Published in China Science Daily, Friday, September 11, 2026. AI was used in this article mainly for retrieving materials; the full text was basically still hand-crafted by me. It was significantly revised at publication, softening many expressions and removing controversial terms such as “panopticon.” What follows is the original version.
1. The Reasons for “Do Not Touch”
At the end of August, a specimen of Ophiophagus mangshanensis at the National Zoological Museum of China was damaged by a visitor who treated it like a toy. In the surveillance footage, a father picked up the specimen and handed it to his child, who took off a shoe and beat it with it. Afterwards the museum issued a statement, Director Zhang Jinsuo was interviewed, and the internet was filled with condemnation. Most of these condemnations targeted the parents’ “quality,” and of course I do not think this parent’s behavior is worthy of approval either; still, what interests me more is a certain predicament in the museum’s own design and positioning.
In its statement, the museum listed the reasons for prohibiting touch: “Sweat and oils on the hands can corrode specimens; specimens are non-renewable; some specimens retain preservatives… posing health risks; specimens are real animals, not models. They were made into specimens after death for research and popular science education. Handling them at will shows disrespect for the exhibits and their sources.”
The first three are technical reasons, or rather economic reasons, while the last is an ethical reason. But in fact these four reasons are independent of one another—renewable specimens may also be poisonous, and nonliving objects may also be fragile. Moreover, apart from the health risk, none of these reasons seems sufficient to constitute a “no touching” rule—because if we look back at the history of museums, we find that these reasons have always existed, yet the prohibition on touching is in fact a relatively recent rule; specimens in museums were once welcomed to be touched.
2. Exhibits That Could Be Touched
“Do not touch” as a basic form of “proper conduct” for the public visiting museums does not have a very long history.
The seventeenth-century cabinet of curiosities was the precursor of the modern museum. Collectors piled crocodile specimens, narwhal tusks, shells, minerals, and exotic objects into the same room, and visitors were shown around by the host, taking each object in their hands to examine it closely. In that era, touching was not rude; it was the proper route to knowledge: you weighed it in your hand, felt its texture with your fingers, turned it over, and thereby judged whether it was genuine and what kind of thing it was. Eyes could be deceived; hands could not—that was the consensus of the time.
In 1683, the Ashmolean Museum opened in Oxford and is generally regarded as the first public museum. It inherited the visiting style of the cabinet of curiosities, except that it expanded the number of visitors from invited friends to anyone who could afford the entrance fee. In 1710, the German scholar Uffenbach visited the museum and left behind a famous complaint in his travel notes: even women could come in for six pence, and they ran about grabbing at everything. This passage is often cited to illustrate the “chaos” of early museums, but what is more noteworthy is that Uffenbach was not complaining about touching, but about women touching things indiscriminately. He believed the privilege of appreciative inspection belonged to cultivated gentlemen; he too used his hands, and recorded the feel of specimens such as reindeer and goats.
In 1705, the Dutch merchant Vincent opened his own cabinet of curiosities to the public, calling it the “Theater of Natural Wonders” (Wondertooneel der Nature), and promoted it in print: three Dutch guilders for a printed catalog of the collection, plus two guilders for admission. Visitors included Peter the Great. The collection contained 600 bottles of animal corpses preserved in alcohol, 288 boxes of insects, 32 drawers of shells and carapaces, 14 drawers of fossils and minerals, and display cases presenting forest scenes, sponges, and coral… The exhibits in the drawers could all be touched. At that time even some embalmed corpses were allowed to be touched, and records even preserve a story of Peter the Great picking up a remarkably lifelike preserved specimen of a boy and kissing it.[1]
In other words, during the first century or two of the museum’s existence, it was perfectly normal for specimens to be touched.
3. Glass Cases and Discipline
Not until the nineteenth century did glass cases appear. With the popularization and commercialization of public museums, glass cases became standard equipment in museums at this time. This certainly had the significance of protecting the collection, but the whole new set of orderly, planned display methods was itself also a form of discipline imposed on the audience.
Museums in this period no longer arranged their collections according to the arbitrary principles of the early cabinets of curiosities; display always had to present some kind of order. The museum was an educational institution, responsible for transmitting orderly knowledge to the public, and also for teaching the public to follow the order of the industrial age.
