China's first vegetable museum opened in east Shandong Province Monday.

Covering an area of 3,000 square meters, the Shouguang Vegetable Museum shows the relationship between the development of China's vegetable farming and society, exhibiting items such as farming tools, specimens and drawings from the Longshan civilization period (2340 B.C. - 1940 B.C.) to modern period, said Wang Ziran, deputy director of the museum's project team.

"You can find a 130-million-year-old plant fossil here and see the tools used to farm vegetables in the Han Dynasty, about 2100 years ago," he added.

The museum is located in Shandong's Shouguang City, known as "Vegetable Town of China," where 56,000 hectares are used to grow vegetables out of a total 94,000 hectares of arable land.

The city area produced about 4 billion kilograms of high-quality vegetables in 2009, according to the local government.

(Xinhua News Agency April 19, 2010)