"The Beauty of Animals," an exhibition of specimens donated by Kenneth E. Behring, chairman of the Wheelchair Foundation, on display at Beijing Natural History Museum.	A Liao Dynasty dagoba, more than a millennia old, in the Yunju Temple Museum.	The restoration of a matrilineal tribe at Banpo Museum.

IT only took 40 minutes for Chen Feng, a 16-year-old high school student, to make his way through all three floors of the 8,000-square-meter Beijing Natural History Museum. “I visited this museum with my school when I was ten and virtually nothing has changed. The same old things are on display with the same boring commentary,” said Chen, who then sat down on the steps outside the museum and began to entertain himself with cell phone video games. He was not the first student to slip out early, there were already several boys lingering and chatting outside the gate, some who had never bothered to enter the museum at all.

Built in 1958, Beijing Natural History Museum is the first museum in China to exhibit biological specimens. It also contains the most comprehensive exhibition on China’s natural evolution and development. The museum is renowned for its collection of rare specimens that date back 530 million years including one of the oldest flower species in the Mainland, dinosaurs with feathers, the Peking Man, giant pandas, golden monkeys and more.

However, the museum’s own statistics show that in recent years the majority of the visiting population are students who only visit the museum as part of their schools’ educational programs.

A recent survey confirms this statistic. Among 20 to 50-year-olds in China, only 20 percent report that they visit museums frequently, while 8 percent say that they’ve never been to a museum; 79 percent say that they will only visit a museum if they have a complimentary ticket or an invitation; 23 percent state that they don’t frequent museums due to a lack of time, while 21 percent believe that museums rarely change their exhibitions.

According to an official with the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, China has over 2,300 museums that, combined, receive around 150 million visitors each year. “This might seems like a large number,” the official said, “however, we can see the discrepancy when compared with other countries. The same figure for the US is 900 million, which means that the number of times that museums are frequented each year is three times its population.”

From the Known to the Unknown

A museum that has had similar experiences to the Beijing Natural History Museum is the Banpo Museum in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province. Built in 1958, Banpo is China’s first prehistoric museum that is located at the excavated site. This museum displays the prehistoric site of a typical Neolithic matriarchal clan society that lived around the Yellow River area between 5600 to 6700 years ago.

“Before 1989, income from ticket sales had been increasing steadily. This was a tourism hotspot that attracted many foreigners en route to the Terra Cotta Warriors and the Huaqing Bath,” Zhang Lizhi, director of the Banpo Museum, explained. In fact, this was also the most prosperous period in the museum’s history. As a nationally renowned museum, Banpo received a million visitors annually, which made it one of the top ten museums in China.

However, since 2000, the museum’s income has stagnated. Revenue was lowest in 2005. “This stagnation is due to the blossoming tourism industry which has given tourists more choices. The loss of visitors can also be contributed to the lack of changes in our museum over the last few decades, and the need for management to be modernize,” says Zhang.

Much of the interior and organization of the museum remains unchanged from its 1958 design and construction, even the office building is more than 20 years old. “Although Banpo Museum may seem old to visitors, its value in the archaeological world is unquestionable.” Zhang stressed.

Financial Crisis

Earlier this year, due to poor maintenance, another museum in Shaanxi Province, the Xianyang Palace Site Museum, suffered water damage problems. The structure of the palace was damaged, and what’s more, some cultural relics were also affected.

Li Zhaoyang, director of Xianyang Museum, said that a lack of funding has meant that the museum has not been renovated since its inception ten years ago. They have reported water leakage problems to the cultural administrative department several times, however no repairs have been made. In 2005, the museum’s annual ticket income totaled less than RMB 400.

Over 95 percent of museums in China are state-owned and depend on a combination of government funding and their own operational revenues to cover costs. Half of the museums’ operating revenues come from ticket sales. Personal donation, corporate sponsorships, and merchandising make up only a small percentage of the total museum revenue.

“Museums are confronted with many problems, such as a lack of understanding of our collections and inadequate preservation conditions, which often lead to severe damages to the collections. Due to our limited resources, parts of some collections can’t be displayed due to space shortage, while we also have a shortage of professionals. All this contributes to the museums’ poor display and service level,” said Li Zhaoyang somewhat helplessly.

Active Museums

Outside the Beijing Natural History Museum, a teacher told us that there were not enough displays that allow the students to interact and engage with the exhibition. He believed that it was not only important, but essential, to design exhibitions that allow visitors to engage their hands as well as their minds.

The limited exhibition space of most museums is a major factor that prevents more interactive displays from being set up, a design researcher at Beijing Natural History Museum told us. “Take the excavation site of the dinosaurs fossils for instance,” the researcher said, “to recreate a replication of the prehistoric age requires a large area. Often, the display area can barely contain the size of the dinosaur foot print, let alone to allow us to set up the conditions of their habitat.”

Many museum administrators have already realized that interactive displays, advanced lighting design, and comfortable rest areas are all major factors that attract visitors. However, due to current resource limitations, many museums have been forced to look for alternative ways for improvements.

The Beijing Natural History Museum has already undertaken other initiatives. The museum has signed an agreement with Kenneth E. Behring, a world famous philanthropist, founder of the Wheelchair Foundation and an avid collector of wildlife. Behring has agreed to provide hundreds of large-sized wild animal specimen from Africa, America and Eurasia, worth over 10 million dollars, to the museum’s collection. A separate wing has been set up to house the display at the Beijing Natural History Museum, which has opened to the public. “This display will not only allow visitors to learn about other habitats, but it will also allow them to experience what it feel to step inside an African jungle,” a museum employee told us.

Smaller museums in more remote areas of China have also begun their own independent fundraising initiatives. Wang Yanhua, director of Beijing Yunju Temple Museum, introduced us to the many initiatives that Yujun Temple is taking to strength their operations. Some initiatives include strengthening publicity through circulating publications, advertising exhibition and museum activities, and recuperating operation costs through CD and book sales. These attempts seem to be paying dividends. The volume of visitors to the museum has remained steady at 500,000 for the past two years.