Shanghai has plenty of museums, but besides the famous favorites are a number of lesser-known gems. Here’s our pick of the best.

Propaganda Poster Art Center: Revolutionary Flavors

Shanghai has promised 150 museums by 2010, but something tells us that even if they fall a little short, this one might not be on the official roster.

Tucked away in the dingy basement of an apartment complex, this three-room gallery feels just illicit enough to be exciting. And that’s the way it should be. After all, you don’t come to a museum like this for classy displays, you’re here to see some of the dirt that’s been swept under the rug. You’ll find it on the posters that cover every inch of the gallery.

Only the tiniest sliver of owner Yang Pei Ming’s 5,000-piece collection is displayed, but even so, all of China’s triumphs and struggles in the Mao Era of 1949 to 1979 are covered. The posters’ topics and styles change abruptly through the seven chronological exhibits around the room.

Start off at posters celebrating the birth of New China, go through the yellower, noticeably lowerquality posters of the leaner Great Leap Forward and come out the other side at the height of Mao’s power.

Pieces from various periods call out from the past with artistic flair, asking for citizens to up industrial production (“Produce more steel to support the liberation of Taiwan!”), back political allies abroad (“Defend the Cuban Revolution!”), and, of course, to buy into state ideology (“Continue to criticize Confucius and persist in revolution and resist the return of capitalism!”).

For Yang, the gallery’s founder and a collector of 14 years, the gallery serves as both a personal showroom and a link to the past. “This poster museum is my personal hobby,” Yang says. And though it’s obvious that he’s as well-versed in this slice of Chinese history as any, he’s really more in it for the art. “I don’t want to be a historian,” he tells us. “History is very difficult to explain. The way art speaks is much more interesting. Each poster exhibited here is a piece of art with history, a time when all the people in China sacrificed for the greatness of one person.”

The museum’s hidden treasure, however, is a room full of dazibao (大字报), “big character posters” that were used by the state to spread Mao’s philosophies during the Cultural Revolution. The written proclamations were used to publicly denounce people and objects as anti-Maoist, and are supremely rare nowadays.

The gallery’s top-notch gift shop is also worth a look. Sort through Tibetan propaganda posters or browse through an old ‘70s English textbook. The title of Lesson One pretty much says it all: We Wish Chairman Mao a Long Life!

Rm. BOC, B/F, Bldg 4, 868 Huashan Lu, 华山路868弄4号地 下室BOC室 Daily 9am- 5pm, Tel: 6211-1845, ¥20

China Tobacco Museum: Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em

Located directly across the street from the Shanghai Cigarette Factory, this tobacco museum is the largest of its kind in the world. Financed by the State Tobacco Monopoly Bureau and built at the monstrous cost of ¥180 million, the building’s exterior is a tribute to Columbus’ discovery of tobacco around the Mayan temples of Central America.

The museum’s 150,000 exhibits are neatly organized into eight sections, covering everything from tobacco’s history in China to (gasp!) the dangers of smoking. As you might expect, however, the displays tend to glorify cigarettes while downplaying their health risks. There are, after all, 350 million smokers in this country propelling a ¥258 billion industry. “There are many smokers among the great men, the celebrities, the intellectuals and the common people,” a sign proclaims, before ushering you down the hall towards wax statues of famous smokers.

The exhibit on smoking and health is in some ways more amusing–signs proudly announce that China’s cigarettes are up to WHO standards but gloss quickly over their dangers. Propaganda aside, the museum does have other points of interest, especially in its coverage of the history of tobacco in China. Banned upon its introduction during the Ming Dynasty and finally legalized at the end of the Qing, smoking only took off as a social pastime with the advent of rolled cigarettes at the end of the 19th century.

A wide range of paraphernalia from this bygone time are proudly on display, including ornate water pipes from the 1800s, beautiful snuff bottles from the 1600s, and, of course, the personal smoking effects of big wigs like Soong Ching- Ling and Deng Xiaopeng, who smoked his now-famous Panda cigarettes until he passed away at 92.

Finish up in the smoking room with a quick puff–just make sure you don’t ash in Mao’s old ashtray.

728 Changyang Lu 长阳路728号, 9am-6pm (Tue, Thu & Sat. Other times by appointment), Tel: 6166-5907, Free

Public Security Museum: Crime and Punishment

Certified by the government as a Shanghai Patriotic Promotion Site, this austere museum showcases the history of the city’s police force, along with a few exhibits on firefighters, courts and jails to boot. With more than 3,000 exhibits, the museum is wellfunded, well-organized and very well kept up. Unfortunately, there are precious few English subtitles to be found.

