Inside the museum of the Chinese businessman
BEIJING — A museum devoted to Chinese businessmen evokes images of drab exhibition halls filled with scale models of earnest middle managers and blueprints of factory expansions.
Yet the Chinese Businessman Museum tells the fascinating tale of an ancient tribe of merchants who revolutionized the way business is done in China. They are credited with inventing the country’s first banking system, establishing a nationwide business alliance that would put modern networking to shame and, oddly enough, turning Maotai into the country’s most famous liquor.
They are the Jinshang merchants of Shanxi province, who for 500 years were China’s business elite — a reign that collapsed with the monarchy and stayed buried through the decades of chaos that ruled China through the 20th century. With China’s economic rise there is renewed interest in its ancient business luminaries.
The businessman museum, a gorgeous and sprawling complex of gray brick on the southeast edge of Beijing, uses only a portion of its grounds to show off its collection. Inside are 200-year-old contracts and passports, stamps and signboards of merchants and interactive photo and map exhibits. It is, quite simply, an elegant and well-planned museum with an interesting tale.
It is also dead empty.
