The National Museum of China, grandly situated on Tiananmen Square, reopens on April 1, 2011, after three years of expansion and renovation.

At 2.07 million square feet, officials call the renovated National Museum of China the world's largest museum building.  (The second largest — New York's Metropolitan Museum — has about 20,000 fewer square feet.)

Communist iconography adorns the front of the National Museum of China.

An outsized welcome: at 30 feet, this statue of Confucius at the museum's entrance hints at the enormity of the space within.

The museum's interior — once drab and dark — is now filled with natural light.

Gottlieb Schick, Portrait of Heinrike Dannecker, 1802

"The Art of the Enlightenment," the first international exhibit at the reopened musuem, is a cooperative venture. It was jointly organized by three German museums and the National Museum of China.

Robe à l’anglaise, around 1770

The exhibit is as ambitious as the museum. Nearly 600 loaned items display a wide spectrum of the arts of the Enlightenment, including masterpieces in painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints, as well as crafts and fashion.

Julius Caesar Ibbetson, George Biggin’s Ascent in Lunardi’s Balloon, around 1785 - 1788

In Enlightenment fashion, a series of dialogues and salon discussions is planned to run for the duration of the exhibition.