The world's greatest collection of Chinese art is being put on display after decades hidden away, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Taipei
DOWN TWO tunnels which look like a James Bond villain’s lair, deep beneath a steeply rising hill covered in acacia trees and bamboo groves, lies the world’s greatest collection of Chinese art.
The secret tunnels are home to hundreds of thousands of treasures which the Nationalist Kuomintang took with them in 1949 when they fled the mainland as the communists took over at the end of China’s civil war.
Above ground, closer ties with China over the past year means thousands of mainland tourists are flocking to see the National Palace Museum, which was recently refurbished in tasteful cream with a green tiled roof.
In October, the museum will stage an exhibition on the Qing Dynasty’s Yongzheng Emperor, incorporating more than 38 artefacts on loan from China in the first such co-operation in six decades. “This wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago,” said Chou Kung-shin, director of the museum. Even though China has contributed, Taiwan is still in no rush to lend artefacts to China, despite warming ties across the Strait of Taiwan.
“Mainland museums would like to have our exhibition but we need legal protection to ensure their safe return,” Ms Chou said.
The caves house the porcelain collection of over 19,000 pieces. Cave A, opened in 1969, contains 511 crates and each bears a number originally assigned in China before 1949.
Some of the wooden crates from China are still kept in the cave. They were used when China’s imperial collection was split, when the Nationalists evacuated more than 19,000 crates of art from Beijing in 1933 because of the threat of Japanese invasion.
The boxes went first to Shanghai and Nanjing, then to Sichuan and Guizhou in the west. By the end of the second World War the collection had spent 16 years criss-crossing China on trains with machine-gun nests to fight off Japanese troops, communist guerrillas and bandits.
Sometimes boxes were carried by lorry, ox cart and raft, or on foot, but always a few steps ahead of potential robbers. Curators proudly say that not a single item was broken during the evacuation.
In terms of Chinese art, this collection is like the Vatican’s collection of Western art. There is a strong sense that the Taiwanese took the best stuff, which still rankles with the mainland government. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek shipped about 3,824 crates of China’s most important pieces of ceramics and paintings to Taiwan between the winter of 1948 and spring of 1949.
For the nationalists, taking the art was their patriotic duty, a decision to save China’s 5,000-year-old cultural heritage from Mao Zedong’s communists. Given what happened to much of the mainland’s cultural heritage during the ravages of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the world can be grateful they did.
As political tensions across the Taiwan strait recede, Beijing and Taipei are finally looking at practical ways of putting the bitterness behind them and sharing their precious artistic heritage. Experts from China have been to visit.
The artefacts left behind in China were mainly large pieces, such as furniture, the Emperor’s clothes and stone rubbings. The National Palace Museum is home to more than 655,888 pieces of Chinese artworks and artefacts, including 386,729 Qing Dynasty archival documents, 25,423 pieces of ceramic, 12,000 pieces of jade, 2,510 enamel wares and 3,000 works of calligraphy.
“I’ve been working here for 27 years and am still constantly finding new things,” said Ms Chou, who graduated from the Sorbonne university in Paris.
The collection was reunited in Nanjing in 1945 after the second World War, and most of it was shipped back to the Forbidden City in Beijing. About 3,000 items are exhibited at any one time and the items are rotated every three months, Ms Chou said. To display all the items in the collection would take decades.
Beijing and Taipei are experiencing their closest ties in years since the election of Kuomintang leader Ma Ying-jeou as Taiwan’s president. He has dropped the pro-independence stance of his predecessor, Chen Shui-bian, and the two sides resumed direct flights, shipping and postal services across the Taiwan Strait last year.
More than 87,000 tourists from mainland China have visited Taiwan since July, and they are keen to see exhibits like the “Jade Cabbage”, a carving of a bok choi cabbage by an unknown craftsman during the Qing Dynasty. The 18.7cm x 9.1cm item, probably a wedding gift, uses the natural colours and texture of a piece of white and green jade to render the cabbage and a grasshopper sitting on top, incredibly lifelike.
Also on display is a wine vessel from the Western Zhou dynasty, which can dispense wine from a very contemporary looking design of an animal.
The Palace Museum collection was founded in the 10th century Song dynasty, when the second Song Emperor built a pavilion to house his books and paintings, which survived violent dynastic changes. In the early 15th century the collection settled in Beijing in the new Ming dynasty palace, the Forbidden City, where it stayed for more than 500 years.
When China’s last emperor, Pu Yi, was forced out, and after the Republic of China was founded, the Forbidden City was turned into a Palace Museum, which opened in 1925. Six years later the Japanese invaded Manchuria, and the collection was moved. It has never been back to the Forbidden City in its original form.