Rival Museums Retrace Route Of China's Imperial Treasures

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CHONGQING, China — On a sweltering morning last month, a white-haired guide trudged up a muddy path, leading a group of scholars toward a bamboo grove on the outskirts of this western Chinese city. The site, he said, was where a large portion of China's imperial treasures were once hidden inside several big wooden sheds.

They were stored right about here, Hu Changjian, a local museum official, said of the artifacts, an unparalleled collection of more than a million objects from the Forbidden City in Beijing, including fine paintings, calligraphy, jade and porcelain dating back centuries. He added, We think they dug caves in the hills behind us to store some of the treasures.

Photographers and documentary filmmakers traveling with the group of scholars recorded the scene, as the scholars, clutching notepads, scampered up a hill in search of caves.

The scholars, from mainland China and Taiwan, were taking part in an extraordinary two-week research project, retracing the routes taken by the imperial treasures in the 1930s and 1940s, when they were being safeguarded from the ravages of civil war and Japanese ...
... aggression, not to mention floods, bandits and warlords.

The project is extraordinary because it was organized by rival museums, the Palace Museum of Beijing and the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, each of which claims to be the rightful home of the artifacts.

The original Palace Museum in Beijing was split in two — its staff as well as its collection — in 1949, when the Nationalist government fell to the Communists and retreated to the island of Taiwan with thousands of supporters and a huge cargo of museum pieces.

For decades there has been debate about ownership of the divided treasures. But in recent years the two museums have begun to collaborate on exhibitions in a stunning show of cross-Strait cooperation. On the scholars' journey this summer, the talk was not of unification but of shared history and of a common desire to understand the remarkable events that both preserved the treasures and eventually led to their division.

We had a rough idea of how things happened, but we didn't know the details, said Li Wenru, deputy director at the Palace Museum in Beijing. But we knew it was a miracle that in wartime over a million treasures were moved 10,000 kilometers, on roads, in water, by air, and nothing was lost.

The museum staff members who protected the artifacts on that 16-year odyssey, hiding them in bunkers, caves, temples, warehouses and even private homes, have all died. But some of their children were invited to participate in this year's trip.

Zhuang Ling, 72, says his father, who had been a cataloger of the collection, was one of the staff members charged with guarding the imperial treasures. He recalls living and traveling with them as a child, in the mountains outside Chongqing.

When the weather was good, they'd bring the paintings, calligraphy and books outside to give them some fresh air because it was too humid inside, he said. I could even see some of the landscape paintings.

The collection was put together by emperors, mostly in the centuries between the Song dynasty (960-1276) and the brief reign of Pu Yi, China's last emperor, at the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). After the Qing fell, the imperial family kept the treasures. (In 1913 the family offered to sell them to the American industrialist and collector J. P. Morgan for $4 million; Morgan died shortly after his staff received the telegrams.)

In 1924 the state expelled the imperial family from the Forbidden City, declared the collection national property and made it the foundation of a new Palace Museum.

But after Japan invaded north China in 1931 and threatened to move toward Beijing, the government, fearing the artifacts might be destroyed or carted off to Japan, shipped them, in more than 19,000 wooden crates, south to Nanjing, the new capital, in early 1933. Then, just days before the Japanese destroyed Nanjing in 1937, they were divided into three groups and sent into hiding along three separate routes. Some of the most valuable objects ended up here in Chongqing, the wartime capital.

Last month this humid, mountainous city was the seventh stop for the Chinese and Taiwanese scholars. They crowded into a rusted bank vault where some of the artifacts had been stored (it now houses sewing machines); visited the old central library, which had exhibited some of the treasures during the war; and trekked up to a warehouse that had been deemed safe for the treasures, they were told, because it was adjacent to a Buddhist temple and so unlikely to be attacked by Japanese forces.