Taiping Kingdom History Museum, History museum at Zhanyuan Garden, Nanjing, China.

The Taiping Kingdom History Museum occupies part of Zhanyuan Garden on Zhanyuan Road in the Qinhuai District of Nanjing, a Jiangnan-style garden that was once the Enthusiasm Garden of the Ming founder Hongwu. The museum is the only one in China devoted specifically to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and its rooms hold more than 2,000 Taiping relics, including coins, weapons, uniforms and documents, alongside Qing official archives and 19th-century printed books.

The garden around the museum was the Ming-dynasty Zhan Garden of the Hongwu emperor before 1853, when Taiping commander Yang Xiuqing made it his residence. Nanjing served as the Taiping capital until 1864, when Qing forces retook the city at the Third Battle of Nanjing. The museum itself opened on this site in 1958, after a Taiping memorial hall founded in 1956 on Tangzi Street was moved here.

The museum's name comes from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the state the rebels founded in 1851. Its ideology was an idiosyncratic version of Christianity: Hong Xiuquan, the movement's leader, believed he was Christ's younger brother, sent by God to overthrow the Manchu Qing rulers, whom he called demons. Documents in the collection set out this doctrine.

The museum sits inside Zhanyuan Garden at 128 Zhanyuan Road in the Qinhuai District, so the exhibition rooms are reached by walking through the garden itself. It is a national second-grade museum and part of the Nanjing Museum Administration. Allow time to cross the grounds between the garden and the display halls.

Inside you will find preserved coins and paper money made during the Taiping Kingdom, a rare sign of efforts to build a complete state system. An exhibition also displays detailed sketches and models of fortifications used during the siege of Nanjing.