The trucks roared past Tian'anmen Square on Saturday, marking the beginning of the 2.6 billion yuan (US$332 million) effort to rebuild the national museum into the world's largest.

The National Museum of China, which sits to the east of the square, was built in 1959 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. It was considered an icon of Maoist-era socialist design and symbolic of the Soviet Union's influence on Chinese art and architecture.

After four decades in operation, the museum has been struggling to accommodate its expanding collection and increasingly sophisticated facilities, said Lu Zhangshen, the museum's director.

Heavy machinery arrives at the National Museum in Beijing over the weekend as work on its expansion gets underway. Inset: an artist's impression of how the new museum will look. Liu Ping
 

The idea of rebuilding the museum was first floated in 2003, stirring debate over whether the museum's Soviet-style appearance should be retained. According to the plan released last December, the new building will resemble the old one, despite a few major changes that continue to inspire debate.

The new four-storey building will cover 70,000 square meters and have a total floor-space of 192,000 square meters, or three times that of the old building, which is enough to qualify it as the largest museum in the world, said Lu.

Construction work will continue until the end of 2009, and the museum will remain closed throughout that period. The 620,000 cultural relics in its collection have been moved to make way for the construction, Lu said.

When the project is completed, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) will transfer another 400,000 relics from the collections of other museums around the country to the national museum, the director added.

The rebuilding of the national museum is only part of the country's ambitious plan to build museums. The SACH, which is in charge of nation's museums, is planning to build 1,000 new museums by the year 2015. By that time, every mid-size or larger city in China is expected to have at least one museum, according to a blueprint released in 2003.

China currently has more than 2,000 museums, with more than 20 million items in their collections. Beijing is reportedly planning to build 20 more museums, bringing the number of museums in the capital to 130, by the time it hosts the 2008 Olympics. Not to be outdone, Shanghai says it is planning to build 100 new museums in time for the 2010 World Expo.

(China Daily March 20, 2007)