To introduce traditional cultural treasures to a wider audience,
the National Palace Museum in Taipei has been working on
exhibitions for its rare artifacts in more countries, starting
with an ongoing exhibit in Germany.
In late June, the staffers of Taipei's National Palace Museum were busy packing artifacts for an exhibition in Berlin's Altes Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery), the latest stop for a collection that has already made one of the most remarkable journeys in history. The storied treasures that once resided in the Beijing's Forbidden City, the seat of Ching Dynasty emperors, are being sent to Germany as part of a new campaign to popularize the museum's extraordinary cultural artifacts.
Entitled "Treasures of the Sons of Heaven: The Imperial Collection from the National Palace Museum," the artifacts will be exhibited in Berlin from July to October, and then at the Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany) in Bonn from November to February.
The exhibitions, which aim to promote cultural exchanges between Taiwan and Germany, will also provide the opportunity for visitors from Germany's neighboring countries, such as Belgium and France, to make the trip to see the world's foremost collection of Chinese art. Related artistic and academic activities, such as conferences and educational seminars, will also be held during the exhibition. The National Science Council, for example, will host academic conferences on Chinese art history in Bonn.
The exhibit, which comprises 400 items, features paintings and calligraphy, porcelain, ancient ritual bronzes, carved jade, seals, and rare book prints that have never been shown outside Taiwan. There are also cloisonné enamels, woodcarvings, tapestries and works of embroidery, and lacquer. The items are divided into five categories depending on when each item was produced: the Neolithic period (ca. 8000-3000 B.C.) to the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907), the Five Dynasties (907-959) to the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911). Selected by German cultural officials, these items are only a small part of the National Palace Museum's "Imperial Collection."
In China's long history, emperors and royal families were often aggressive and powerful art collectors. Many pieces in the emperors' art collection were lost or destroyed during changes of dynasty or in the chaos of civil upheaval, but many others were passed down from generation to generation, kept in the palace, and hidden from those outside the court. It was not until the fall of China's last dynasty, the Ching, in 1911 that commoners were allowed to enter Beijing's Forbidden City, where the collection was housed, and view the treasures that were once reserved only for the eyes of the emperor and his courtiers.
The public's access to the collection, however, was brief. In 1933, the treasures were moved out of the Forbidden City, which had been renamed the National Palace Museum in 1925 to reflect the new republican spirit in China after the overthrow of the last dynasty and founding of the Republic of China. Civil war and foreign invasion soon threatened the collection, however. To protect it from destruction and plunder from the Japanese imperial forces, the collection made a 16,000-kilometer journey around China.
In 1949, when the Nationalist government moved to Taiwan, it brought with it as much of the collection as it could. To protect the artifacts from a potential attack from the Chinese Communists, the collection was first stored in a tunnel in Taichung, in central Taiwan. Finally in 1965, the artworks were given their present home at the National Palace Museum in northern Taipei.
The National Palace Museum, along with the Louvre, the British Museum, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, ranks as one of the world's four best museums and contains the world's largest and finest collection of Chinese artworks. The collection contains over 650,000 objects, including ceramics, calligraphy, painting, ritual bronzes, jade, lacquer ware, curio cabinets, enamels, writing accessories, carvings, embroidery, and rare books. Since the museum only has the space to display around 15,000 pieces at any given time, the majority of the treasures are kept in air-conditioned, temperature-controlled vaults buried deep in the mountainside. The displays are rotated once every three months, which means it would take about 11 years to exhibit the entire collection.
Prior to the 1990s, pieces from the collection were rarely sent abroad, and loans of items to complement exhibitions in foreign museums were uncommon. The ongoing exhibition in Germany represents only the second time that items have been put on display in Europe since the opening of the National Palace Museum. The first time was in 1998, when more than 300 pieces were on display for a three-month show titled "Memory of the Empire: Treasures of the National Palace Museum" at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris.
According to Tu Cheng-sheng, director of the National Palace Museum, the six-month show in Germany took 10 years of negotiations to arrange. The arduous negotiations were necessary because of Taiwan's unique historical background and diplomatic status. Taiwan must take every precaution to make sure that the artifacts are not requisitioned by the host countries because of claims by Beijing.
To avoid such a situation, the National Palace Museum requires host countries guarantee that the exhibits will be free from judicial seizure and be safely returned to Taiwan before the museum will allow an exhibition to take place in a foreign country. Taiwan and Germany began ironing out the final arrangements in 1998, when the German parliament passed a law concerning the protection of foreign art treasures during exhibitions in Germany, and an agreement on the exhibition was signed last November.
In return for lending the collection of Chinese imperial court items to Germany, Taiwan will host the "A Century of German Genius" exhibition of German art in May 2004, which will feature a range of Western artworks that have never been exhibited in Asia before.
The National Palace Museum has worked on cultivating such cultural exchanges in recent years to introduce the exquisite beauty of the artifacts to a wider audience and build closer cultural links with other nations. As part of its campaign to promote the collection, the museum has also begun setting up an online database of its 650,000 pieces. The project will not be completed until after 2008, but the site will have information in several languages. For art lovers who cannot travel to Berlin, Bonn, or Taipei, the museum's website, http://www.npm.gov.tw, might be the second best way to take a peek at the world's finest collection of Chinese artifacts.