The Guangdong Provincial Museum is really comprehensive

The Guangdong Provincial Museum is a bit different from other provincial museums. Firstly, the exterior of the museum doesn't look very big, but there is really a lot to see inside. In addition to ancient and modern history, there are also natural, marine, and geological exhibition areas, making it a comprehensive museum. I followed a volunteer guide for the explanation at the museum, and I found the quality to be quite high. Surprisingly, the so-called treasures in the Guangdong Museum were not as numerous as I imagined. The Xinyi bronze hu is one of the few bronze artifacts, and the guide informed us that this is because Guangdong does not produce copper, so there are fewer bronze artifacts unearthed, and even this one is likely to have been passed down from someone's private collection. There are not many bronze artifacts, nor is there a lot of gold. One of the museum's treasures, a gold necklace, comes from the Nanhai No. 1 shipwreck, but the style doesn't seem to be a local product. The Guangdong Museum seems more like an explanation of the human development history of Guangdong, rather than a display of a dazzling array of treasures. It mainly covers three subtopics. The first is the three branches of Guangdong people: Cantonese, Chaoshan, and Hakka. The second is the origin of the Maritime Silk Road, with a detailed display of the porcelain from the Nanhai No. 1 and Nan'ao No. 1 shipwrecks. (From here, it is very clear that society was regressing from the Song Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty). The third is the various industries of ancient Guangdong. There are clocks, barbershops, ivory, murals, etc., and the most interesting is the wallpaper, which we consider very tacky, but was pasted over entire walls by Europeans. It is also evident that Guangdong, from being the southernmost part of ancient China, has gradually developed into the forefront of China's interaction with the world.