On October 10, 1925, the Forbidden City in Beijing became the Palace Museum. The massive complex of ancient imperial palaces that was home to the royalty of the Ming and Qing dynasties for centuries became a museum for the people. Today, there are four Palace Museums: the original in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, with a Southern branch in Chiayi which opened in 2015, and the Hong Kong Palace Museum which opened in 2022. In this series, we explore the stories behind the centenary...
On October 10, 1925, the Forbidden City in Beijing became the Palace Museum. The massive complex of ancient imperial palaces that was home to the royalty of the Ming and Qing dynasties for centuries became a museum for the people. Today, there are four Palace Museums: the original in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, with a Southern branch in Chiayi which opened in 2015, and the Hong Kong Palace Museum which opened in 2022. In this series, we explore the stories behind the centenary and look at how each museum is marking this major milestone. Among the extraordinary stories of the second world war is a saga that is largely unknown outside China: the epic 17-year odyssey to save the country’s heritage in the world’s largest and longest migration of cultural treasures. From 1933 to 1950, some 20,000 crates of priceless relics travelled more than 10,000 miles across dangerous routes through battle-ravaged cities to the country’s western hinterland. Thanks to the protection of dedicated guardians of civilisation, these treasures – mainly from the Palace Museum but also from other institutions – have become enduring symbols of national heritage. Eighty years on, the wartime spirit of the migration has shaped contemporary cultural identity, soft power and national pride, as seen in the thousands of museums across China that echo President Xi Jinping’s ambition of a Chinese rejuvenation, according to analysts. At the same time, the collection remains divided – split between Beijing and Taipei’s National Palace Museum and seen by some as a continuing barometer of tensions across the Taiwan Strait. According to Neil Schmid, an American scholar at the Dunhuang Academy in China’s northwest Gansu province, the survival of the treasures gives added credence to the Communist Party’s broader claim of rescuing the country from fragmentation and humiliation.
“This narrative and its cultural continuity serve as both a civilisational virtue and a political achievement,” said Schmid, the first and only Western scholar hired by the academy to study the nearby Mogao Caves, a Unesco heritage site. “The safeguarding of artefacts became understood as the protection of Chinese identity itself, enhancing national pride and bolstering notions of cultural confidence.” The great flight On October 10, 1925, the imperial Forbidden City in Beijing formally became the Palace Museum, home to the nation’s priceless collection of delicate porcelains, ancient bronzes, calligraphy and jade. When Japan invaded Manchuria in northern China on September 18, 1931, the museum’s custodians decided to evacuate the artefacts rather than risk them falling to the Japanese, despite fierce public opposition, including some threats to bomb the trains. Intellectuals like the writer Lu Xun asserted that the evacuation would spread fear. There were also worries about the risks of moving the fragile items. But the plan’s supporters saw the mission as vital for China’s cultural survival after the scars left by the Western imperialist plunder of the country in the 1860s and again in 1900. “[They] were afraid of repeating the tragic scenes of the Eight-Nation Alliance invading Beijing,” Liang Jinsheng, former director of the Palace Museum’s cultural relics management department, said in a 2021 CCTV documentary. “The destruction of the Old Summer Palace was heart-wrenching – everything was looted. No one dared to gamble with China’s 5,000 years of civilisation.” With no experience of how to manage such an enormous undertaking, the staff sought help from antiques traders for advice on how to transport the items as safely and securely as possible. In his book 70 Years in Guarding National Treasures of the National Palace Museum, jade expert Na Chih-liang recalled learning how to pack fragile relics with cotton, straw, rice paper and reinforced wooden crates. Between February and May 1933, Palace Museum staff moved 13,427 boxes from Beijing to Shanghai, storing them temporarily in the French Concession before taking them on to Nanjing, then capital of the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government, in 1936. Among the priceless items making the great migration was a complete set of the Qing dynasty Siku Quanshu, the largest collection of books in imperial China, and Chinese calligraphy legend Wang Xizhi’s Timely Clearing After Snowfall. Another work evacuated to safety in the operation, the sculpture known formally as Jadeite Cabbage with Insects is now the most visited artefact at the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
Journey to the west As the country descended into full-scale war after the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 1937, the custodians retreated with the artefacts once again, heading westwards from Nanjing to China’s vast hinterland to escape the Japanese invasion. This time, the collection was divided, with most of the treasures leaving the city in late November 1937, carried by trains, boats, trucks and even bamboo rafts along three separate routes to Sichuan and Guizhou provinces in southwest China. On December 13, Nanjing fell to the Japanese. In the notorious Nanking massacre which followed, the staff and relics left behind in the city disappeared from the historical record. “To this day, their fate remains unknown,” Ma Heng, museum director from 1933 to 1952, wrote in his diary. Antiques expert and calligraphist Chuang Yen led the team that took the perilous southern route, moving 80 crates of the museum’s most prized bronzes, jades and porcelains through Hubei and Hunan provinces in central China. At one point in the weeks-long journey to Guiyang, provincial capital of Guizhou, bombs nearly destroyed the building where the treasures were being sheltered. Those who took the northern route through Shaanxi province transported 7,287 crates over the snowy, muddy and treacherous Qinling mountain roads to the safety of Chengdu in Sichuan province.
