The curator of Russia's State Historical Museum, Alexey, paid a visit to Shanxi province, Feb 11 – 12, with some colleagues to get a look at the Shanxi Museum and its exhibitions, space utilization, arrangements, design, and relics storage.

Accompanying the visitors was the vice-provincial governor, Zhang Fuming, and officials from the province's Foreign Affairs Office, Culture Relics Bureau and Shanxi Museum to discuss exchanges and communications based on their collections. They reached an exchange agreement for 2016 on a "Shanxi ancient arts exhibition" in Russia, and "18th century Tsarist culture and arts exhibition" in Shanxi and agreed to cooperate in museum management, relic preservation, archeological research, public education, and museum personnel training to promote cultural exchanges.

Zhang led a Shanxi cultural relics delegation to Russia, last May, and visited the State Historical Museum in Moscow, where the architecture, exhibitions, and other collections made a great impression on the Chinese visitors, and the two museums spoke about cooperative relations.

Work on the Russian Historical Museum, in the middle of Red Square, in Moscow and Manezhnaya Square, began in 1873, and it opened to the public in 1883, making it one of Russia's oldest museums and one of the major educational institutions, with a fabulous collection. It has become a Moscow landmark and the glory of Russian culture with 4.2 million objects and more thn 68 million pages of historical records. It has 48 exhibition halls for Russian politics, the economy, military, culture, arts and social life of different historical periods.