Aurora Museum (震旦博物馆)

The museum occupies six levels of Aurora Plaza (震旦国际大楼), an office building completed in 2003 in Lujiazui, with a 38-storey tower, designed by the Japanese practice Nikken Sekkei and owned by a subsidiary of the Taiwanese Aurora Group. Chen Yung-tai, the group's chairman, owns a large collection of ancient Chinese objects; he had first opened a display space in Taipei in 2003.

In 2009, during a study trip to Europe on which he visited museums, some of them designed by Tadao Ando, he decided to invite Ando to design the Shanghai museum: a good museum, he had realised, must match its space to the objects it shows. Ando was at first not very interested, because the office building was already finished and converting an existing building is not easy. Two reasons changed his mind: a conversion can give a building new life, and the site faces the Bund, the historic waterfront across the river, with historic objects inside and a historic scene beyond the windows. The client gave him complete freedom, from the exterior to the interior.

The project was launched in 2009, the work was finished in 2012 and the museum opened in October 2013.

The building is not by Tadao Ando: it dates from 2003 and its architect is Nikken Sekkei. Ando designed the conversion into a museum, inside and out.

His starting point is a jewellery box: a clean, clear geometry in glass curtain wall, which takes on the look of a blue jewel box at night. Inside, a spiral staircase is set in a circular space five storeys high. The exhibition halls begin on the first floor, and the staircase climbs from the first to the fifth floor: it starts from a darker level and gradually reaches the upper floors, from which the river can be seen. Ando conceived it as a path from shadow towards light.

The café on the fourth floor (A Café 5) is also a special design by Ando: it is reached by climbing the spiral staircase, and it looks onto the Huangpu and, across it, the Bund, the historic waterfront.

The museum presents the collection of Chen Yung-tai: Buddhist sculpture, blue-and-white porcelain, jades of successive periods and earthenware figurines of the Han and Tang dynasties. Four permanent galleries are devoted to them, each with a zone of masterpieces arranged by period, a thematic zone and a research zone. The jades run from the Neolithic to the Ming and Qing; the blue-and-white, from the Yuan to the Qing; the Buddhist sculpture, from Gandhara art to statues of the Northern Wei, Sui and Tang; the figurines are mostly painted pieces of the Han and Tang.

The museum also has a research centre for ancient artefacts, and thematic exhibitions are shown alongside the permanent galleries. Its method of study rests on four criteria: material, craftsmanship, form and pattern.

The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm, with opening extended to 9 pm on Fridays, and closed on Mondays. The ticket office is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9:30 am to 4 pm, until 8 pm on Fridays. No advance reservation is required: tickets can be bought on site, at the museum's service counter.

The museum is at 99 Fucheng Road, in Aurora Plaza. From Lujiazui station (metro lines 2 and 14), allow about ten minutes on foot.