The remaining 9,331 crates headed for China’s wartime capital since November 1937, Chongqing, also in Sichuan, travelling by boat along the Yangtze River through central China via Hankou, now part of the larger city of Wuhan. The museum staff were racing to reach the crucial transit city of Yichang in Hubei province – the only gateway to Sichuan – before the low water levels of winter halted shipping on the river. In Yichang, where the relics were at risk of being stranded by a shortage of steamships and the priority was on moving military supplies and half a million refugees, China’s version of the Dunkirk evacuation unfolded. Just as the situation appeared hopeless, industrialist Lu Zuofu’s Minsheng Shipping Company devised a navigation method that enabled ships to operate in shallow water. Like Dunkirk, it was a race against time under enemy threat, but without any military command. Instead, what many describe as a more arduous civilian miracle was achieved solely through Lu’s ingenious “three-stage” shipping system. By the spring of 1938, the team had transported the crates in 19 batches from Yichang to Chongqing, with one casualty that occurred when one of the museum staff fell through a ship’s hatch. But although the relics had reached the wartime capital, they were still far from safe. To protect them from Japan’s brutal bombing campaign on Chongqing, the museum pieces were hurried into underground tunnels and caves. From 1938 to 1943, more than 10,000 people were killed in the air raids, which dropped 11,500-plus bombs on the city. While the treasures narrowly survived the destruction, the exodus was not yet over.
Meanwhile, the fall of Wuhan in October 1938 and an intensified Japanese bombing campaign prompted Chuang Yen and his team to move their share of the relics further inland to Anshun in Guizhou. In Sichuan, artefacts were also moved deeper within the province to Leshan and Emei. For the rest of the war years, the relics were stored in warehouses and caves. As well as the dangers of humidity, challenges included potential collapses and floods, as well as looting and termites. In the 2021 CCTV documentary, Chuang’s sons recalled the years in Anshun, where the treasures were hidden in caves that were dark, deep and dripping with water. Each morning, the guards gathered outside, marching and singing patriotic songs. The relics were regularly aired to prevent dampness and decay. On sunny days, the guards and scholars carefully unpacked the fragile paintings and calligraphy so they could be aired, catalogued and studied. Most of the artefacts survived, in what Ma Heng called a “miracle beyond explanation”. It was as if divine forces had watched over them, he wrote in his diary. “They can only be attributed to the nation’s fortune.” Cultural diplomacy The treasures also played an important wartime role, with two exhibitions showcasing China’s cultural heritage held overseas to elicit international sympathy and support for the country’s fight against the Japanese, according to analysts. In November 1935, when the palace collection was still in Shanghai, the Nanjing government ordered curators to select 735 items for an international Chinese art exhibition in London. It was the first large-scale government effort to exhibit China’s antiquities abroad. Museum curator Na described it as “a wonderful opportunity to promote Chinese art and to let Europeans and Americans realise that there is an ancient, great China in East Asia”.
