Zhejiang Announces 2025 List of Provincial Village Museums: Six New Additions from Wenzhou Recognized

The Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau has released its 2025 list of provincial-level village museums, designating six new institutions from Wenzhou. The newly recognized sites include the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway Culture Exhibition Hall in Ouhai District, the Nanshan Sliced Noodle Memory Museum in Ruian City, the Maosong Vinegar Culture Museum in Pingyang County, and three museums in Taishun County: the Weng Tongwen Art and Culture Museum, the Xiaocun Folk Culture Museum, and the Kutun Cultural Exhibition Hall. With these additions, Wenzhou now has a total of 98 provincially designated village museums.

These six museums serve as unique"cultural living rooms," each offering a distinctive window into local traditions and community identity.

The Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway Culture Exhibition Hall in Ouhai District uses rare historical materials, physical artifacts, and digital exhibition technologies to tell the story of Wenzhou's entrepreneurial spirit and urban development. The main exhibition space, the Skills Master Studio, is housed in a decommissioned railway line and repurposed train carriages. The centerpiece is the"Gratitude and Progress" train, which includes a drivable locomotive and three themed carriages equipped with a train simulation system that allows visitors to experience virtual train operation. The"Time Platform" area uses immersive reconstructions to display historical documents, photographs, and personal accounts from the builders and workers of the Jinhua-Wenzhou Railway.

The Nanshan Sliced Noodle Memory Museum in Ruian and the Maosong Vinegar Culture Museum in Pingyang both use food as a cultural entry point, exploring ingredients, production processes, craftsmanship, and folk traditions. Housed in a 300-year-old"Zoumalou" residence in Nanshan Village, Pingyangkeng Town, Ruian, the noodle museum showcases the entire process of making suomian (hand-stretched noodles)—from mixing and kneading dough to coiling, stretching, and sun-drying. It also features a workshop where visitors can taste traditional"longevity noodles" and participate in noodle-drying educational programs.

Located in Zhouyang Village, Wanzhen Town, Pingyang County, the Maosong Vinegar Culture Museum focuses on vinegar heritage and is divided into sections:"The History of Vinegar,""The Vinegar Family,""Vinegar in Diet,""Vinegar in Ritual," and an educational zone. It traces the origins of traditional vinegar brewing, illustrating the development of the vinegar industry in Zhouyang Village across different eras and the product evolution of Maosong fragrant vinegar. The museum also offers hands-on vinegar culture courses to help youth engage with this heritage.

Drawing on cultural assets such as folk traditions, intangible cultural heritage (ICH), and historic homes, Taishun County has developed a cluster of small, refined, and meaningful village museums. The Weng Tongwen Art and Culture Museum in Waiyang Village, Xiaocun Town, is located in the former residence of scholar Weng Tongwen. It focuses on his life, showcasing his academic works and artistic creations through artifacts and archival materials to highlight his scholarly and artistic legacy.

Nearby, the Xiaocun Folk Culture Museum highlights local customs, featuring an agricultural product exhibition and sales center, a farming culture gallery, a wedding customs hall, an ICH gallery, and a small tavern. With over 3,000 sets of folk artifacts from southern Zhejiang, the museum hosts parent-child educational programs on ICH and farming culture, serving as a vibrant platform for local cultural promotion.

The Kutun Village Museum, located in the ancient Kutun Village in Nanputan Town, centers on"a thousand years of scholarly farming culture." It explores the village's history through a blend of culture, tourism, and education, restoring the architectural style and historical narrative of the settlement. Using cultural elements such as stone carvings, She embroidery, and rice cultivation, the museum has established a"one-main, four-branch" cultural complex. The main hall guides the overall narrative, while the four branch museums focus on themes like"scholarship and farming passed down through generations,""ecological Kutun," and"folk customs and intangible heritage," making it a living model of rural cultural revitalization in southern Zhejiang.

Together, Wenzhou's village museums are crafting a powerful narrative of cultural preservation, civilizational continuity, and rural renewal—one community, one story, and one museum at a time.（Ran Mengdie）