Museum of the South China Sea

A ship of concrete

The museum stands in Tanmen, just a few steps from the fishing port, and opened in April 2018. It was designed by He Jingtang, one of China's best-known architects, who also built the China Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. The building resembles a boat floating on the sea, with open, shaded walkways through which the sea breeze blows.

At more than 70,000 square metres it's a big building for a small fishing town. From the viewing terrace you look over the halls to the harbour from which captains have sailed to the distant reefs for generations.

The ship from Huaguang Reef

The centrepiece is a wreck from the Southern Song dynasty, named after the reef on which it sank: Huaguangjiao I, off the Paracel Islands. Fishermen discovered it in 1996, and archaeologists excavated it in 2007 and 2008 — it's considered a milestone of Chinese underwater archaeology.

The ship was about 20 metres long and 6 metres wide and carried mainly porcelain from the kilns of Fujian province. One bowl bears an inscription that dates the voyage to the year 1162. The museum shows a reconstruction of the ship and part of the cargo — bowls and plates destined for the markets of Southeast Asia.

Fishermen, sea books and whales

Four permanent exhibitions tell the story of the sea: its nature with whale skeletons and corals, the maritime Silk Road, underwater archaeology and the life of Tanmen's fishermen. Here you'll also find the Genglubu, the handwritten sea books with which the captains found their way to the reefs.

If you've been to the harbour first and read the page on Tanmen, you'll recognise a lot: the boats, the compass courses, the names of the reefs.

Good to know

The museum is also an official site of patriotic education. The exhibition tells the story of the South China Sea entirely from the Chinese perspective and explicitly serves to support China's claims to the islands. Other coastal states see it differently, and in 2016 an international arbitral tribunal ruled against the historical claims.

That doesn't make the visit any less worthwhile — quite the opposite. Here you see how China tells this story, and you can compare for yourself what is shown and what is missing.