To know a city, you should go to its museums. Wuxi has many precious historical relics and a profound cultural context as an important birthplace of Wu culture. So today, let’s walk into Wuxi Museum, the first-class museum in the country to seek cultural symbols deep in the memories of the Wuxi people.
The Wuxi Museum has nearly 40,000 cultural items, including paintings and calligraphy, purple clay, clay sculptures, contemporary revolutionary relics, and industrial and commercial relics, allowing people to see different aspects of the city. The collection includes more than 5,000 pieces of calligraphy and painting that are of great importance in the Wuxi Museum, showing the artistic development of calligraphy and painting in the Ming and Qing dynasties systematically. Among the exhibition items, Ni Zan’s painting “Shadow of Moss-covered Trees” remains one of the “Treasures of the Museum”. Meanwhile, Wuxi Museum also has a rich collection of works by Wen Zhengming, one of the “Four Masters of Wu Clan” in the Ming Dynasty.
As a descendant of Qian Liu, the King of Wuyue, Qian Yu was laid in a grave, from which numerous cultural relics have been unearthed. These cultural relics are made with gold, silver, jade, silk, lacquer wood, banknotes, and bronze mirrors. Among them, there is the famous Yuanchun water-jade belt buckle.
The clay figurines from Huishan, Wuxi are known as a national-level intangible cultural heritage that is handed down from thousands of years ago. Meanwhile, the Wuxi Museum has a “fine” boutique, namely the “Saturn Peach Meeting”, which was a gift from the then Wuxi County magistrate for Empress Dowager Cixi’s 50th birthday. In fact, two similar pieces were made in a rush at that time, with one sent to the Palace and the spare eventually included in the museum’s collection. In addition, with the popularity of purple clay from Yixing, the purple clay pots are also one of the characterized collections of Wuxi Museum. Among them, the pear-shaped pot made by Gu Jingzhou remains one of the premiums. 
Source: Wuxi Municipal Bureau of Culture, Broadcasting and Tourism
