Published in China Science Daily, Friday, September 11, 2026. This article mainly used AI for searching materials; the full draft was basically still hand-assembled by me. It underwent major revisions at publication, with many expressions softened and controversial terms such as “panopticon” removed. Here I am posting the original version.
I. The Reasons for “Please Do Not Touch”
At the end of August, a specimen of Protobothrops 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 then took off a shoe and slapped it. Afterward, the museum issued a statement, the director, Zhang Jinsuo, gave an interview, and the internet erupted in condemnation. Most of that condemnation was aimed at the parents’ “quality,” and of course I do not think this parent’s behavior deserves approval either. But 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 touching: “Sweat and oils on the hands will corrode the specimens; the specimens are nonrenewable; some specimens retain preservative chemicals … posing health risks; the specimens are real animals, not models. After death they are made into specimens for research and public 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 one. But these four reasons are actually independent of one another—nonrenewable specimens may also be poisonous, and inanimate objects may also be fragile. Moreover, apart from the health risk, none of these reasons seems sufficient to constitute a full reason for “no touching”—because if we look back at the history of museums, we find that these reasons have always existed, yet “no touching” is in fact a relatively new rule. Specimens in museums used to be welcome to be touched.
II. Exhibits That Could Be Touched
“Please do not touch” as a basic “standard of conduct” for museum visitors is not a very old historical development.
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 guided by the host to take them up one by one and examine them in their hands. In that era, touching was not bad manners but a legitimate way of knowing: you weighed the object in your hand, rubbed its texture, turned it over, and from that judged whether it was genuine and what sort of thing it was. Eyes could be deceived; hands could not—that was the common conviction of the time.
In 1683, the Ashmolean Museum opened in Oxford and is generally regarded as the first public museum. It inherited the mode of viewing of the cabinet of curiosities, except that it expanded visitors from invited friends to anyone who could afford a ticket. 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 rushed about grabbing everything. This passage is often quoted to illustrate the “chaos” of early museums, but what is more noteworthy is that Uffenbach was not complaining about touching as such, but about women touching things indiscriminately. He believed the privilege of savoring such objects belonged to cultivated gentlemen, and he himself also put his hands on things, recording 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 “Wonder Theater of Nature” (Wondertooneel der Nature), and promoting it in print: for 3 Dutch guilders one could buy a printed catalog of the collection, plus 2 guilders for admission. Visitors included Peter the Great. The collection contained 600 animals preserved in alcohol, 288 boxes of insects, 32 drawers of shells and carapaces, 14 drawers of fossils and minerals, a display of a forest scene, sponges and corals… The exhibits in the drawers were all touchable. At that time, even some preserved corpses were allowed to be touched; the literature even preserves a story of Peter the Great picking up an extremely lifelike preserved boy specimen and kissing it.[1]
In other words, during the first one or two hundred years after museums were born, it was normal for specimens to be touched.
III. Glass Cases and Discipline
It was not until the nineteenth century that glass cases became standard. As public museums became more popular and commercialized, glass cases at this point became standard museum equipment. This certainly had the significance of protecting the collections, but the very new mode of exhibition planning, with its entire system of orderly arrangement, was itself also a form of discipline exerted upon the audience.
Museums of this period no longer displayed collections according to the arbitrary principles of early cabinets of curiosities. Exhibitions always had to present some kind of order. Museums were educational institutions, responsible for transmitting orderly knowledge to the public, and for teaching the public to follow the order of the industrial age.
The Australian scholar Tony Bennett pointed out in The Birth of the Museum that nineteenth-century public museums, world expositions, and department stores together constituted a new apparatus of power, one that mirrored the prisons described by Foucault: “The exhibitionary complex and the prison archipelago developed more or less simultaneously, that is, from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century”[2]
The panopticon keeps people under constant sight—the prisoner knows the watcher can see him at any moment, but he cannot see the watcher, so even when the watcher is absent he can complete his own discipline through self-surveillance. The museum, by contrast, lets the masses watch one another. At the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, the “tips for visitors” advised: “Please remember that when you enter the gate, you are part of the exhibition”[3] Bennett said: “The exposition thus achieved certain ideals of panopticism, converting crowds into objects of continuous surveillance, self-surveillance and self-management, and, as the historical record shows, into a consistently ordered public”[4].
From cabinets of curiosities and wonder theaters to world industrial expositions and the Science Museum in London, the theme of the museum also changed, from novel knowledge to orderly knowledge. And modern science itself is vision-centered; apart from helping us understand the shape of objects in the same way vision does, touch has no additional epistemological status. Vision offers a detached and objective cognitive standpoint, whereas touch involves the subjective body, which does not aid the construction of knowledge. So it was only natural that the hand should be excluded from the museum.
IV. Science Centers and the Return of the Hand
By the latter half of the twentieth century, another kind of exhibition hall brought the hand back in: the “science center.” Science centers differ from science museums in that they are dominated by interactive devices rather than historical collections, and these sturdy installations are designed specifically to be handled. The Exploratorium in San Francisco, founded in 1969, and Ontario Science Centre in Toronto are paradigms. The Exploratorium has no glass cases; visitors use their hands to operate the exhibits and understand the principles of optics, mechanics, and perception.
Subsequent science centers, including science and technology museums all over China, have taken the Exploratorium as their model, advocating hands-on operation and allowing visitors to learn scientific knowledge through entertaining 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”: corals, shells, whale bones, rocks, antlers, even whole animal skins are placed on open counters with signs beside them saying “Please touch.” This is the natural history museum’s imitation of the science center, and also a response to visitor pressure—parents bringing children expect the children to “get hands-on,” and so the museum provides some things that can indeed be handled.
