Ningbo History Museum

The Ningbo History Museum is as much a destination for its architecture as for its contents. The building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Wang Shu, is built from twenty million recycled bricks and rooftiles salvaged from villages demolished in the course of Yinzhou's rapid urbanisation. The facades are a deliberate collage of demolition material, and the building's irregular profile and bamboo-imprinted concrete make it one of the most visually distinctive contemporary buildings in eastern China.

Inside, the permanent collection covers the history of Ningbo and the surrounding region from the Hemudu Neolithic culture (7000 BCE) through the present, with good displays on the maritime trade networks that made Ningbo one of China's most important commercial ports during the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties. The ceramics and bronze collection is particularly strong. The museum is in Yinzhou, about five kilometres south of the old city centre, accessible by metro.

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A story
The Ningbo History Museum building, designed by Wang Shu and completed in 2008, uses over twenty million recycled bricks and tiles salvaged from villages demolished for Yinzhou's urban expansion. The facades are a patchwork of grey, brown, and red material from different periods and origins — a building made from the demolished past of the city it documents, which is either deeply poetic or deeply ironic depending on your view of urban China.