There is a poem on the wall of Shanghai’s Jewish Refugee Museum that stopped me in my tracks. It was written by Dan Pagis (1930-1986).

Shanghai comes into its own when it is directly involved in the story being told. Which is why I urge visitors not to go in search of the all-China generic galleries to be found at the massive museum in the city centre, but to look for those places where Shanghai celebrates itself. There is, for example, the charming Shanghai City Museum, which remains the only real reason to visit the Oriental Pearl Tower in Pudong. Readers of this blog will already be aware of my enthusiasm for the Longhua Martyrs Cemetery, which enumerates the many Party-approved heroes and heroines who fought to make Shanghai what it is today.

Shanghai’s Jewish Refugee Museum is another fascinating place, a monument to a phenomenon that supposedly came and went long, long ago. It is a surprisingly lavish venue chronicling the lives of 13,732 exiles from Nazi Germany as they tried to make the best of life in Shanghai, one of the few places in the world that offered them sanctuary.

Pictures are not permitted in the museum interior, possibly as a result of the same trepidation that requires all visitors to leave their cigarette lighters at the entrance. But the story told inside, like that in the Martyrs Cemetery, manages the difficult task of taking a tale of misery and misfortune, and reframing it as a celebration and commemoration. There is some treatment of the Jews already present in the International Settlement, where, as regular readers will already know, a thriving community of Russian émigrés tried to make do and mend after fleeing the 1917 Revolution. But the museum’s primary interest is in the years between 1938, when the first Jewish refugees arrived from Germany, and 1956, the year in which the last of them disembarked for new lives in Australia, Canada and multiple other places.

In a diverse mix of dioramas, video footage and exhibits, the museum tells the tale of the sudden ferment of Jewish and European friendships, feuds and families, the new careers and businesses that sprang up to serve this sudden influx of newcomers, and the long, long tail of their associations and connections. Permitted visa-free entry to Shanghai after most other places around the world had refused them access, the Jews soon had to contend with the city’s Occupation by the Japanese, which led to the creation of the Shanghai Ghetto in 1943. The end of the war in 1945 soon pivoted into a Civil War between the Communists and Nationalist Chinese, while the last of the Jews scrambled to find safe passage to another country.

A sign at the door exhorts anyone with family connections to Shanghai’s Jews to make themselves known to the curators – and clearly there have been several cases where visitors have become exhibits, captured on film discussing their grandmother’s wedding dress or the day they ran the gauntlet of Japanese military police.

Sometimes, one gets a sense of real happiness in a museum. It is very rare, but every now and then, the narrative on display becomes a descant of jubilation – I have felt it before only rarely, most memorably at the Norway’s Resistance Museum in Oslo. The Jewish Refugee Museum veritably beams with pride at the way that materialist, money-grubbing Shanghai suddenly flung open its doors to a foreign people in need, and at the many hundreds of strangers who come to its doors eight decades later, to announce that their ancestors still speak fondly not only of violin concertos on the Roy Roof Garden and pastrami at Horn’s Snack Bar, but also of the way that China became so intimately and briefly part of their lives, leaving them each embroidered on the other.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.

Just around the corner from the tourist-magnet Longhua Temple is one Shanghai’s most exciting museums – a facility dedicated to framing the story of China’s Revolution in terms of its relationship to Shanghai itself, where so many of the fights, protests and strikes that defined it took place.

The Longhua Martyrs Cemetery makes fantastic use of its space and location, built over the site of the former prison and execution ground where so many Communist martyrs were created. The site has, at some point, been both a holding area for the Nationalist Kuomintang government and a detention centre for the Japanese invaders in World War Two. Twin walls, carved with the names of victims of the Kuomintang, snake around the gardens, leading off from the main entranceway, which is dominated by chunky statues not of individual revolutionaries, but of the spirit of Revolution itself, represented not only by soldiers, but by nurses and mothers, students and musicians.

The museum itself tracks the rise of the People’s Republic of China through its early stops and starts, including relative obscurities such as the Rebellion of the Small Swords Society, in which part of Shanghai turned into a Triad enclave, mysteriously joined by European supporters, or the activities of the Su Bao (Jiangsu Daily), a newspaper shut down by the imperial authorities in 1903 for daring to question the rule of the Emperor. The story of the Su Bao is told through the life of its star writer Zou Rong, whose pamphlet The Revolutionary Army was the cause of the newspaper’s downfall. Zou himself died in prison in 1905 and was awarded a posthumous general’s rank by Sun Yat-sen. He is depicted here in a lush oil painting, as a “Soldier of the Revolutionary Army”, wielding a pen instead of a sword.

