In its quest to become the cosmopolitan and culturally savvy city worthy of hosting the World Expo in 2010, Shanghai has set a mildly ambitious goal of having 100 museums up and running by that time. To meet this quota, everything from navy ships to Chinese medicines has been encased in glass and given its own building. Many of Shanghai's museums and historic residences are housed in the European mansions and estates of colonial Shanghai where the setting is often the chief attraction. While lighting and display are seldom state-of-the-art and English signage can be spotty or nonexistent, simply touring these fine storehouses is fascinating enough. To spare the time-limited traveler, what follows is a list of the more worthwhile sights. No doubt by the time you read this there will be that many more new museums to visit.
China's Sex Museum(s)
When it first opened in 1999 on the eighth floor of the Old Sincere Building on Nanjing Lu, China's first official sex museum was welcomed by some as an indication of an increasingly progressive attitude in a puritanical empire where the sale of pornography is still ostensibly punishable by death. The creation of Professor Liu Dalin of Shanghai University, this pioneering Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture (Zhogguo Gudai Xing Wenhua Bowuguan) displayed most of his private collection of over 1,200 sex artifacts, many of them proof that China's putative Puritanism is really no more than a 60-year-old yoke. Unfortunately, exorbitant rents in 2004 forced the museum to move to the town of Tongli 80km (50 miles) away. The museum's eviction received some press attention and Tongli, not surprisingly, has also received more visitors. Not to be one-upped, Shanghai has now established the China Sex Culture Museum (Zhonghua Xing Wenhua He Xing Jiankang Jiaoyu Zhan) at Binjiang Dadao 2789 (tel. 021/5888-6000; 8am to 9pm; admission ¥20/$2.85/£1.45), at the Pudong end of the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel. Though it tries hard, this museum with its small collection of pottery, stone phalluses, porcelain figures in various stages of amour, and some literature on sexual health, is not as big or as impressive as the museum in Tongli.
