XI'AN, China - This year, in a drive to promote awareness of China's national heritage, the government introduced a free-admission policy at the country's public museums.
Officially, the cultural establishment greeted the news with smiles.
But the look of exasperation on the face of a curator watching crowds of schoolchildren swarm through a gallery of ancient ceramics here on a recent morning told a different story.
They touched every exposed surface, leaned on glass cases and smeared them with fingerprints. Body contact and the art experience seemed to be inseparable.
A running joke is that once only a few people came to these institutions to see the art; now many come, not for the art but for the air-conditioning.
Such are the growing pains of museums in a country that feels both older and newer than any place on the planet.
Archaeology pushes its history ever deeper into the past; a racing market economy makes Chinese-ness a mutable identity, under continuous revision. The country and its art institutions seem caught in the tension between self-images: the sovereign civilization apart on one hand, the ambitious scrambler in the global game on the other.
Or so it feels to an art critic on a month-long visit here, taking the measure of the Chinese art world against a panorama of earthquakes and hectic preparations for the Olympic Games.
China's museums come in all sizes and types, from the majestic Shanghai Museum to shabby rooms in small- town Confucian temples.
The artefacts are fabulous. What looks from afar like a dim little nothing display can leave you floored. (Contemporary-art museums are for the most part in a separate, still shaky category, an amalgam of public and corporate, for-hire affairs and collectors' vanity showcases.) Yet most art is an unsettled category in China - 'cultural relics' is the preferred term - and museums have complicated uses.
They provide aesthetic delectation to be sure, but also moral education, pop entertainment and political propaganda. In a country that, culturally speaking, always has one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, art museums tend to be both innovative and conservative. They are postmodern or premodern but skip the in-between.
There are exceptions. The new city museum in Suzhou is a Modernist showcase par excellence, pitched to international consumption.
Designed by I.M. Pei, who spent part of his youth there, its clean lines and cream-and-grey architecture would look equally at home in Paris or New York. So would the spartan galleries, which exude art-speaks-for-itself Western taste and are as suited to party-giving as art-viewing.
From outside, the splendid Shanxi Museum in Taiyuan looks far more exotic to the Western eye. Its inverted- pyramid shape is a kind of Chinese version of chinoiserie, such as the New Agey mood music that emanates from fake rocks in public parks here.
Yet the installation of archaic ritual bronzes will feel familiar to anyone who frequents the Metropolitan Museum of Art's display of the same type of material in New York, so similar is the presentation.
Almost shocking in their fierce delicacy, they are joined here by complete sets of caldrons for ancestral offerings, carillons of giant bells and herds of fantastically fashioned beasts. The sight of them lined up in spotless cases, as if in a celestial department store, is an experience of formal perfection that an art specialist dreams about and comes to China for.
If China's effort to regain its patrimony is still in the testing stages, so are its efforts to preserve its treasures and promote its museums, which are growing in number, size and ambition.
No one can predict what impact free admission will ultimately have, but museum officials express confidence that all will be right. People will learn proper behaviour, they reason.
Meanwhile, museums are experimenting with daily attendance limits and beefing up on guards.
Experimentation is integral to China's public museums. The old is big news. Institutions are still excavating and discovering, still defining what art is and what it means. The city museum in Xi'an, which opened new quarters just last year, is a bracing example.
I recently spent an afternoon there touring its galleries of carved jades, porcelain and Tang gold work before studying objects up close with curators in a storage area. Afterwards, as they walked me out through a back hall, we came across a large form lying under a blanket on the floor. What was it? No one was sure, so we all crouched and lifted the blanket to see.
It was a life-size sculpture of a Buddha or bodhisattva carved in a local stone, caked with dirt on one side but still brilliant with centuries-old vermilion paint on the other.
Oh, yes, someone said, this just arrived. Workers found it in an orchard outside town. We all bent close. One by one, we gently touched its surface, as if feeling for a pulse. As if touch were a form of seeing, we touched the past.