At the same time, our concept of “what science is” has changed again; the orderly discipline of the colonial era has become outdated, and we now once more advocate scientific pluralism—scientific activity is not cold, rigid, pure observation, but includes rich and varied participation and action. Hands, bodies, emotions, culture—these things are no longer seen as opposed to knowledge. New academic currents such as sociology of scientific knowledge and philosophy of scientific practice have given the hands an epistemological status.
Thus, today’s museums simultaneously contain two sets of rules about the hand: on the one hand, the invitation of “Please touch” stemming from science centers and new exhibition concepts; on the other, many places still continue the rule of “Please do not touch.” Visitors move through different galleries in the same museum, and perhaps they too need to switch modes of bodily participation. Yet the reasons for switching are actually not so clear.
V. The Invisible Glass and the Blurred Boundary
Let us now return to those four reasons for “please do not touch,” especially the ethical one: reverence for life. Based on this reason, should we oppose the “touch zones” in natural history museums? Corals are also animals, and animal skins also have all sorts of unique histories—does letting visitors touch them amount to disrespect for life?
The more truthful reason should be: specimens like corals are cheap, whereas specimens of rare snakes are precious. In other words, what really needs to be “respected” seems to be cost rather than life. Of course, that “cost” does not have to be measured only in money; we could also say that the labor of researchers is worthy of respect, but this reason should not be abducted under the name of reverence for life. Moreover, the labor of researchers itself includes various hands-on operations: researchers use their hands to turn life into specimens, and that is respect for life—while visitors using their hands to experience them suddenly counts as disrespect for life? That reasoning does not hold. Better to say it is labor that should be respected.
The reason phrases like “reverence for life” are brought out may be that museums have long since taken down their glass cases, yet do not wish to bear the vulgar air that comes with saying, “This thing is expensive, so you must not touch it.” They need a moral discipline to replace the physical barrier—just as the invisible watcher in the panopticon continues to function even when absent. But moral injunctions must be internally coherent, or they will fail in the eyes of the audience. When a child has already touched whale bones in the touch zone, then heard how researchers use their hands to make specimens, and then is told that “touching specimens with your hands is disrespectful to life,” how is he supposed to make sense of this rule?
VI. Back to the Panopticon?
In the interview, the director explained that the specimens are not covered by glass domes like artifacts because reflections in the 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 has removed the physical barrier and transferred the responsibility for protecting the exhibits to the audience’s self-discipline. In Bennett’s words, this is the most extreme version of the exhibitionary complex—glass is no longer even needed, because the audience is already presumed to be bodies that have fully internalized discipline.
But this presumption is becoming harder and harder to sustain today. Young audiences today are no longer vision-centered; they are a generation raised on touchscreens. For them, what can be seen is what can be operated, and that is a bodily intuition that has been repeatedly trained. Museums use “interaction,” “immersion,” and “hands-on” to attract visitors precisely because they are following the new trend of the age. But if that is the case, then one cannot simply assume that in certain galleries they will willingly 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 call in the police. 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-restraint is no longer dependable. And the discussion of a “blacklist for uncivil behavior” is an attempt to patch discipline with still 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 prison directly—and yes, these are indeed disciplinary means, but are they really the way out for the twenty-first century?
7. 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 return it to exhibition design. The status of the object should be expressed by the space itself, rather than by admonitions on the exhibit label. Of course, I am not a professional in this area and it is hard for me to propose specific solutions; I can only offer a few rough points.
First, there should be a clear spatial distinction between what may be touched and what may not. Differences in distance, height, pedestal, lighting, and flooring material are all signals directly perceptible to the body; wherever possible, the mode of interaction should be conveyed through spatial design.
Second, if realistic replicas can be made, then the original and the replica can be displayed as a pair, and the difference between the two can become part of the exhibition itself. Put a life-size replica that can be touched next to a precious specimen. Museums should respect visitors’ interest in touching.
Third, the provenance of the specimen should also be made into a visual part of the exhibition, rather than being left to a news release after the fact. Chen Yuanhui, the discoverer of the Mangshan pit viper, had a finger amputated after being bitten by it; this specimen was donated by him. This history is told very movingly in interviews, but in the exhibition hall, visitors cannot see these things directly, and at best can only learn about them through a particular kind of commentary or dry text.
Fourth, for especially precious exhibits, there is no need to abandon glass cases altogether; one could consider using low-reflectivity invisible glass, optical magnification devices, electronic screens, and other technological means to help visitors see the exhibits clearly. Although this costs more, it is worthwhile for precious exhibits.
Finally, occasional damage may be hard to avoid; compensation can be sought afterward, and there is no need to damage the experience of the vast majority of visitors in order to guard against a very small number of people. If damage becomes the norm, if a considerable number of people no longer accept the default etiquette, then that means the culture of the times itself has changed. One should respect the cultural background of the age and adapt the display methods accordingly, 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; ed. Wang Xiaoxi and Wang Siyu, Renmin University of China Press, 2024, p. 74.
[3] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, trans. Duan Jifang, Chen Jing, Chen Wangqing, and Xiao Na; ed. Wang Xiaoxi and Wang Siyu, Renmin University of China Press, 2024, pp. 83–84.
[4] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, trans. Duan Jifang, Chen Jing, Chen Wangqing, and Xiao Na; ed. Wang Xiaoxi and Wang Siyu, Renmin University of China Press, 2024, p. 84.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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