Collection Evacuation during World War II and the Ensuing Split
Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese, having annexed territory in China's northeast, proceeded to march on Beijing. With this looming threat, the museum authorities decided to evacuate its collection rather than let it fall into enemy hands or risk destruction in battle. For four frantic months between February and May 1933, the most important pieces in the collection were packed into 13,427 crates and sixty-four bundles and sent to Shanghai in five batches. Another six thousand some crates were assembled from the Antiquities Exhibition Institute, the Summer Palace, and Imperial College. In 1936 they were dispatched to Nanjing where a depository had been built and a branch of the Palace Museum was to be established.
On 7 July 1937 shots fired at the Marco Polo Bridge west of Beijing heralded the eruption of the Sino-Japanese War. Within a year, the Japanese had penetrated to most of eastern China. Then the treasures stored in Nanjing had to be moved again, this time by three routes to Sichuan, where they were secreted in three locations, Baxian, Emei and Leshan. Only at the end of the war were they consolidated in Chongqing, whence they were returned to Nanjing in 1947. By then the Kuomintang were considerably weakened, and with the imminent takeover by the Communist armies of areas south of the Yangtze River, they began their retreat to Taiwan. Between the end of 1948 and the dawn of 1949, the Kuomintang selected 2,972 crates for shipping across the Strait to storage in Taichong. A rival Palace Museum was built in Taipei to display these antiquities, opening to the public in 1965. Most of crates left in Nanjing were gradually returned to Beijing, although to this day 2,221 crates remain in storage in Nanjing.
During this tumultuous decade of war and revolution, none of the treasures was lost or damaged even though the volume involved was enormous. This was largely due to the dedication of the Palace Museum staff, whose achievement in preserving these treasures was nothing short of heroic. But it was also as a result of this long period of upheaval that the treasures were dispersed. Yet the rationale for keeping the collection together, representative as it is of traditional culture, seems so incontestable that most people believe the treasures will be re-united one day.
In the early 1950s, shortly after the establishment of the People's Republic, the Palace Museum staff worked with a new will and enthusiasm to restore the Forbidden City to its former glory. Where previously the dirty and dilapidated halls and courts lay under weeds and piles of rubbish, some 250,000 cubic meters of accumulated debris were now cleared out, giving the palace a sparkling fresh look. A policy of comprehensive restoration was also launched, and in time the crumbling palace buildings, repaired, and redecorated, once again looked resplendent. All the tall buildings were equipped with lightning rods, while modern systems of fire protection and security were installed. It has been a priority of the government, particularly since the beginning of the reform era in the early 1980s, to keep the surrounding moat dredged and clean.
Collections
The collections of the Palace Museum are based on the Qing imperial collection - ceramics, paintings and calligraphy, bronze ware, timepieces, jade, palace paraphernalia, ancient books and historical documents. During the 1950s and 1960s, a systematic inventory was completed redressing the legacy of inaccurate cataloguing. After the founding of the Museum, the collection was moreover augmented, for example by the salvage of a number of precious artifacts from a jumble of apparently worthless objects. After more than a decade of painstaking efforts, some 710,000 objects from the Qing palace were retrieved. At the same time, through national allocations, requisitions and private donations, more than 220,000 additional pieces of cultural significance were added, making up for such omissions from the original Qing collections as colored earthenware from the Stone Age, bronzes and jades from the Shang and Zhou dynasties, pottery tomb figurines from the Han dynasty, stone sculpture from the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and tri-color pottery from the Tang dynasty. The ancient paintings, scrolls and calligraphy added to the collections were particularly spectacular. These included, from the Jin dynasty, Lu Ji's A Consoling Letter (Pingfu tie) in cursive script, Wang Xun's Letter to Boyuan (Boyuan tie) and Gu Kaizhi's Nymph of the Luo River (Luoshenfu tu); from the Sui dynasty, Zhan Ziqian's landscape handscroll Spring Excursion (Youchun tu); from the Tang dynasty, Han Huang's Five Oxen (Wuniu tu), Du Mu's running-cursive script handscroll Courtesan Zhan Haohao (Zhang haohao shi); from the Five Dynasties, Gu Hongzhong's The Night Revels of Han Xizai (Han Xizai yeyan tu) "; from the Song dynasty, Li Gonglin's Painting after Wei Yan's Pasturing Horses (Lin Wei Yan mufang tu), Guo Xi's Dry Tree and Rock, Level Distance Landscape (Keshi pingyuan tu), and Zhang Zeduan's Life along the Bian River at the Pure Brightness Festival (Qingming shanghe tu) - all masterpieces without exception.
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