But if their interests on the cultural revolution, which tore the country apart from 1966 to 1976 and resulted in millions of deaths do, need to search a rear corner of the two million square foot museum, the opening is completed this month for a single photograph and three lines of text, which are the only reference to this era.
No less grand - serves China more than a decade and nearly $ 400 million, which remake, a monument to his rising National Museum in a leading showcase of the history and culture, are the world's largest museum under one roof - and sustainable as the Olympic Games in 2008.
But a tradition was set in place: China will confront not his own history. The Museum is less the product of extensive research, discovery, or creativity as the most famous symbol of the Communist Party of China's efforts to control of the narrative of the history and suppress alternative points of view, even those that are present in the ruling elite. It is also an example for such as China, it is difficult to create cultural institutions which prove equal to its economic achievements.
With participants tortured reconstruction describe one interviews, longer than planned, constantly revised in the year with plans to political twists and turns, accommodate pulled decided many personally by top party leaders.
Proposals for a permanent historical exhibition discussed the disasters of the early Communist rule have killed would rejected - in particular the great leap forward, a political campaign and resulting famine, the more than 20 million officials. Some organizers wanted an honest assessment of the cultural revolution, a decade-long attack on the traditional culture and learning, but this effort was squashed.
Instead, the authorities decided that the exhibition should concentrate contemporary China, such as the Museum before its extensive makeover, on the party triumphs.
Another permanent exhibition, presented at China's ancient history, an idealized version of the past. It tells the uplifting story of the Chinese ethnic groups together to draw create "brilliant services."
"The party will determine historical truth," said Yang Jisheng, a historian whose book front famine in China was banned on the big jump to. "It is ensure that if competing versions are allowed, then their legitimacy in question will be put."
Many countries are not their history as to independent historians consider fully credible. American museums were under pressure to allow more fully for slavery. American Indians won a long battle to open her own Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.c.; other museums celebrate the westward expansion of the United States but give short verstell-and killing the Indians.
Nevertheless, only a few countries with China can compete to suppress to shades of gray about her past. One result is that the Chinese public rare access to the Internet to versions of history, that differ from party propaganda and public support for some nationalist causes sometimes even stronger than his own party is attitudes. Many Chinese are confused, such as claims that some Tibetans and Uighurs are dissatisfied with Chinese rule or Japanese and Taiwanese may have different perceptions of China in their territory.
This means that the National Museum, China's long history has granted unlimited access to the treasures and relics, have not succeeded, the political constraints to escape, which for centuries hobbled the study of Chinese history. Then, as today ruler uses history to present, to make a theme that has marked almost every era.
"A public museum in China rarely about the past," said Hung Chang-Tai, Professor at the Hong Kong University of science and technology, who has written about the Museum. "It is about the current image of the party and as the party itself seen to be."
The red line
The National Museum has its roots in the Communist Party of China's wish for a legacy. In his memoirs Wang Yeqiu remembers, the Director of the Museum accession was, entered Beijing in 1949 Communist forces as they and make just used for a prison to a scaffold in 1927, one of the founding members of the party are to secure. The framework was the first element in the collection of the Museum. But its opening in 1959 was marred by a problem that would keep track of it to the present - politics. Prime Minister Zhou Enlai visited which proposed exhibition and it does not emphasize the "red line", said: the line of thought of Mao, the country's top leader.
In the next few decades, the Museum closed spent more time than open. It officially opened 1961, then closed at the beginning of the cultural revolution in 1966, reopening in 1979 and was then through a series of closings and openings as a leader for an interpretation of the past, that they could accept. The exhibition of contemporary history, closed for the good began in 2001 as civil servants, to see the Museum as an anachronism, to promote that no modern image to outside. In the same year Beijing won its bid for the Olympic Games 2008 and officials were concerned that the capital would not be a worthy host. A year earlier, a British Research Institute in Beijing a city rated third level on a par with Warsaw and Bangkok. The report was widely discussed with officials that Beijing had no notable museums or galleries in China.
Zhang Jing contributed research.
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