Date: Tuesday 26 November 2024

Time: 11: 00 am to 12:30 pm (GMT)

Venue: Online via Zoom

The event is free to attend and open to all. 

Zoom ID: 896 9673 2914

Password: 12345

Zoom meeting link:

https://ntu-sg.zoom.us/j/89696732914?pwd=dn5XUF8tXT3HUckilc6P2KYrPFQQLi.1

The talk will be given in Mandarin Chinese. Simultaneous translation into English will be provided.

Chair: Yow Cheun Hoe, Director of the Chinese Heritage Centre, Singapore

Speaker: Gao Donghui, Director of the Jiangmen Museum, China

Abstract

The Jiangmen Museum is an important platform to represent the history and culture of Jiangmen’s overseas Chinese communities. Planning for an Overseas Chinese Museum began in 2002, leading to the opening of the ‘Jiangmen Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum” in 2010. In 2023, the upgraded museum was reponed to the public under the name of “China Qiaodu Museum for Overseas Chinese”. The museum’s collection includes over 43,000 artifacts, featuring items such as qiaopi (remittance letters), passports, and deposition papers. This talk includes five sections: (1) the origins, context, and development of the museum; (2) The museum’s collection system and special artefacts as a local museum situated in China’s qiaoxiang (the hometown of overseas Chinese); (3) an introduction to the new exhibition Roots in the Hometown, which highlights Jiangmen’s “Qiao Culture” while situating the contributions of overseas Chinese within a global context; (4) the use of digital technology in education and community engagement to amplify the museum’s influences; and (5) challenges, opportunities and plans for future development. The Jiangmen Museum’s experiences shows the necessity to explore a distinctive path for the sustainable development of regional museums specializing in the history of overseas Chinese.

This is the final talk of this public talk series jointly hosted by HOMELandS (Hub On Migration, Exile, Languages and Spaces) at the University of Westminster and the Chinese Heritage Centre of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It is organised as part of the ‘Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative’ project funded by AHRC.

About the speaker:

Gao Donghui is a museum researcher and the director of Jiangmen Museum. He specializes in the research of overseas Chinese cultural relics and overseas Chinese museums. He has published more than ten articles, including “A Research of Honolulu Consular Officer Mei Jingzhou with emphasis on His Anti-Japanese War Propaganda Activities” and “Research on Passport Issues in the Republic of China – Focusing on the Beiyang and Nanjing National Government Periods”. The exhibitions he curated, including “An Exhibition on the Life and Deeds of Situ Meitang”, have been shortlisted for awards at the national and provincial levels.