2025/07/22

Taiwan Today

Taiwan Review

A Task of Imperial Proportions

December 01, 1993
The National Palace Museum in Taipei is known for having one of the world's finest collections of Chinese art. The goal now is to build a reputation in conservation and restoration.
When the ROC government moved to Taiwan in 1949, it also brought along 650,000 precious artworks removed from the Forbidden City during World War II. The challenge of preserving these national treasures did not end after their safe arrival.

In the dead of night, February 5, 1933, teams of workers sneaked China's imperial treasures out of their home in the National Palace Museum in Beijing by wheelbarrow. It was an emergency effort to protect them from destruction or plun­der by the invading Japanese. Thus, the 19,557 boxes of rare jade, porcelain, ritual bronzes, documents, paintings, and callig­raphy began a 12,000-kilometer, sixteen­ year survival test.

To avoid the Japanese army, and later the Communists, the collection was moved each time danger neared. It dodged bombs, forded rivers, and scaled mountain precipices. At one point, the tow ropes broke while workers were ferrying the priceless load across a river to escape bombing in Chongqing. But be­fore the boat could smash into the rocks, it grounded on a sand spit. According to Na Chih-liang (那志良), "It was then that I started to believe the objects had a life of their own." The 90-year-old jade expert knows the collection well. He was part of the team assigned to clean and classify the articles left in the Forbidden City when Pu Yi, the last heir of the Ching dynasty, qui­etly left Beijing in 1924.

Na was there when the wheelbarrows started their trek and he remained with the collection until his retirement from the National Palace Museum in Taipei in the mid-1970s. He was one of the collection's first conservators. Just after the Japanese were defeated, the collection was tempo­rarily hidden in insect-infested store rooms in Nanjing. Na said he spent three months on his hands and knees, fighting termites with a flashlight and poison: "It was more of a headache than the war."

More than 3 million people a year visit the museum to see such treasures as this re-creation of a scholar's study.

The collection's survival path around mainland China may have resembled the panicky death run of a headless chicken, but it was a success. The collection was largely intact in 1949 when the ROC gov­ernment and its supporters fled to Taiwan. They brought as much as they could. These 650,000 items now make up the imperial collection housed in the National Palace Museum. The collection is indeed priceless. Emperors were given the best, bought the best, commissioned the best, and at times plundered the best.

The museum is well recognized worldwide as having one of the finest collections of Chinese artwork in existence. Providing the standard of care and main­tenance the collection deserves has been a monumental challenge.

Consider Taiwan. It was a poor, largely agricultural island when the collection arrived. When the ROC government and more than 1 million military personnel and supporters moved to the is­land, the newcomers often clashed with local residents culturally, socially, and po­litically. Peace, governance, infrastruc­ture-even a common language-had to be established. Few would expect a gov­ernment under so much stress to give pri­ority to building a museum.

Yet sixteen years after the ROC gov­ernment arrived, an elaborate, palace-like cluster of museum buildings opened. The museum was designed to reflect the sub­tle color and grace of the late Ming and Ching imperial structures.

The museum in Taipei officially opened on November 12, 1965, the 100th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth. The opening date was no coincidence. The dy­namic behind building the grand new fa­cility was the politics of culture: At the time, Taipei and Beijing were competing zealously for international recognition of their respective claims as the legitimate government of China. Possessing many of the culture's most precious documents, artworks, and antiquities helped give le­gitimacy to the ROC. It was vital that Chi­nese people everywhere could see that the treasures of cultural heritage had survived and were being protected.

But a fine collection and strong po­litical will do not guarantee a well-run museum. In holding some of the most valuable Chinese antiquities in the world, the museum has a tremendous responsi­bility to preserve and display these treas­ures. The National Palace Museum in Taipei is now twenty-eight years old. In its early days, Taiwan had no trained spe­cialists besides Na and a handful of other art experts from the mainland who had helped bring the collection to Taipei. Iso­lated from other Chinese experts in the mainland, they sought training and mu­seum skills from books, from abroad, from any source they could find.

The first mission was to store the collection safely. Until the museum opened, the collection was kept in a 200­-meter cave dug into a hillside in the northern outskirts of Taipei, where the museum now stands. Authorities chose the underground site mainly for security reasons. "They thought it offered more protection than a building if bombing occurred," says Chang Shih-hsien (張世賢), head of the museum's conserva­tion division.

Since then, the museum has made some major advancements in its storage facilities. Storage is vitally important, since only I percent of the massive collec­tion is displayed at a time. In 1985, the museum opened a state-of-the-art, 250,000-square-foot storage area featur­ing computer-controlled temperature, hu­midity, and air quality. Only porcelain is still stored in the cave behind the mu­seum. The new storage building is equipped with an extensive security sys­tem that cost US$3 million to install. In case of fire, the embroideries, documents, and paintings are protected by five-foot­ tall canisters of specialized gases that can extinguish fires without damaging the artworks.