Zou’s story is only the first of dozens of vignettes that anchor the stories of China’s revolutionaries in context and commemoration. There are dioramas and relics, photographs and statues, video-on-demand testimony and even a looped ballet video, each telling the story of a particular individual’s role in lifting China out of its “Century of Humiliation.” It was a humbling and immersive experience, easily one of the best museums I have visited in China, on a par with Changchun’s Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

I soon ran into the exhibit on Zhang Tailei, whose statue so struck me in the pantheon of revolutionaries outside Guangzhou Martyr’s Park last December, but also many other similar incidents in which “failed” protests helped China’s revolutionary movements gain momentum and popular support. One absolutely massive widescreen oil painting celebrates the May 30th Movement, a series of protests and strikes in Shanghai that led to the “Shanghai Massacre” of 1925, in which nine protestors on Nanjing Road were shot and killed by members of the Municipal Police.

I was particularly taken with the works of the artist Chen Jian, who has supplied a series of tableaux for the museum, some of them about specified individual subjects, others about more general themes. Chen’s work includes a moody, cramped depiction of Communists studying in their prison cell, and the beautifully modernist “The Arrestee”, in which two plainclothes police officers lead an unrepentant Communist to a prison van. The picture is suffused with an unsettling physicality, as one of the officers seems to be leaning into his task, as if he is having to bodily drag a prisoner who stands confident with the gravity of being on the right side of history.

Other artists tackle the problematic history of the Longhua Cemetery as the location of White Terror firing squads, such as Wang Shaolun’s “On the Execution Field”, in which a diverse collection of Chinese subjects wait glumly for their imminent deaths.

In one of the most moving exhibits, the museum relates the story of Cai Bozhen and Wu Zhongwen, who were married in the prison van that took them to their deaths, a soaringly romantic revolutionary story that has already been immortalised in a movie, for which extra drama was piled on with “The Internationale” substituting for the Wedding March.

Revolution, for the museum, is a state of grace towards which China groped during its Century of Humiliation, and then fought to maintain in the years that followed. There would be scope here, in a truly comprehensive installation, for an entire extra gallery about the Chinese who lost their lives in some of wrong-turns of the subsequent Chinese state, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but such discussions are characteristically muted.

Instead, it favours the idea of revolutionary spirit as something that burned in the hearts of the characters whose stories are told in the exhibits, and should be nurtured and encouraged in everyone. Pointing out that it presumably also flourished in at least some of the millions of people who were starved, beaten or executed during Maoist purges and social experiments in the 1950s and 1960s would ruin the brilliantly told story of a past that marches ever onwards towards a utopian present.

Nor does the museum have much time or space for those revolutionaries who were inconveniently Nationalist. The Nationalist authorities, with whom the Communists themselves fought from 1911 to 1949 (and technically still fight today on Taiwan), might equally lay claim to be the inheritors of the Small Swords Society or the Su Bao, but their contribution is downplayed here. That, perhaps, is only to be expected in Shanghai of all places, where Chiang Kai-shek authorised vicious putsches against Communists, many victims of which died on these very premises.

Instead, the museum’s narrative of the martyrs of the Revolution continues into the 1950s and beyond, with tales of derring-do on numerous Cold War battlefields, and selfless sacrifices by soldiers, firemen and other public servants.

The visitor is guided out past one final giant oil painting, “The Vision” by Li Peng, which looks down on the contemporary Pudong cityscape from a vantage point somewhere high above the Bund. This, it seems to say, is what you now have, because of their sacrifices.

As the visitor heads towards the exit, past the classrooms and library, there is one final exhibit. The museum doesn’t have anything so gauche as a gift shop, but it does have a wall of free bookmarks, filed chronologically. Each bears the image and description of a Martyr of the Revolution, encouraging the visitor to take a piece of Revolution home with them. I couldn’t find any of my newfound favourites on the day, so I settled for Qiu Jin.

The Longhua Martyrs Cemetery and its attendant museum are gold-star examples of the new “Red Tourism”, and an absolutely fascinating example of “the story people tell themselves about themselves.” It is easily the most interesting place I have visited in Shanghai, not least because it finds a way to put Shanghai itself front and centre in the story of the birth of modern China.  

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.