Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum

The Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum opened in 2005 on Renmin Road in Yuzhong District, directly across from the People's Great Hall, and was built partly in response to the Three Gorges Dam project, which flooded numerous archaeological sites and historic towns along the Yangtze upstream from Chongqing between the 1990s and 2009. The museum absorbed the collections of the former Chongqing Municipal Museum and now holds more than 170,000 artifacts spanning the region's history from Paleolithic finds through the Bronze Age Ba culture, the Han dynasty, and into the Republican and modern periods, with a dedicated wing devoted to relics salvaged from the Three Gorges reservoir area before flooding, including bronze vessels, stone carvings, and ceramics rescued through a multi-year emergency archaeological program. Permanent galleries include a large-scale diorama and multimedia reconstruction of the pre-dam Three Gorges landscape, a hall of Ba-culture bronzes recovered from riverside tombs, and displays on Chongqing's role as China's wartime capital during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The building itself is a large modern structure combining a curved glass facade with a stone-clad base, designed to house both the emergency-rescued Three Gorges relics and the city's existing historical collection under one roof. Curatorial organization is broadly chronological on the upper floors, moving from prehistory through the Bronze Age and imperial periods, with a separate thematic floor for the Three Gorges relocation relics and another for modern Chongqing history including the wartime capital years. As one of China's newer large state museums, the building and its climate-controlled galleries remain in good condition, with ongoing conservation work concentrated on the more fragile organic and metal artifacts recovered from the reservoir excavations.