Rockbund Art Museum

This guide to the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai starts with the Royal Asiatic Society's collection that once filled these rooms, a stuffed leopard, thousands of pinned butterflies, ancient bronzes, over twenty thousand specimens gathered since 1874, then traces how almost overnight every piece walked out the door in 1952. You'll hear where the animals, antiquities and books ended up scattered across the city, and how the art deco building itself, finished in 1933 and once trading specimens with the British Museum and the Met, sat quiet and stripped for decades. Listen for how the same rooms that lost everything they owned found a second use.