Nearly 75 years ago, the largest collection of Chinese artifacts and art in the world was transferred from Beijing’s Forbidden City to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.
The transfer of the artifacts, which numbers more than 600,000, was orchestrated by Chiang Kai-shek, the former leader of the ruling nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party, as he escaped from Mao’s communist Red Army Zedong in 1949 fleeing to Taiwan during the China War. civil war.
Now China wants the collection back. The artifacts have been housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei since 1965, but have increasingly been the source of a fomenting dispute between China and Taiwan.
The position of the National Palace Museum is clear. He unconditionally refused to return any of the items previously displayed in Beijing. The museum also refuses to loan the artifacts to other countries for fear that they will be seized and repatriated to mainland China.
The museum can then be seen as a microcosm of the escalating political tensions and historic conflicts that define China’s relationship with its neighbor Taiwan.
In April, China sent warships, including an aircraft carrier, to the seas around Taiwan, the latest in a series of provocative statements and actions. In a public address in October 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping said “reunification” with Taiwan “must be accomplished”. At the same time, Taiwanese museum officials say, China has launched an aggressive digital disinformation campaign in an attempt to discredit the museum.
Last October, it emerged that three pieces of porcelain from the museum’s collection, worth a total of $66 million, had been broken. The museum chose not to officially record the breakups at the time, leading to accusations of a cover-up by senior staff.
The story was picked up by the Chinese government, which attacked Taiwanese authorities in an official gazette, saying that only under reunification could these national treasures be fully protected. A cyberattack was also launched. Countless accounts on multiple social media platforms have been created, all accusing the Taipei museum of chronically mishandling China’s priceless artifacts.
“In museum work, incidents like this are not very uncommon because sometimes, due to the structural composition of the object, or due to its age, objects can deteriorate,” Tsai Chun said. -Yi, curator of painting and calligraphy at the National Palace Museum, in a BBC documentary on Taiwan airing this spring. “I think [at the museum] we take great care of the cultural heritage that is transmitted to us and that belongs to people all over the world.
Cyberattacks take many forms. In March, up to 100,000 high-resolution images of paintings and calligraphy from the collection were leaked online after the museum was subjected to a massive digital heist. The artifacts were then put up for sale, often for less than a dollar, on Taobao, a Chinese shopping platform.
“We are looking into the matter and have hired lawyers to trace the intellectual properties and damages involved to Taobao,” the museum’s deputy director, Huang Yung-tai, told CNN at the time, explaining that the museum’s private server had been hacked.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen
© Presidential Office of the Republic of China
A complex story
“The historical artifacts on display at the National Palace Museum in Taipei are of utmost importance to China,” said Baoping Li, senior lecturer in Chinese archeology at University College London. The objects were part of the royal collection of the Forbidden City of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911). After the founding of the Republic of China (ROC), in 1925, the Forbidden City in Beijing was transformed into the Palace Museum to house the royal collection.
After the KMT party’s defeat by the Communists in 1949, the Republic of China government retreated to Taiwan, taking with it large swathes of the Beijing Palace Museum collection, while Mao Zedong established the Republic People’s Republic of China (PRC). “The Nationalist government obviously selected only the most important pieces from the vast royal collection when it moved to Taiwan, as a symbol and continuity of its legitimacy,” Li says. The National Palace Museum in Taipei was inaugurated on 15 years later.
“The PRC was founded as a revolutionary state bent on destroying the past, which it saw as having dragged China down,” says Ian Johnson, China reporter for publications such as the New York Times, formerly based in Beijing. “But in recent decades, the Communist Party has redefined its mission to become the protectors of China’s cultural past. Thus, he now regards the treasures of the Palace Museum of Taiwan as his cultural heritage – never mind that many of these treasures might well have been destroyed had they remained in China during the early decades of communist rule.
For the governments of Taiwan and China, these artifacts represent an important testimony to their past. But they are also a symbol of their political status at a time when Taiwan’s independence is at stake.
The establishment of the museum during a period of radical transformation for Taiwan, while the territory was still under martial law, represented a key exercise in nation building.
“The museum was designed by the KMT as a way to show that Taiwan is the ‘best China’ – one that respects traditions and does not destroy them, and one that takes care of the country’s cultural heritage and does not allow fanatics to destroy it, which happened during the first decades of communist rule,” Johnson says.
Under its current president, Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan has increasingly turned away from China and towards countries like the United States. Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, visited Taiwan in August 2022. In April, Tsai responded by speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in California during a visit to the UNITED STATES. Tsai has long championed Taiwan’s independence from China and questioned the ‘one China principle’, saying that ‘such a consensus does not exist’ among the majority of the Taiwanese public. .
Elections in January 2024 will end Tsai’s second term, and many of his supporters fear the KMT, which has long promoted closer diplomatic ties with China, could return to power.
“Today the museum has a more complex role,” says Johnson. “Many people, especially young Taiwanese, identify more with other island nations, such as Japan, the Philippines or Indonesia, rather than the overbearing, overbearing People’s Republic of China. For them, these treasures do not really belong to their culture, but rather represent a bond that is no longer so strong. For them, the Palace Museum is something of yesterday.
For Li, the museum’s treasures represent a collective heritage that cannot be forgotten. “These national treasures are the most representative of Chinese civilization,” he said. “A large number of people in Taiwan identify themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese, and the artifacts in the National Palace Museum are certainly part of that identity.”
As Taiwan’s national identity continues to mutate, the collection remains a reminder of how the Chinese Civil War continues to unfold across the strait. The repercussions of this continue to ripple through the museum. “According to the Communist Party, Taiwan is part of China. So the artifacts are already in China,” Johnson says.
The collection of artifacts housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is increasingly being used as a pawn as the two states vie to assert their authority. It is therefore symbolic not only of a historical conflict, but of an uncertain and potentially unstable future.