The Australian scholar Tony Bennett, in The Birth of the Museum, points out that the public museum, the world exposition, and the department store of the nineteenth century together formed a new apparatus of power, a mirror image of the prison in Foucault’s work: “The exhibitionary complex and the carceral archipelago probably developed during much the same historical period, namely, the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century”[2]
The panopticon keeps people under constant visibility—the prisoner knows the watcher can see him at any time, but he cannot see the watcher, and thus even when the watcher is absent, self-surveillance can produce self-discipline. The museum, by contrast, lets the masses watch one another. In the “visitor reminder” for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, the public was admonished: “Remember, when you step through the entrance, you are a part of the show”[3]. Bennett says: “The exhibitionary complex, then, realized some of the major principles of panopticism, transforming the crowd into a constantly surveilled, self-surveilling, and self-managing subject, and, as the historical record shows, into a regularly ordered public”[4].
From the cabinet of curiosities and the theater of wonders to the universal industrial expositions and the London Science Museum, the museum’s theme also changed, from novel knowledge to orderly knowledge. And modern science itself is visual-centric; aside from helping us grasp an object’s shape the way sight does, touch has no additional epistemological status. Vision provides a detached and objective cognitive perspective, while touch implicates the subjective body, which is of no help in the construction of knowledge. So excluding the hand from the museum was only natural.
4. Science Centers and the Return of the Hand
By the second half of the twentieth century, another kind of exhibition hall had invited the hand back in: the “science center.” Science centers differ from science museums in that they are centered on interactive devices rather than cultural relics and collections; these sturdy installations are designed precisely for hands-on operation. The Exploratorium, opened in San Francisco in 1969, and Ontario Science Centre in Toronto are exemplary. The Exploratorium has no glass cases; visitors use their hands to manipulate things and understand the principles of optics, mechanics, and perception.
Subsequent science centers, including science and technology museums across China, have all taken the San Francisco Exploratorium as their model, advocating hands-on operation and allowing visitors to learn scientific knowledge through entertaining and educational interactive games.
This trend did not stop with science and technology museums. In recent decades, natural history museums have also widely set up “touch zones”: coral, shells, whale bones, rocks, antlers, and even whole animal pelts are placed on open counters with signs beside them reading “Please touch.” This is both a museum of natural history’s imitation of the science center and its response to pressure from visitor flow—parents who bring children expect the children to “do something with their hands,” and the museum then provides things that can indeed be handled.
At the same time, our conception of “what science is” has also changed. The orderly discipline of the colonial era has become outdated; now we once again advocate scientific pluralism—scientific activity is not cold and rigid pure observation, but something that includes rich and varied participation and action. Hands, body, emotions, culture—these things are no longer regarded as opposed to knowledge. Sociology of scientific knowledge, philosophy of scientific practice, and other new academic currents have given the hand an epistemological status.
So today’s museums coexist with two sets of rules for the hand: on the one hand, the invitation of “Please touch” stemming from science centers and new display concepts; on the other, many places still continue the rule of “Please do not touch.” As visitors move between different exhibition halls in the same museum, they may also need to switch modes of bodily participation. And the reasons for that switch are in fact not so clear.
5. Invisible Glass and Indistinct Boundaries
Let us now return to those four reasons for “do not touch,” especially the ethical reason: reverence for life. Based on this reason, should we oppose the “touch zones” in natural history museums? Coral is also animal life, and animal pelts also have all sorts of unique histories—does allowing visitors to touch them show disrespect for life?
The more truthful reason should be this: specimens like coral are cheap, while specimens of such a rare snake species are precious. In other words, what really needs to be “respected” seems to be cost rather than life. Of course, “cost” does not have to be measured in money; we can also say that the arduous labor of researchers deserves respect, but this reason should not be hijacked under the guise of reverence for life. Moreover, researchers’ arduous labor itself includes all kinds of hands-on operations; researchers use their hands to turn life into specimens, and that is respect for life, yet when visitors use their hands to experience it, suddenly that is not respect for life? That makes no sense. Better to say that what deserves respect is labor.
Perhaps the reason phrases like “reverence for life” are brought up is that museums have long since removed their glass cases, yet do not want to bear the bourgeois feel of saying, “This thing is expensive, so don’t touch it.” They need a moral discipline to replace the physical barrier—just like the invisible watcher in the panopticon, who still exerts an effect when absent. But moral injunctions must be self-consistent, or else they will fail in the eyes of the audience. When a child has first touched whale bones in the touch zone, then heard the story of how researchers make specimens with their hands, and then is told that “touching specimens with your hands is not reverence for life,” how is he supposed to make sense of this rule?
