Rain over the Mersey had stopped by the time the doors opened on the evening of October 9. The setting was the central hall of the World Museum in Liverpool, part of National Museums Liverpool and a building with 170 years behind it. Called Yun Jin Yi Du, the show taking the space is a Shanghai intangible cultural heritage exhibition, and it is the first time this particular touring programme has reached Britain.
For anyone raised in Shanghai and now living in the north of England, the pairing is less arbitrary than it looks. Liverpool and Shanghai are both port cities, shaped by docks, shipping and the movement of goods and people, and the organisers frame the exhibition as a continuation of that relationship rather than an import.
A Guest List of Two Countries
More than 100 guests from both countries came to the opening. On the Chinese side were Tang Rui, consul general in Manchester; Zhang Li, director of the China National Tourist Office in London; Li Lingchao, head of overseas Chinese affairs at the consulate; Li Jing, head of the cultural relics division at the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism; Hu Muqing, chairman of the Shanghai Art Collection Museum; Shen Jie, director of the Shanghai Art Research Centre; and Guo Guangwu, deputy party secretary of the Shanghai Arts and Design Academy.
On the Liverpool side were Andrea Nixon, chair of the board of National Museums Liverpool; Nick Small, deputy mayor and deputy leader of the city council; Andrew Lewis, the council’s chief executive; Gary Millar, a former Lord Mayor and chair of the Liverpool China Partnership; Dr Ashley Cooke, head of the World Museum; Jo Brooke, executive director for audiences and media at National Museums Liverpool; and the directors of the Lady Lever Art Gallery and Sudley House, the Walker Art Gallery, the Museum of Liverpool, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the International Slavery Museum. The mayor and deputy mayor met the Chinese delegation shortly before the opening.
Joint hosts are the Shanghai Art Collection Museum, the Shanghai Arts and Design Academy, the Shanghai Art Research Centre and National Museums Liverpool. Support came from the Shanghai administration of culture and tourism, the Chinese consulate in Manchester, the China National Tourist Office in London, Liverpool City Council and the Liverpool China Partnership, with the Shanghai Mass Art Centre and the Songjiang district culture and tourism bureau as co-organisers and Juneyao Air and Shanghai Zhongchuan Construction Group as sponsors.
Tea, a Song-Dynasty Guqin and a Donated Painting
First came a Shanghai tourism film and a retrospective reel from earlier stops on the tour, with Hu Muqing and Dr Lou Qionglin of the Shanghai Art Collection Museum hosting. Hannah Malik, culture director at the British Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, sent a letter of congratulations. Nixon gave the welcome address, and Tang Rui and Nick Small followed with remarks.
Performances kept to the crafts on display. Zhang Wenhua, a tea specialist, worked through a tea service on stage. Gong Xiaoning, principal player at the Juneyao Guqin Hall, performed on a Northern Song instrument named Baobo, a thousand-year-old piece that travelled to Liverpool for the evening. Dong Yichi and Zhang Yihan followed on bamboo flute and pipa.
Before the guests moved into the galleries, the Shanghai Art Collection Museum donated a painting by the Chinese artist Song Hua, Dance of Spring, to National Museums Liverpool for its permanent collection. Delegates from both countries then wrote lines of good wishes to open the exhibition, and the guests walked the display with Zhang Li, an inheritor of Gu embroidery, demonstrating the stitch on site. Tang Rui said the show gathered the best of Shanghai’s intangible heritage and traditional art, and that he hoped more British visitors would come to know the craft and the city behind it. Guests interviewed by China News Service described the objects as finely made and the content as substantial, and said the exhibition gave them a closer view of both.
The Sixth Stop, and a First for Britain
Behind the Liverpool show is a tour that has run through Alexandria in Egypt, Istanbul in Turkey, Bratislava in Slovakia, Jakarta in Indonesia and Casablanca in Morocco. Liverpool is its sixth stop and the first in the United Kingdom, which is why National Museums Liverpool put its own publicity behind the run rather than treating it as a visiting display.
Away from the opening, the delegation worked through a second agenda. It met Liverpool City Council, National Museums Liverpool and the Museum of Liverpool, along with other local cultural organisations, to compare notes on protecting heritage, showing collections to the public, running international cultural projects and building long-term cooperation. Sessions were also arranged for students at local universities and schools, which is where a touring exhibition either leaves something behind or does not. Both sides described the programme as an opening chapter rather than a completed exchange, and the practical test will be whether the museum partnerships outlast the display.