Calligraphy and scroll paintings are kept in camphor wood cabinets. The mu­seum staff insisted on using camphor wood despite its high cost, because the wood has traditionally been considered safest for preserving works on paper because it naturally repels insects. Most other artifacts are stored in large metal steamer trunks with sturdy handles. When asked if the museum was preparing for another quick getaway, Chang Shih-hsien just laughs. He says the main reason for the unorthodox storage is the threat of earthquakes. Each trunk is well padded. Since the collection's arrival in Taiwan, according to the museum, none of the artworks has been damaged by natural disaster or improper handling.

Despite the strides made in devel­oping state-of-the-art storage facilities, actual conservation work got off to a slow start. It wasn't until 1969 that the museum formed a conservation unit. Today, its staff is still limited to 11 of the museum's 580 employees.

Conservation director Chang Shih-hsien, who has been with the museum for twenty years, began his career by doing neutron-activation analysis of ceramics in Taiwan. He went on to study art con­servation at Brookhaven National Labo­ratory in Long Island, New York, and at the University of London's Institute of Archaeology.

Chang fights two of the biggest threats to the treasures—fungus and insects-by constantly researching new means of controlling them. With 3 million people strolling through the museum each year, the biggest dread is that insects will hitchhike into the building and find their way into the storage areas. In subtropical Taiwan, cockroaches are enemy number one. The collection is stored at a stable and appropriate temperature and humidity level, a mix of Chinese and Western in­ sect baits are used, and monitoring is constant. As a result, insect damage is now virtually nonexistent.

But Chang feels the collection is too rare for complacency and stresses that deterioration could be taking place with­ out being detected. He has helped intro­ duce modern pesticide-laced baits and glue papers, and he makes sure his staff keeps up on new forms of protection against insects.

Debate about the use of Western methods is a common source of disagree­ment among museum conservators throughout Asia, and the National Palace Museum is no exception. One of the most often discussed issues at the mu­seum is how to best conserve ancient books, documents, and paintings. "Our technique of mounting paintings is origi­nally from China and it is good," Chang says. "But paintings must be cleaned be­fore they are mounted. Here, it is hard to say if West or East is better." The mu­seum uses only organic Chinese materi­als and traditional methods on rare books and scrolls, but Chang plans to experiment with Western methods. The move will undoubtedly bring opposition from purists on the staff.

One such confirmed traditionalist is conservator Lin Mao-sheng (林茂生). In cleaning and maintaining the collection, Lin sticks strictly to all natural materials, many of which have been used for centuries. Lin removes mild mildew with wa­ter, tough mildew with a natural alkaline wash made from rice straw ash, fungus with a soft brush or water, and mild water marks using a gentle water bath. Fortu­nately, most of the imperial books and documents are written on the best quality paper with ink ground from the best ink sticks on the best ink stones, so there has been little deterioration in quality. One of the characteristics of ink befitting an emperor is that it will not run after it is applied. Paintings needing remounting are mounted with a traditional flour-based glue mixed by the museum staff.

In restoring objects such as porcelain, bronzes, and lacquerware, reversible proc­esses are used whenever possible. Thus, pigments and epoxies can be removed when better methods are discovered. This is critical with the museum's 5,000-year-old painted pottery and its world-class collec­tion of Chinese porcelain.

Do these traditional conservation methods provide the best care possible for the imperial collection? One Ameri­can curator currently conducting re­ search in Taipei explains that many Asian museums prefer to use such traditional methods in caring for their lacquerware and silk paintings. But Tai­wan's conservation system has suffered because the tradition of master-to-ap­prentice training never fully developed here. Since no master came to Taiwan from the mainland with the collection, and local conservationists remained largely cut off from the mainland for four decades; they had to teach themselves. Thus, conservation work in Taiwan fell behind that of other Asian countries, es­pecially Japan.

Even today, while most interna­tional-class museums demand that their conservationists have several years of study in conservation science, often with specialties in chem­istry or other related fields, no advanced degree in the subject is offered in Taiwan. All this adds up to some inadequately equipped practition­ers.

But the museum is not cut off from in­ternational art ex­perts. This fall, one staff conservator be­gan a six-month course on restoration techniques for ceramics and metallics at East Anglia Uni­versity in England. Although museum staffers rarely take part in such overseas training, they regu­larly glean conserva­tion information through the steady stream of international interns and researchers who work at the museum each year.

Only 1 percent of the museum's huge collection can be shown at one time. A display of Ching dynasty snuff bottles is one of the recent temporary exhibits.

Some items in the collection are extremely challenging to pre­serve, no matter how sophisti­cated the methods used. Consider the miniature curio boxes of the Ching im­perial court. These can be as complex to preserve as they were to design. In many cases, the intricately carved, rare wood cabinets contain different components that survive best in very different conditions. For example, some contain miniature bronzes best maintained in less than 50 percent humidity (to control corrasion) along with lacquer ornaments that can crack when the humidity falls below 65 percent.

