking a course on these subjects, would have a better understanding of the progression of styles than I did and would have recognized many of the calligraphers and artists. Despite a lack of knowledge in this area, you can’t help but stand in awe of the beauty of not only the finished works in the gallery, but of the skill and spirit of the artists that are expressed in each brush stroke.

Who says Chinese calligraphers didn't use guidelines?

A trio of hanging scrolls.

Album leaves by Zhao Zhiqian. Qing dynasty.

Another album leaf.

Bamboo.

Flowers and Fruits handscroll by Xu Wei. Ming dynasty.

Three hours in a museum seems to be my limit (for both attention span and ability to move among huge groups of people), so I left through the museum shop and purchased a few postcards—the first postcards I’ve seen in China! When I was in Shanghai back in June, I could not find postcards anywhere—not in the hotel shop, not in stores on the popular shopping streets.

Anyway, it was approaching dinnertime when I left the museum, so I started out in search of a vegetarian restaurant, with pictures and English on its menu, that I found online. It was a good 45-minute walk to get there, but when I arrived, I was told that the restaurant was temporarily closed. Great. I looked at the other restaurants I had plotted on my city map. They were all too far from the hotel given my state of semi-exhaustion by that point.

So another 45-minute walk later, I ended up sharing a table with a Chinese couple at Ajisen Ramen (a Japanese noodle place) on Nanjing Road, close to my hotel. I had eaten there with colleagues back in June, and liked the atmosphere, service, food selection, and prices. For 45RMB (about $8), I got a tall, refreshing mango juice and a bowl of noodles with a variety of mushrooms and vegetables.