Nanjing Museum

Nanjing Museum

Nanjing Museum

The Nanjing Museum is located within the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing. It is a comprehensive museum reflecting the history and culture of Nanjing and serves as a patriotic education base for both Jiangsu Province and Nanjing City. For over half a century, the Nanjing Museum has been responsible for underground archaeological excavations in the Nanjing area, collecting scattered cultural relics, exhibiting and preserving artifacts, conducting scientific research, and carrying out educational and promotional activities. The museum houses over 100,000 cultural relics, which collectively reflect the historical and cultural characteristics of the ancient capital, Nanjing.

The museum site, Chaotian Palace, is the highest-ranked, largest, and best-preserved ancient architectural complex in the Jiangnan region. The name “Chaotian Palace” was bestowed by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang of the Ming Dynasty. During the Ming Dynasty, it served as a place where officials and their sons practiced court etiquette before imperial ceremonies and inheritance rites, and it also functioned as a Taoist temple. In the Qing Dynasty, it became a Confucian temple. After years of restoration, the ancient buildings of Chaotian Palace have regained their former glory. The display of the museum’s precious cultural relics, set against the backdrop of these majestic historic structures, makes it a shining gem in modern Nanjing.

The various cultural relics housed in the museum bear witness to different historical periods of Nanjing and are distinctly local in character. Notably, the fossils of Nanjing Erectus from the mid-Middle Pleistocene period, and relics from Neolithic sites such as Yingpan Mountain and Xuecheng, are particularly unique. The quantity and quality of cultural relics from the Six Dynasties, Ming Dynasty, and Republic of China periods have drawn attention from experts and scholars both in China and abroad.