Caplan, Aaron

A museum featuring "ten thousand Chinese things," Nathan Dunn's Chinese Museum informed and entertained Philadelphians from 1838-1841. Filled with artifacts, paintings, life-size mannequins, and recreations of Chinese shops and drawing rooms, the museum gave Americans a brief glimpse of a country that most never would see.

Founded in 1838 by merchant and philanthropist Nathan Dunn (1782-1844), the museum shared its home at Ninth and George (now Sansom) Streets in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Museum, the descendant of Charles Willson Peale's museum of portraits and natural history. During his time in the China trade, Dunn had acquired a large collection of artifacts in Canton between 1818 and 1831 and presumably housed them at his New Jersey summer home, known as the "Chinese Cottage," until the late 1830s, when he decided to bring his collection to the public. He joined the Philadelphia Museum company and spearheaded the campaign to raise funds for the building that would house both the Philadelphia Museum and his own Chinese Collection. By most measures, the partnership was a success. An estimated 100,000 people visited Dunn's Chinese Museum during its short life, purchasing 50,000 copies of its catalogue, and although it did not present any new ideas about China, the Museum did play a major role in shaping American perceptions of China.

By 1842, Dunn decided to relocate his collection to London, perhaps for financial reasons. Planning to donate a large portion of the profits to charity, he may have sought a larger audience who would find the exhibit fresh and novel. The opium wars also may have played a role in Dunn's decision to relocate. Dunn opposed the opium trade and apparently believed that he could sway the British public against the trade by making them better acquainted with Chinese society and culture. Following a favorable report from its first visitor, the young Queen Victoria, the British nobility and scholars flocked to Dunn's exhibit pavilion in droves, and for the next two years, the Museum enjoyed considerable success. After Dunn's death in 1844 revealed that his assets could not cover the generous bequests he had laid out in his will, the Museum's curator William B. Langdon, took the collection on a tour of Britain in an attempt to raise funds. The later whereabouts of the collection are uncertain, although a portion of it may have been lost in a train wreck near Edinburgh in 1849. In the following year, P.T. Barnum displayed what was apparently at least a portion of the collection in Knightsbridge to little success, after which the collection was auctioned in December of 1851, perhaps saving some of it from the fiery fate that befell Barnum's American Museum. Its later whereabouts are unknown, but over twenty-five years later, the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia reportedly featured a few items from the Museum.

A philanthropist as well as a merchant, Dunn was the first major donor to Haverford College. He persevered through intermittent legal and financial troubles. Despite being disowned by the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting in 1816 for bankruptcy, his Quaker beliefs continued to influence his life and his work. He was director of the Philadelphia House of Refuge and involved with several other benevolent organizations, including the Pennsylvania Institute for Instruction of the Blind, the Indigent Widows and Single Women's Society, African colonization societies, and prison reform societies. He was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences and in 1836 was elected to the American Philosophical Society. Dunn died at age 62 of malaria in Switzerland on September 19, 1844.

From the guide to the Nathan Dunn's Chinese Museum, 1986, (American Philosophical Society)