Discover Shanghai
Shanghai Natural History Museum
上海自然博物馆
A spiral, nautilus-shaped building sunk into Jing'an Sculpture Park holding some 270,000 natural specimens, with strong Chinese dinosaur material and an excellent Africa diorama hall. Central, cheap and good on a rainy day.
The story
What makes this place special
The museum's collections are old, but the building is not: it moved into a purpose-built home in Jing'an Sculpture Park and opened to the public in 2015, with 44,517m² of floor space. The holdings are reported at around 240,000 specimens, including over 62,000 animal and 135,000 plant specimens, some 700 Stone Age items and 1,700 minerals - figures that conflict with the much smaller number given in some summaries. Its best-known specimens are Chinese: a Yellow River mammoth, a giant salamander, a giant panda and a Yangtze alligator, a combination not held outside China. The largest exhibit is a 140-million-year-old Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis skeleton from Sichuan, standing more than four storeys high.
What you’ll discover
A low spiral building wrapped around a courtyard with a pond and a living green wall, with the galleries descending through several levels below ground, so you walk down and inward rather than up. The route runs through the origins of the universe and the Earth, then the dinosaur hall around the Mamenchisaurus, then a large African savannah diorama of taxidermy specimens, then galleries on Chinese ecology and the evolution of life, with a human-biology section including mummies and preserved embryos. There are live animals and an excavation sandpit for children.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- It is built downwards: the entrance is at the top and the galleries are underground, which means the quietest hour is right at opening when everyone else is still at the first display and you can go straight down and work back up.
- This is the best rainy-day option in Shanghai for families, and that means school holidays and weekends are overrun. A weekday afternoon in term time is a completely different museum.
- The Chinese ecology and endemic-species galleries are what you cannot see elsewhere - the giant salamander, the Yangtze alligator, the regional habitat displays. The dinosaurs and the African diorama are well done but not specific to China.
- The courtyard with the pond and green wall is part of the architecture and is free to sit in; so is Jing'an Sculpture Park around it, which is a good place to eat a packed lunch.
- Book ahead with your passport. It is cheap rather than free, but capacity-limited, and walk-up tickets are not reliable at weekends.
- Allow two to three hours. It is big, and the descending route is one-way enough that doubling back is annoying.
When to come
Weekday mornings in term time, at opening. Any season - it is fully indoors and air-conditioned, which makes it a good August and monsoon-season choice.
Getting around
Very good. A 2015 building with lifts between all the underground levels, step-free entry, level galleries, wide ramps on the spiral route, accessible toilets and seating, and loan wheelchairs. Because the plan is a descending spiral rather than staircases, the whole visit is genuinely step-free. The only cautions are the length of the route, the low light in parts of the dinosaur and evolution galleries, and the crowding around the popular specimens.
Worth knowing before you go
The metro station is called Natural History Museum and exits directly into the park, so you never go outside. Go anti-clockwise down the spiral ramp from the top floor to follow the exhibits in order.
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