It is these difficult circumstances that cause stress between the conservation divi­sion and the museum's management. Chang and other conservators want to see the components of the curio boxes stored separately to preserve them better. But the museum's system of assigning each type of artwork to a specific managerial depart­ment has resulted in the boxes being stored as complete entities. Although Chang says the curators have "more knowledge in con­servation than before," he remains frus­trated that he cannot change the storage methods of these precious boxes.

Another fragile but important part of the collection is the archives. Interested scholars can apply to don white gloves and study the 386,440 Ching dynasty documents or browse the museum library of rare books. Last year, more than five hundred people visited the archives, while seven hundred used the library. Despite the steady stream of visitors and the deli­cate nature of the materials, says museum archivist Shen Ching-hung (沈景鴻), only about 5 percent of the imperial books and documents need restoration.

Samples from an ancient document Asia's museum staffs debate whether to use modern or traditional methods of preservation.

The archives include everything from emperors' diaries and decrees to reports of the social, religious, and family lifestyles in mainland villages. The tradi­tion of painstakingly chronicling impor­tant events dates to the Tang dynasty, when an institution was set up specifically for that purpose. As such, museum archivists are actually archiving ancient archi­vists. Asked to rate the Ching researchers, Shen calls his predecessors "pretty good." He says, "These scholars tried to record every incident that took place during the Ching period, even down to tiny details. They were very precise and accurate."

Perhaps the most challenging part of the conservation department's work is restoration. Senior restorer Yang Yuan-Chyuan (楊源泉) explains that each item needing restoration has been diagnosed, photographed, and given a "medical re­port" complete with x-rays. The line-up for treatment is long. Yang says it will take "many lifetimes" to repair the damaged porcelain, bronze, jade, and lacquerware items. He does not talk in numbers respecting the museum's official position that the collection sustained little damage in the thirty-two-year trek from the Forbidden City to the National Palace Museum.

Since no other museums on the is­land have restoration resources, another part of the job for the National Palace Mu­seum staff is sharing conservation knowledge with local museums. On occasion, the staff has helped train employees of other museums.

Despite its role as a conservation leader among Taiwan's other museums, in the realm of technology, the museum is not on the leading edge. Researcher Yu Dwun-ping (余敦平) calls the conserva­tion division "medium-tech." For exam­ple, he fervently hopes that the museum will install non-destructive analyzing equipment. Currently, only shards and samples can be comprehensively ma­chine-analyzed. Purchasing equipment capable of analyzing whole pieces would be a substantial investment. The research budget is only a fraction of the NT$500 million (US$18 million) annual operating budget and it covers many areas besides conservation work. The only other sources of funding for the conservation unit are occasional research grants and study scholarships from the National Sci­ence Council.

Samples sliced from ancient pots await analysis Researchers hope the museum will purchase new equipment that can examine whole artifacts.

The technological limitations and small staff have not kept the National Palace Museum's research from going be­ yond the traditional analysis of age, origin, and amount of deterioration. The conservation staff's research into the use of camphor as an insect repellent, for example, is groundbreaking and is watched by many international institutions. The museum is probing the potential side effects of using this item on organic materials. Re­searchers are also comparing camphor with naphthalene, a manmade repellent used by most other major museums.


Exhibiting this monster-sized collection is the challenge of Julie Kung-shin Chou (周功鑫). Because only a small part of the collection can be exhibited at any given time, she rotates in at least one new exhibit into the display cases every two months. Her goal, she says, is to balance preserva­tion and conservation with exhibiting items in a way that enhances their beauty. Chou is also involved in the museum's constant ef­forts to build the collection.

Museum director Chin Hsiao-yi (秦孝儀) acknowledges that much more work needs to be done to round out the collection. "The foundation of the impe­rial collection is the Ching dynasty, but over the years, we have been striving to broaden our holdings," Chin says. Spe­cifically, he says, there are weaknesses in the representation of the neolithic, Ming, late Ching, and early Republican periods. Acquisitions and an increasing number of donations are helping to fill the gaps, but this takes time and money. The logistics can also be complex. The political ban on buying or borrowing from mainland China means extra hurdles, and buying through an intermediary adds to the cost. It hurts to be the leading Chinese cultural museum but to lack the borrowing rights that local private museums, such as Tai­pei's Chang Foundation, now enjoy.

Chou says more and more people are approaching the National Palace Museum with donations and artwork or antiquities for sale. She points to a recent acquisition of an outstanding piece of eleventh cen­tury jade from the Western Chou dynasty. Chou believes that the new interest in donating stems from the museum's im­proved storage and restoration capabilities. She is clearly proud that priceless items are now being presented to the National Palace Museum rather than to leading museums overseas. It will be through building its reputation for providing top-class con­servation that the museum can further strengthen its international standing.­—Linda Pennells is afreelance writer based in Taipei.

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