6. Back to the Panopticon?
In the interview, the director explained that the specimens are not covered in glass the way cultural relics are because reflections from glass would affect the viewing experience. This is an honest explanation, and also a crucial one. It means that open display is a design decision made by the museum itself: in pursuit of better viewing, the museum removed the physical barrier and transferred responsibility for protecting the exhibits to the audience’s self-discipline. In Bennett’s terms, this is the extreme version of the exhibitionary complex—glass is no longer even needed; the audience is already presumed to be a body that has fully internalized discipline.
But this presumption is becoming harder and harder to sustain today. Today’s young visitors are no longer visual centrists; they are a generation raised on touchscreens. For them, what can be seen is what can be operated—a bodily intuition produced by repeated training. Museums use “interaction,” “immersion,” and “hands-on” to attract visitors, and that itself is already an accommodation to the new trend of the age. But if so, one cannot simply assume that in certain exhibition halls they will consciously switch back to a nineteenth-century body.
After the incident, the museum’s response was to release screenshots from the surveillance footage, preserve the full video, reserve the right to pursue legal responsibility, and the police also became involved. I understand this response, but surveillance and accountability are precisely proof of the failure of discipline: when a museum has to rely on cameras to protect its exhibits, it has already admitted that self-discipline is no longer reliable. And the discussion of an “uncivilized behavior blacklist” is an attempt to patch discipline with even more discipline—the curator himself also admitted that this would be very difficult to implement in practice.
Surveillance and blacklists—we seem to be summoning up the nineteenth-century panopticon directly—are indeed disciplinary means, but is this really the way out for the twenty-first century?
Seven. Let the Space Speak
My suggestion is that museums should take the question of “can this thing be touched or not” out of moral discourse and hand it back to exhibition design. The status of the object should be expressed by the space itself, not by admonitions on the exhibition label. Of course, as for how to design it in concrete terms, I am not a specialist and it is hard for me to propose a detailed plan; I can only offer a few rough points.
First, there should be a clear spatial distinction between what can be touched and what cannot. Distance, height, pedestals, lighting, and changes in flooring material are all signals the body can directly perceive; as far as possible, interaction should be communicated through spatial design.
Second, if realistic replicas can be made, then the authentic object can be displayed together with the replica, and the difference between the two can become part of the exhibition itself. Place a life-size replica that can be touched beside a precious specimen. Museums should respect visitors’ interest in touching.
Third, the provenance of the specimen should also be made visible in the exhibition, rather than being left to a press release after the fact. Chen Yuanhui, the discoverer of the Mangshan pit viper, lost a finger after being bitten for it; this specimen was donated by him. This history was told very movingly in interviews, but in the gallery, visitors cannot see this directly; at most, they can learn about it through specific explanations or dry text.
Fourth, especially precious exhibits do not have to give up glass cases entirely; one can consider using low-reflection invisible glass, optical magnifying devices, electronic screens, and other technical means to help visitors see the exhibits clearly. Although the cost is higher, for precious exhibits it is worthwhile.
Finally, occasional damage may be hard to avoid; compensation afterward will do, and there is no need to damage the experience of the majority of visitors in order to guard against a very small number of people. If damage becomes the norm, and quite a lot of people no longer accept the default code of etiquette, then that means the culture of the times itself has changed. One should respect this cultural background of the age, adapt to the times by changing exhibition methods, rather than blaming the majority.
[1] “Touching Anatomy: On the Handling of Preparations in the Anatomical Cabinets of Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731)”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 49, pp. 32–44.
[2] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, trans. Duan Jifang, Chen Jing, Chen Wangqing, and Xiao Na; eds. Wang Xiaoxi and Wang Siyu, China Renmin University Press, 2025, p. 74.
[3] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, trans. Duan Jifang, Chen Jing, Chen Wangqing, and Xiao Na; eds. Wang Xiaoxi and Wang Siyu, China Renmin University Press, 2025, pp. 83–84.
[4] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, trans. Duan Jifang, Chen Jing, Chen Wangqing, and Xiao Na; eds. Wang Xiaoxi and Wang Siyu, China Renmin University Press, 2025, p. 84.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.