Tianjin Natural History Museum

The Tianjin Natural History Museum is one of the oldest in China, founded in 1914. It was started by the French Jesuit priest Émile Licent, who spent many years collecting fossils, herbaria and zoological material in the basins of the Yellow River and the Hai He; its first name said as much — the Museum of the Huang He and the Bai He. Licent worked in the field together with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and their finds in the Ordos became some of the first evidence of the Palaeolithic in northern China. The collection's historic building, known as the Beijiang Museum, survives on the grounds of the old campus in the west of the city and is open to visitors as well: some of the cabinets there have been left just as the founder arranged them, with handwritten labels. It was built from the early 1920s specifically as a repository — thick walls, steel cabinets, almost windowless lower floors — and the collections came through the war and the occupation with hardly any losses; after a long restoration the halls opened again in 2016. Since 2014 the main exhibition has occupied a new building in Tianjin's cultural centre, showing palaeontology, zoology and dinosaur skeletons.