A visitor enjoys looking at digitized ancient paintings in the newly-opened digital exhibition gallery in the Zhejiang Provincial Musuem on August 29, 2023. 

The area of present-day Zhejiang Province is one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. Human activities in the region can be traced back one million years, and more than 100 Neolithic sites have been discovered here. Throughout recorded history, Zhejiang has always been a key administrative unit of China. During the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), its capital was established in the present-day provincial capital of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, and many of the ports in this region served as major stops along the ancient Maritime Silk Road.

Founded in 1929, Zhejiang Provincial Museum houses over 100,000 cultural relics. Highlights of its collection include: Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains scroll, Boat-Shaped Longquan Celadon Water Dropper, and Wangong Sedan Chair.

A staff member at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum demonstrates how to operate the MR headset which is used to enable an interactive experience of assembling iconic ancient architecture in Zhejiang Province through virtual reality technologies, on July 29, 2025.

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, painted in 1350 by the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) painter Huang Gongwang, is one of the most celebrated surviving ancient Chinese paintings and has been recognized as a national treasure. Drawn in ink on paper, the scroll presents the picturesque scenery along the Fuchun River in Zhejiang in early fall. With its elegant and refined brushwork, balanced composition, and masterful use of varying ink tones, it has long been hailed as one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese painting. Over the past 600 years, it has passed through the hands of many collectors, including the Qing Emperor Qianlong, who treasured it deeply.

In 1650 in the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), on his deathbed, Wu Hongyu, collector of the painting at the time, asked his family to have the scroll burned and buried with him. Fortunately, his nephew rescued it from the flames, however it had already been damaged and separated into two sections, a long one and a short one. Later, the Wu family carefully arranged the surviving sections into two paintings.

The shorter section became known as The Remaining Mountain currently housed in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum, while the longer named The Master Wuyong Scroll is kept in the Palace Museum in Taipei. At a joint exhibition in 2011, the two parts were reunited for the first time since their separation over three centuries ago, attracting more than 800,000 visitors to view this legendary work.

The painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains: The Remaining Mountain Scroll exhibited at the museum on August 29, 2024, draws streams of visitors. 

Wangong Sedan Chair

Wangong Sedan Chair, created in the late Qing Dynasty in Ningbo, Zhejiang, is a lavish red-painted, gilded wooden bridal carriage. It supposedly took 10,000 man hours to make. With its exquisite craftsmanship, this item on display at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum went viral online, drawing streams of visitors to get a glimpse of its beauty.

Composed of several hundred removable carved panels, it stands 2.75 meters tall, measures 1.5 in length and 0.9 meters in width, and weighs over 200 kilograms. Despite the complicated design, it does not have a single nail, being originally assembled solely with the traditional mortis-and-tenon technique.

The chair was owned by a wedding business in Ningbo and used for rental purposes in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China period (1912-1949). As a bridal carriage was the focal point of a wedding procession, which formed part of the wedding ceremony in ancient times, the bridal sedan chair was usually elaborately decorated, and Wangong Sedan Chair is amongst the most luxurious.

The Wangong carriage is adorned with hundreds of lifelike figures as well as symbolic flora and fauna designs, including 24 phoenixes, 38 dragons, 54 cranes, 74 magpies, 92 lions, and 124 pomegranates, crafted in low, high or openwork relief. More astonishingly, there is a group of opera performer figurines on a theatrical stage, equipped with hidden mechanisms beneath the stage which allows these figures to sway as the chair is carried, creating the illusion of a live opera performance in motion.

Wangong Sedan Chair on display at the museum.

Longquan Celadon Water Dropper

The Boat-Shaped Longquan Celadon Water Dropper is one of the must-see treasures of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum. The water dropper is a stationary item used to add small increments of water to inkstones while grinding ink.

This delicate hand-sized piece assumes the shape of a passenger boat. In the boat cabin, one can see two figures sitting together in conversation. Outside, there is a boatman in a raincoat climbing up toward the awning to fetch a hat. The boatman’s fluttering robe evokes the sensation of a light breeze sweeping across the water.

The item showcases an ingenious, functional design. The hollow hull serves as the water reservoir, with a large opening at the bow serving as inlet and outlet. On the deck between the cabin and awning sits a small round hole – a “switch” that controls the water flow. By adjusting the pressure of the thumb over this hole, the user could control both the speed and volume of water, demonstrating the ingenious use of air pressure.

A visitor enjoys an immersive experience in the digital gallery at the museum. 

Culturally Imbued

On July 29, 2025, the Zhejiang Provincial Museum’s Humanities Exploration Hall reopened after completing renovations. The 1,000-square-meter space allows visitors to explore Zhejiang’s millennia-old cultural legacy through immersive digital projection, MR interactive experiences, multi-sensory installations, and traditional craft workshops.

Here, visitors can participate in fun, instructive interactive activities that combine creativity with lessons in history and geography. For example, visitors can design and decorate their own model of an ancient vessel through collage and painting, then scan it for projection onto a large screen. Their virtual boat will set sail from Zhejiang, journeying through five regions along the Maritime Silk Road. Visitors can also wear MR headsets to assemble Zhejiang’s iconic ancient buildings, experiencing the digital rebirth of those traditional architectural designs.

Every weekend, the museum hosts a series of engaging cultural activities for children and teenagers, offering them opportunities to learn about traditional Chinese culture through hands-on creativity. Recent workshops have included making pop-up books inspired by the scroll painting Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, telegraph operation, crafting herbal sachets for the Dragon Boat Festival, and building bamboo-framed kites.

Boat-Shaped Longquan Celadon Water Dropper on display at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum.