One Weird Way to Spend The Holiday: The Beijing Police Museum
To celebrate International Museum Month we returned to some of Beijing’s more niche museums for a look around. Our team found the aging exhibits just as bizarre and pleasantly surprising as we’d remembered.
Beijing Police Museum (北京警察博物馆)
Mind-blowing and dangerous are oft used descriptors in Beijing, but the exhibits at the Beijing Police Museum are exactly that. Museums are not necessarily my idea of fun and certainly wouldn’t normally trump a few hours on the couch watching DVDs. But it was stifling hot in my apartment one Saturday, so I thought I’d volunteer to visit one of the museums for this feature and try to enjoy the AC for an hour. I opted to go to the Police Museum at Dong Jiao Min Xiang, close to Tian’anmen Square.
Admittance is RMB 5 at the small box office next to the entrance. The Museum is located at the rump of the Beijing Police Station, which itself is housed in an impossibly ancient building curiously free of any Chinese-style architecture. It was also the Beijing branch of a bank before World War I.
Exhibits are found among every nook of the four-storey building. The first floor deals with the history of Chinese Police post-1940s. The highlight of the second floor is the “famous criminal cases” exhibition. And you can monitor the traffic on Chang’an Jie from the third floor. All exhibitions are described bilingually – handy for foreign law enforcement enthusiasts.
But the first three floors serve as mere warm-ups for the main attraction: The Gun Collection Exhibition. From the ungainly Mausers of the 1940s to the heavy duty machine-guns used right up to the 1990s, eight shelves loaded with firearms allow you to get some idea of the craftsmanship that goes into each firearm.
Pistols from the Czech Republic and Spain were the prettiest, delicately designed and elegantly decorated in cowry – almost too pretty for a deadly weapon. Admiring their gleaming beauty gave me a newfound appreciation for them.
I ended up spending two hours there, the brunt of that time admiring the guns. I think I might have inadvertently discovered a new hobby. Previously, I was terrified of guns, but like I said, it was mind-blowing.
Beijing Police Museum 北京警察博物馆
Tue-Sun 9am-4pm (last admittance 3.30pm). 36 Dongjiao Minxiang, Dongcheng District (8522 5018)
北京市东城区东交民巷36号
A version of this article appears in the September 2013 issue of the Beijinger
Photos: Crystal Li
