Two of our Human Technologies teachers were very lucky to be invited to preview 'The Little History of the World'.

Natalie Bailey and Jon Rees visited Christian and Stella Pilard's incredible museum in Chai Wan, which they have built after a lifetime of inquiry.

Their Little Museum's slogan is "A Time Machine for Building Peace" as within a tiny square footage in their museum space, they take visitors back to the dawn of life on this planet in an amazing fossil museum featuring rocks that at 4.2 billion years old are some of the earliest in existence.

We can take a leap forward to the first life on Earth with traces of bacteria in the fossil record to dinosaur eggs and skeletons from the Jurassic age, and then onwards again- in just a few steps- to view the first moments of our human story on Earth with paleolithic axes and spearheads.

This all within one small room, and Christian has an amazing story to tell you about every one of the hundreds of exhibits here that cause you to reflect on the vast scope of our planet's evolutionary history; then, visitors step into the 20th Century and the stratospheric speed of development of human technologies in just over the space of a century that have connected us through phone, film and internet, taken us up into the air, and then out into space...and onto the Moon. You can see fragments of the parachute that delivered the Apollo 11 astronauts back to Earth, as well as moon dust and meteors that act as postcards from our solar system.

Sports fans will love the signed shirts of Pele and Maradona, as well as boxing gloves signed by Muhammad Ali and other photos of the evolution of sporting teams such as the 2023 World Rugby Champions, The Springboks, whose nation used sports as a catalyst to unite after the suffering inflicted under years of Apartheid.

The exhibition takes you right up to the present day and the problems that we face through overpopulation and the threat our expansion and consumption of resources places upon the lives of all other species with whom we share this planet.

The scope for teachers at our school and others across Hong Kong to connect students with visceral stories from history, science, ecology and human history is vast. Christian and Stella have done an incredible job with this museum, curated across the last 2.5yrs but built upon a lifetime of inquiry.
You can find out more at /The-Little-Museum-of-the-World/