The First Museum in China: The British Museum of Macao (1829–1834) and its Contribution to Nineteenth-Century British Natural Science

Abstract

AbstractThis article establishes that the first museum in China was not the Zhendan Museum in Shanghai, founded by the French Jesuit Pierre Marie Heude (1836–1902) in 1868, but the “British Museum in China”, founded in 1829 by three supercargoes of the English East India Company, in Macao, a Portuguese enclave in the Pearl River Delta since c.1577. My research, based on Portuguese, British and American sources, allows us to better understand the context in which the founders of the museum interacted and lived in Macao, how their research and field-work was important for academic British institutions such as the British Museum in London and how the British Museum of Macao was founded and became the first (western-styled) museum in China.