The man Americans blamed for having "lost" China to the communists in 1949, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, in fact "saved" China in one important respect: He preserved China's vast imperial art collection, which is now housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. During the winter of 1948, as president of the Republic of China, General Chiang arranged for 2,631 crates carrying the priceless treasures to be transported by battleship to Taiwan. The third and last shipment left Nanking in February 1949, just as the communist forces stormed the Yangtze River only miles from the city. One can only speculate what might have happened to the imperial collection had it remained on the mainland during the rest of the civil war, or throughout the Cultural Revolution twenty-five years later.
The objects were transported to the city of Taichung, which has Taiwan's driest climate, and eventually were stored in a U-shaped mountain tunnel to shelter them against possible air raids. Security was extremely tight, and only a small portion of the collection was ever displayed in the simple exhibition hall nearby. In 1965, the collection was moved to its present site--a majestic, palace-style museum equipped with modern facilities.
The imperial collection itself is the product of almost seven centuries of connoisseurship by emperors of the Sung (950-1279), Chin (1115-1234), Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and Ch'ing (1644-1911) dynasties. Its beginnings date back to around A.D. 1127, the year after the Chin Tartars sacked the Northern Sung capital and looted the imperial holdings. Over the centuries, the collection has remained remarkably intact despite natural disasters and political upheavals, its losses balanced by new acquisitions.
The person directly responsible for the present collection was the famous Emperor Ch'ien-lung, who reigned from 1736 to 1795. The emperor enriched the collection immensely during his reign, collecting the best contemporary works and, more importantly, acquiring ancient paintings and calligraphy from private owners. He also had the foresight to commission a catalog of the imperial collection in 1745, completed by 1845.
Unfortunately, the result of the Emperor Ch'ien-lung's great connoisseurship was to some extent undone by the last emperor, Pu Yi, whose short reign ended with the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. Pu Yi was permitted to continue living in the Forbidden City, during which time he sold or gave to relatives and foreigners many important works from the collection. Ironically, it is through this regrettable circumstance that some former palace works have found their way into Japanese and Western museum collections. In 1924, government authorities forced Pu Yi out of the Forbidden City and took possession of the imperial collection. The Palace Museum was founded on the site of the Forbidden City one year later.
Political chaos from 1925-28 made it difficult for officials of the new museum to work productively. Once stability was restored, museum activities flourished until the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931. It was then decided that the best pieces should be shipped to Shanghai and Nanking for safekeeping, where they remained until those cities were they remained until those cities were threatened in 1937. This time the crates made a narrow escape, transferred by train, truck, and boat to remote areas of western China, using three different
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