Zeng Zhaoyu, Nanjing Museum, and the Politics of Museums in Early Mao-Era China

During the Mao era (1949–1976), Chinese museums used a Marxist framework to interpret unearthed cultural relics. This chapter uses documents from the Nanjing Museum in the Jiangsu Provincial Archive to explore one case study of this process. It develops an intellectual and professional biography of Zeng Zhaoyu (1909–1964), one of China’s first female archaeologists and museum directors. Born into a declining gentry family, Zeng studied for a master’s degree in archaeology at the University of London in 1935–1936 before returning to China to work in the preparatory office for a national museum planned by the Guomindang government in Nanjing. After the revolution in 1949, she stayed in mainland China and became the first director of the Nanjing Museum, a major heritage institution in the new PRC. Under her leadership, this museum developed templates for exhibiting the history of China in the new Communist state before the Museum of Chinese History in Beijing was established in 1959. The chapter analyses her efforts to navigate a shifting political environment for museums and archaeology while preserving professional standards and also protecting her family. It seems likely that political pressure led to her suicide in 1964. Nonetheless, in the 15 years before her death, she skilfully and often successfully mediated between the centralising blueprints of a state cultural bureaucracy and the rigour of excavations and exhibitions of local culture.

Bureaucracy · China · Communism · Exhibition · Gentry · Government (linguistics) · Politics · State (computer science) · Chinese history and philosophy · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Museums and Cultural Heritage