Review | Exhibition about history of Hong Kong as a hub of global trade is rich in detail, but too broad in scope

A new exhibition at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum uses objects to join the dots between different cultures, shedding light on affinities forged not by military dominance but by the circulation of ideas through commerce.

An ancient bronze drum excavated in Guangdong province that may be 1,800 years old, for example, so resembles drums of a similar age, material and design found in Yunnan, in the interior of southwest China, and in parts of Southeast Asia that it links southern China to a so-called “Bronze Drum Culture” shared by communities which traded with each other for millennia.

Of the 250 items included in “Maritime Crossroads: Millennia of Global Trade in Hong Kong”, some are exquisite examples of export wares to the West, others intriguing items that demand close inspection, such as a fragment of a wooden ship dating from China’s Ming dynasty unearthed in Sai Kung, in Hong Kong’ s New Territories.

There are also 19th century carronades, a type of cannon, and much smaller flotsam salvaged from shipwrecks that help bring to life the epic journeys of seamen plying long-distance sea routes and place Hong Kong in the cross-currents of the “Monsoon trade routes” that used to be determined by seasonal trade winds.

There is a fundamental problem with the exhibition, however, and that has to do with its scope. The curators have attempted to condense 6,000 years of history (“from the Neolithic to the Internet era”, according to their description) into one exhibition. And it is not just local history but a grand narrative that attempts to cover the history of trade between Asia, the Middle East, Europe and America.