A history of China in 8m objects

“WE DO NOT speak. We let the cultural relics speak!” declare the ambiguously worded signs around China’s most interesting history museum: the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, a sprawling, astonishing memorial to China’s 20th century. Taken literally, the notices are a request not to be noisy. They remind elderly couples or red-scarved school groups to whisper as they wander through the 33-hectare campus with its dozens of museums housing three-dimensional recreations of life under Japanese occupation in the 1940s, or during the “Red Age”. That is the museums’ tactful name for the 1960s and 1970s—above all the Cultural Revolution, the decade after 1966 when Mao Zedong unleashed terror on his own country, pitting neighbour against neighbour, students against teachers, children against parents and Red Guard mobs against officials whom Mao despised. More than a million lives were lost, and many more ruined. Centuries-old temples and libraries were smashed to so much rubble and firewood.