This article establishes that the first museum in China was not the Zhendan
Museum in Shanghai, founded by the French Jesuit Pierre Marie Heude
(1836–1902) in 1868, but the “British Museum in China”, founded in 1829 by
three supercargoes of the English East India Company, in Macao, a Portuguese
enclave in the Pearl River Delta since c.1577. My research, based on
Portuguese, British and American sources, allows us to better understand the
context in which the founders of the museum interacted and lived in Macao,
how their research and field-work was important for academic British
institutions such as the British Museum in London and how the British Museum
of Macao was founded and became the first (western-styled) museum in
China.