Hong Kong is the cultural capital of South East Asia. There are many events that occur throughout the city from exhibits in the world of visual arts to dazzling festivals. Sports, theater, musical concerts and international dance companies…to consumer and product fairs where shoppers can find everything from flower seeds to computers. One of the local venues that is a draw for tourists staying in the best Hong Kong hotels, is the Museum of History. The museum was founded in 1975, and was the result of the split in the City Museum and Art Gallery. Many of the items in the collections at the museum date back to 1962 however, from before the split. For a short time, the new museum was located in Kowloon Park but now has a permanent home on Chatham Road, close to many other venues in the city, including the Museum of Science, making this a convenient stop on a tour throughout the city.
One of the exhibits running through the rest of the summer is the Retrospect, which details the last one hundred years in the history of China. For although there are thousands of years of Chinese history, the last one hundred have seen many enormous changes in the city and the culture, from economic changes to political, to the life of the citizens in general. Throughout the years following the Revolution in 1911, China and her people were not ‘bouncing back’ according to the intellectual thinkers and philosophers of the day, and a movement was begun to incorporate science and democracy into the daily lives of the citizens. With this came ideas that shattered the outdated social structures and questioned the traditional ways of the existing culture. In the later part of the last century, the country’s economic power rapidly developed, and the nation became revitalized in spirit as well as on the global map of technology and science. The Retrospective Exhibit at the Museum illustrates this transformation through the collection on show, and the lectures and seminars being given throughout the run of the exhibit and is a fascinating look at the history of a city and a country transformed.
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