Taiwan's National Palace Museum - Treasure island

Feb 14th 2008 | TAIPEI
From The Economist print edition
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. But make sure the law is watertight

IT IS the finest collection of imperial Chinese art anywhere. But Taipei's National Palace Museum rarely sends its treasures overseas. Indeed the exhibition that opens in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum on February 26th will be only the fourth big foreign loan it has made since it opened in 1965. Like everything else in Taiwan, the art collection is coloured by the tense relationship with China. The exhibition is possible only because Austria, like America, France and Germany, the three earlier destinations, passed legislation granting exhibits immunity from judicial seizure, to stop China staking a legal claim to them.

Of the Palace Museum's 650,000 items, 230,000 come from China's imperial collection, started in the Song dynasty in the 10th century. Partly as a badge of political legitimacy, and partly to protect the artworks from the advancing Communists, Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang shifted them from China to Taiwan in 1948 and 1949 before retreating there after losing the civil war.

For nearly 30 years the museum served as a fortress guarding these political symbols from Beijing's Forbidden City. As democracy took root in Taiwan, however, the museum became a diplomatic tool to help counter Taiwan's acute isolation. The president's wife, Wu Shu-chen, made an unusual trip to accompany exhibits to Germany in 2003.

According to Lin Mun-lee, the museum's director, Japan has lobbied for some 20 years to have a collection appear there, but its parliament has not passed the regulations needed. A loan to Taiwan's only diplomatic partner in Europe, the Vatican, has likewise not been possible because Italy would not offer artworks immunity from seizure.

An official from China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage suggests that Beijing has never considered reclaiming the objects from Taiwan because “Taiwan is part of China.” The island's independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party administration has realised that returning the treasures to China is not on, and has tried to use them to its own advantage. But Ms Lin says that, should Taiwan one day be forced to make a choice between its destiny and the treasures, it should be a democratic decision by Taiwan's people. China, of course, will do all it can to deny them the choice.