Yellow River museum curators vow to promote high-quality development of watershed

Yellow River in Ruoergai county of Sichuan Province Photo: Baoding/ Courtesy of DJI

 
The curator seminar of the Yellow River Museums League was held in Yushu and Xining, Northwest China’s Qinghai Province to promote the high-quality development of the Yellow River basin from Wednesday to Saturday. More than 90 curators of over 50 museums along the Yellow River provincial-level regions participated in the seminar, according to media reports. 

Boasting rich historical and cultural resources and relics, the Yellow River basin is the earliest area where museums started to develop in China. In December 2019, the Yellow River Museums League was established and it now counts 72 member museums. 

Since the inception of the League, regional cultural resources, relics and personnel have been integrated through a cross-provincial coordination mechanism such as seminars, symposiums and academic forums. In the meanwhile, the member museums conducted in-depth exchanges and cooperation by organizing exhibitions and creating culturally creative products, such as the blind box, according to Wang Jinxian, curator of the Qinghai Provincial Museum.

In the Yushu Tibetan Prefecture, where the Three-River-Source National Park is located, eight representatives of the Yellow River Museums shared their academic research results and practical experience. 

Zhang Deshui, deputy curator of the Henan Provincial Museum, gave an account of the smart display of its resources and the audience’s interactive experience from the internet plus convergence media cases, the creation and application of cultural IPs, and the protection and dissemination of the Yellow River culture. 

Shi Ce, deputy curator of the Gansu Provincial Museum, also shared its series of culturally creative products, the “Arrival of the Magic Horse”, which takes the bronze galloping horse as its prototype and illustrated how products like this could become an essential vehicle of the cultural communication between museums. 

Centered around the theme of “integrating culture and tourism,” Wang Yongjun, deputy curator of Shandong Provincial Museum, briefed its cultural and tourist studies tours and introduced its selected exhibits. Meanwhile, the curators of the Weifang Museum in East China’s Shandong Province and Tianshui Museum in Gansu Province made a proposal for “promoting intensive and collective development,” and gave creative ideas on how to tell good Yellow River stories.

Xiong Wei, deputy curator of museums and social relics department, National Cultural Heritage Administration, said that the Yellow River Museums League would play an important role in promoting the ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River basin and revitalizing the Yellow River culture.

The Yellow River is the second longest river in China. Located in the northern part of China, it carries a huge amount of loess and sand, so it is named. Originated from the Bayan Har Mountains on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, it flows eastward through nine provincial-level regions, including Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan and Shandong provinces, and Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions, into the Bohai Sea. With a total length of 5,464 kilometers, it covers an area of 795,000 square kilometers.