Mudong: the water post at the river junction

The museum stands where the Yangtze and the Wubu meet, and it is the first museum in China devoted to the water post. It is made of two buildings, the Mudong inspection office and the Qiandexing warehouse, 1,917 square metres in all, built on the principle of repairing the old as old. The inspection office is the main gallery, with more than 350 images and texts and more than 200 objects in three parts and 20 installations, among them sand tables, sculpture and multimedia. The subject is a system, not a building: the post station, its staff and the paperwork that moved with the river.

The best exhibits are the ones that stayed outside. Mooring posts and Ming-Qing wharf remains are used to bring back five li of street and one li of wharf, the market town's own measure of itself. The courtyard shows a Taishan shigandang, stone vats and column bases; the holdings include the old book Pingtan Jilue, a Song facsimile of the Wuchuan Lu and a bronze post seal of Dushikou. The Qiandexing warehouse is now the Mudong hall of famous people, with Zou Rong's manuscript and Yang Cangbai's letters, and AR restores the old post-road map of the Kuixing Jicheng.

Mudong has seen human activity since the Neolithic, and by Tang and Song times its trade was busy. The water post was one of three forms of post station, staffed with a postmaster, boatmen and watermen; in the Yuan, Ming and Qing water posts and inspection offices were set up in turn, and the town became an important land and water hub on the upper Yangtze. It is counted one of Chongqing's four great water posts, with Tongguan, Chengshui and Yudong. In 2017 Mudong was named a historic-culture town of Chongqing, which is the modern register of the same fact.