To Serve and Protect: Shanghai Style

After almost two years in Shanghai we've hit about all the big sights and are now looking for the overlooked. We found it on Saturday. We visited the Museum of Public Security operated by the Shanghai police and chronicling their history. We paid 8 rmb to enter the multi-storied museum on Ruijin South Road and immediately noticed that we were all alone. There was a security guard at the entrance and a young lady that sold us the ticket - but there was no one else to be seen.

We went from floor to floor looking at exhibits of 150-years of police gear, clothing, vehicles, and memorabilia. There was virtually no English signage so we were only able to get bits and pieces of the story behind the exhibits but much of it was self-explanatory. There was a section on counterfeit money and credit cards, a section on spies that the police caught (hollowed-out books, etc) and one room dedicated to photos of bludgeoned, shot, decapitated and otherwise inconvenienced crime victims.

The fourth floor was given over to the firefighters - a part of the Public Security Bureau (PSB) - the name the police go by in China. This was the last floor. It had been an hour-long tour of the museum and we had not seen another visitor during that hour. Like the Zhou Enlai Museum I visited a couple of weeks ago, this museum was empty on a Saturday afternoon in a city of 20 million people. So if you are ever in Shanghai and get tired of the crowds all you need to do is pay 8 rmb (about US$1) and retreat to a museum celebrating the police or old Communist heroes.