A Round Heaven and a Square Earth

After my normal routine of 2 hours of phone calls home and responding to e-mail, on the strong recommendation of my friend Amy Xu, who refers to Shanghai as her home town, I went to the Shanghai Museum.

Artifacts from 5,000 years of Chinese history are housed in a building completed in 1995 with a design that symbolizes A Round Heaven and A Square Earth. The buildings surrounding the museum give no sense of the historical nature of its displays. This area of Shanghai is new, spotless and futuristic and belies the contrast that you normally see in any short walk around the city.



As I walked into the first gallery, it was a collection of Grand Masters on tour from the Prado in Spain. Fabulous, but not what I had come here to see. The other galleries contained artifacts, from currency, to pottery, to sculpture and of course lots of jade. It is amazing how you can sense the development of a country’s sophistication by the development of their coins.

Leaving the museum, I had planned to go back to the Yu Gardens, but was approached by a young woman. My initial reaction was she was selling something, since Americans and Europeans are easy targets to identify. As it turned out, she and two of her friends had traveled 15 hours by train from Xi’an on holiday for their first visit to Shanghai. They just wanted to practice their English and talk. We walked to the People’s Park and then went to a Tea House for something to drink. Although we all stumbled over pronunciation, it was a delightful culturally enhancing afternoon.