This last detail makes the first exhibit, a timeline of the Shanghai PD from its establishment in 1854, a drag, but for the most part, everything else is pretty self explanatory.

The one (somewhat) hidden treasure in the history section to look out for is the pistol used by a Kuomintang agent in a 1949 assassination attempt on Shanghai’s first mayor, Chen Yi.

A whole host of other assorted police paraphernalia, including handcuffs and inflatable rafts, are spread out over the rest of the three floors, split up into themed sections. Everything from traffic cops to “police martyrs” (who gave their lives in the line of duty) to forensics are given a little room to shine, but the most interesting exhibit details the investigation of 30 famous solved cases. It’s not for the faint of heart–some of the pictures show some rather graphic details–but it’s must-see material, especially for CSI fans.

On the third floor, find the history of firefighting in Shanghai, showing fire control efforts dating back to the Qing Dynasty. Though far less popular than the massive 238- gun display that includes three of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s own pieces, it’s well worth a look.

Other assorted highlights include a stuffed police dog and homing pigeons, mock prison cells (including a padded cell), and, of course, the gift shop, where you can buy all sorts of official police gear–boots, vests, watches, gloves, even some pseudo-uniforms.

2-4/F, 518 Ruijin Nan Lu 瑞金南路518号2-4层, 9am-4pm, closed Sundays, Tel: 6372-0256, ¥5 concession / ¥8 full price

Shanghai Museum of Traditional Chinese Medicine: Uncovering the Yin and Yang

This museum, part of the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Pudong, is not one of the new kids on the block. The original museum was founded in 1938, but over the years it’s become a three-floor operation boasting over 14,000 exhibits and 10,000 books and documents on the ancient science of Chinese medicine. There are a millennia of history on display here, starting with bone-needles used by doctors in the Stone Age to perform acupuncture.

The museum’s most famous artifact is a one-of-a-kind bronze statue from 1744 that shows the body’s 580 acupuncture points, but the thing that the museum does best is showing how traditional Chinese medicine developed out of the culture and philosophies that surrounded it.

Exhibits go over the theory of yin and yang and the three life forces of qi, shen and jing, and explain how the balance between these ancient philosophical beliefs became the foundation of Chinese medicine. The traditional tools and practices become doubly amazing when you discover how little they’ve changed over the years.

Browse through the 5,000- year timeline in the Medical History Hall and get a whiff of the 3,000 pungent herbal and animal samples in the Specimen Hall and you’ll find it hard to disagree. Bail your nostrils out and finish off your visit outside in the herbal garden, home to 300 varieties of soon-to-be-harvested medicinal plants.

1200 Cailun Lu 蔡伦路1200号, 9am-4pm, closed Sundays, Tel: 5132-2710, ¥15

Shanghai Astronomical Museum: Taking It to the Stars

Shanghai’s oldest eye on the sky sits atop Songjiang’s Sheshan Hill, just about as far away as it can get from the bright (night) lights of the big city. The observatory’s main building is a former French Catholic Mission, but it’s been more recently renovated to include a museum about the cosmos and the role China has taken in its discovery.

A retired three ton 40cm double-refracting telescope is the museum’s showpiece–a massive instrument that, when imported in 1900, was the biggest in Asia. It’s taken a nice collection of photographs over the years, including China’s first images of solar eclipses, dark stars and nebulae, and it’s also one of the few telescopes that witnessed both of Halley’s Comet’s last two passes (in 1910 and 1987).

The bulky Prin meridional instrument, an old telescope from 1925 that kept time by the stars, is the highlight of the museum’s exhibition on the theme of time. Its presence under the once-retractable dome of the former observation room is contrasted nicely by a nearby clock that turns out to be China’s first atomic timepiece. Another section of the observatory honors important figures in the institution’s history, including French astronomer Stanislaus Chevalier and his local counterpart Gao Pingzi, the only Chinese person with a crater on the moon named after him.

Also on the grounds and still in use (but off-limits to the public) is a newer optical telescope–currently the second biggest in the country.

Huanshan Lu Sheshan Hill 佘山环山路, Daily 8:15am-4:30pm, Tel: 6469-6271, ¥30 (Sheshan Hill entrance), Free

By Geoff Ng