Shanghai Natural History Museum

The Shanghai Natural History Museum (上海自然博物馆, Shànghǎi Zìrán Bówùguǎn) at 510 West Beijing Road is the city’s main natural history museum, in a new building inside Jing’an Sculpture Park. Go for the specimens, from a whale skeleton to a long-necked dinosaur, and for a building designed to look like a shell. No official hours page was reached when this entry was written, so check ahead.

The museum’s history has two addresses. Chinese Wikipedia says work on the first museum began in 1958, at 260 East Yan’an Road, inside a former exchange building. The sources name it differently: Chinese Wikipedia calls it the Shanghai Chinese Merchants Yarn and Cloth Exchange (华商纱布交易所), while English Wikipedia calls it the Shanghai Cotton Exchange Building and dates it to 1923. That museum closed on 12 May 2014. Chinese Wikipedia calls it China’s largest natural history museum, with more than 260,000 items.

The new building opened on 18 April 2015 and welcomed the public the next day, according to Chinese Wikipedia. It was designed jointly by the American firm Perkins and Will and the Tongji University Architectural Design and Research Institute, at a stated cost of 1.3 billion yuan. Its floor area is given as 45,257 square metres by Chinese Wikipedia and 44,517 by English Wikipedia, so treat either figure as approximate. The outline resembles a giant nautilus, which gives the building its nickname, the Green Snail (绿螺), and the east facade carries planting.

Inside, Chinese Wikipedia puts the collection at more than 280,000 items, mostly specimens. A fin whale skeleton 24 metres long, finished on 9 December 2021, is described as the longest of its kind in China. English Wikipedia lists a Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis skeleton about 140 million years old and over four storeys high, a Yellow River mammoth, a giant salamander, a giant panda and a Yangtze alligator. The English page gives the collection as about 240,000 samples, a different total from the Chinese page.

Show the Chinese address on this page to a taxi driver. The old Yan’an Road building is no longer a museum, so make sure maps point to the Jing’an Sculpture Park site.