When you travel far and for a long time your priorities tend to change. You begin to trim off the obligatory must sees, particularly in the big cities where the lists of attractions are overwhelming. Quite honestly, we cannot be bothered to visit some lame sight merely because a guidebook has listed it as a sine qua non on any given tour.

In our case the tourist waste basket is full of museums, because so many cities have so much history, and history – unfortunately – tends to be presented as if it were really just files in a bureaucrat cabinet: grey, dull and ghastly lit. A welcome exception to the rule is the Shanghai Museum.

The centrally located building which looks almost like a dim-sum-box is situated right on the People’s Square where the visitors are led straight to the entrance atrium paved with wall to wall polished granite.

We wander about the 14 galleries that the museum curators have carpeted and lit dimly, muffling the sounds and making it more easy to focus your attention on the objects on display without being disturbed by the other visitors.

One of the most fascinating exhibits is the absolutely overwhelming collection of coins and bank notes – more than 7,000 of them made of gold, silver, iron, bronze, and copper. Not least thanks to a private collector who has generously donated his huge collection of coins from the old princedoms along the ancient silk trade route to the museum.

We dwell on the sight of some of the first printed private bank notes. Small works of art, ornamented with lavish splendour, promising that the banks will pay the bearer the stated amount in gold.

The permanent collection of the museum consists of more than 123,000 objects, covering everything from calligraphy and textiles to porcelain, jade and ancient imperial seals.

Among the most treasured exhibits are the bronzes from the Shang and the Zhou Dynasties, not to mention the impressive collection of furniture from the Ming and the Qing Dynasties – whose functionality and purified and simple lines and shapes still act as an inspiration for today’s modern Asian design.

Thousands of visitors pass by the museum every day, so we had been told to be ready to queue. When we arrived, however, on a rainy Monday there was hardly anybody there, and we had almost all the galleries and the small tea house on the first floor to ourselves.

SHANGHAI MUSEUM, 201 Renmin Avenue, Shanghai.