Shanghai Museum. The Shanghai Museum is a museum of ancient Chinese art, situated on the People's Square in the Huangpu District of Shanghai, China.
   Rebuilt at its current location in 1996, it is considered one of China's first world-class modern museums. The museum was founded in 1952 and was first open to the public in the former Shanghai Racecourse club house, now at 325 West Nanjing Road.
   The founding collections came principally from three sources: a batch of artifacts gathered by the Communist 3rd Field Army during the civil war from accidental finds and confiscations of private property and brought to Shanghai upon the Communists' conquest of the city; artifacts confiscated by the customs service; items sold by private collectors due to political pressure during political purges and purchased by the government. The former Shanghai Municipal Museum was also merged into the new Shanghai Museum.
   In the next few years, the museum's collections were further enriched from other private and institutional collections in Shanghai, including the collection of the former Shanghai Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society, which were moved to the museum as foreign institutions gradually left the city in the 1950s. In 1959 the museum moved into the Zhonghui Building at 16 South Henan Road, which housed insurance companies and bank offices.
   During the metal-gathering campaign of the Great Leap Forward, the
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