Shanghai History Museum

The museum's collections focus on the approximately a hundred years in the history of Shanghai from the opening of the port in 1843 to the communist take-over in 1949.

It features a cannon used in the first Opium War, a sedan chair, and two bronze lions that used to adorn the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation on the Bund.

Since May 2001, the museum has maintained an exhibition room at the base of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Lujiazui, called the "Shanghai History and Development Exhibition", with select items from the museum's collection.

[1] Notable items in the collection include:[1] Gu Embroidery of flowers, insects, and fish by the Ming-Dynasty "needle saint" Han Ximeng (韩希孟); a scroll by Hou Tongceng; the Golden Sutras of the Qibao Temple; a bronze cannon called "General Zhen Yuan" that once belonged to Chen Huacheng (1776–1842), a Qing Dynasty general responsible for Shanghai's defenses during the First Opium War; a "big hua qian" coin issued by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom; a pair of bronze lions from the entrance of the former HSBC Building; and boundary markers from the French Concession and the Shanghai International Settlement (1893).

There have been repeated calls to build a new building for the museum for many years, but commercial considerations (as the exhibition room at the basement of the Oriental Pearl Tower contributed to the commercial success of the tower as a tourist attraction) and budgetary constraints prevented this from occurring for several years.