The Ningbo Port Museum documents the city's extraordinary maritime history, covering the full arc from the prehistoric canoe culture evidenced at the Hemudu site through the Arab and Persian trading networks of the Tang and Song dynasties, the Ningbo Gang merchant community that dominated Shanghai's twentieth-century business world, and the modern container port that is now one of the busiest in the world. The museum is located in the Jiangbei district near the old customs building on the Yong River.
The exhibits are well-organised and bilingual, and the section on the historical Ningbo Gang — the tightly connected network of Ningbo-origin merchants who came to control much of Shanghai's finance, shipping, and industry in the Republican era — is particularly interesting. The names of Ningbo merchant families appear repeatedly in the history of modern Chinese capitalism, and the museum provides a useful biographical grounding. Scale models of the major ships that worked the Ningbo routes through history provide visual interest throughout.