DM Monitoring
LANZHOU: In an obscure museum in Huachuan Village, old items and furniture collected from local farmers are testimonies to the tremendous changes wrought by China’s anti-poverty drive. Kerosene lamps and water containers made from bark were once common objects in the village in northwest China’s Gansu Province. Now they are displayed like ancient relics in the three-room “Rural Memory Museum.”
Hold your breath and meet the most grandiose dowry of a local family: five pottery bowls of different sizes juxtaposed like an unfolded Matryoshka doll.
“In the past, only the richest of the impoverished families in the village could afford them,” said Wang Ting, a township official stationed at the village and a guide at the three-room museum. Pottery jars of various sizes and shapes are the most common items on display, redolent of the era when local families need to store water to prepare for droughts.
Another photo showed villagers gathering around a newly-installed open-air faucet in 2014. “It was the first time tap water reached the village, and villagers wrapped the faucet with plastic bags to protect the precious water source from freezing in the winter,” said Wang. China has set the goal of eradicating absolute poverty by 2020. As destitution fades across China, villages like Huachuan have set up museums to document the memories of poverty, both to honor the historic campaign and to preserve local cultures and identities. In east China’s Shandong Province, over 210 village memory museums have been set up since 2018 with government funds. One of such museums in Caoxian County collected over 100 wooden farming tools that have been replaced by machines.