Cheng Tien-hsi, a special commissioner appointed by the government to accompany the exhibits, told reporters at a press lunch in London that “Chinese art is rooted in principles of kindness, morality, justice and peace, not wars”. In a work report about the exhibition, he wrote that visitors would gain “more than aesthetic appreciation, but also a glimpse of the essence of Chinese culture and the enduring way of the nation”. Media coverage was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and over four months, the exhibition attracted 420,000 people, including dignitaries and international tourists, with many travelling to London just to see it. Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the first Western historians to consider the full implications of the Chinese contribution during World War II, said the exhibition was “transformative in changing China’s image”. “The sophistication of China’s cultural heritage was exposed to a much wider range of people than before, and this reshaped images of China in a much more positive way,” he said. Schmid, from the Dunhuang Academy, said the London exhibition and the one that followed in Moscow shifted the way people thought about China, especially in the West where Japan had often been seen as the face of “Eastern civilisation”. “By showcasing art and history, these exhibitions opened doors, giving China a different kind of presence on the international stage, especially at a time when formal diplomatic support was hard to come by,” he said.
For the Soviet exhibition, two boxes of artefacts from the palace collection were sent to Moscow in June 1939, this time to be displayed alongside photographs illustrating China’s resistance against Japan. By now, China was dealing with a prolonged war. China’s fiscal revenues had dropped 63 per cent since the Marco Polo Bridge incident, while spending was up by a third, according to the memoir of Kia-ngau Chang, then an influential banker. In 1938, with a severe annual deficit of 200 per cent, and to avoid hyperinflation and collapse, China started seeking financial and military aid from the Soviet Union and the United States, Chang wrote. According to Emeritus Professor Kirk Denton from Ohio State University’s department of East Asian languages and literatures, the Soviet Union was not yet directly involved in the conflict in China, but it was supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. “So the exhibit may have been a goodwill gesture to strengthen relations between the two nations,” said Denton, who specialises in museum culture and historical memory in Greater China. Simon Li, a senior fellow in genocide education at the University of Southern California, said the exhibition’s impact was “amplified by context”. “[It] coincided with rising anti-fascist sentiments in Europe, making China’s plight a proxy for the global fight against aggression,” Li said. The return of the relics from Moscow was delayed for three years by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
A palace divided Two months after its surrender on August 15, 1945 Japan formally surrendered northern China in a ceremony at the Forbidden City’s Hall of Supreme Harmony on October 10, coinciding with the Palace Museum’s 20th anniversary. However, by 1949, before the collection could be reunited, it faced a new rupture. After its defeat by the Communists, the Nationalist government moved nearly 3,000 crates of artefacts to Taiwan. Among them were the Jadeite Cabbage, the Mao Gong Ding bronze vessel and many other treasures that today are housed in Taipei’s National Palace Museum, which opened in 1965, a year before the Cultural Revolution began on the mainland. The remainder of the collection eventually returned to Beijing, with the first batch arriving in 1951 and the last crates returning as late as 1958. Competing narratives developed across the Taiwan Strait. The Taipei museum has positioned itself as the guardian of traditional Chinese culture, while Beijing emphasises the Forbidden City itself as the “ultimate revolutionary artefact”. Despite the tensions, there have been “on-and-off ties and exchanges” between the two museums that are interwoven with the island’s politics, according to Denton. Leaders from the Nationalist KMT appointed museum directors who “favoured” exchanges with the mainland, while the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) made appointments that tended to “downplay” the island’s ties to Chinese culture, he said.
This has led to museum exchanges becoming a barometer of cross-strait relations. Tensions over the Taipei museum’s ties with the KMT during the leadership of the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian led to a 2007 charter change emphasising both “domestic and foreign” art. Relations warmed between 2008 and 2016 under the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou, with a number of active collaborations, including the co-hosting of major exhibitions that reunited the artefacts temporarily. In 2010, the two museums even got together to revisit the incredible wartime migration route in a two-week investigation of 37 of the sites used to store the relics during their epic journey. Exchanges stalled in 2016, when the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen began her leadership refusing to accept the one-China principle. Her successor, William Lai Ching-te, from the same party, has continued “de-Sinicisation” efforts since becoming leader last May. This has included reducing the amount of Chinese history in textbooks, removing the “Han” category from demographic groups listed in official information, and using Tokyo’s framing of August 15 as the “end of war” in this year’s commemorations. Centennial legacy In retrospect, the epic story of the relics’ survival during their 17-year migration symbolised the nation’s resilience and laid the foundation for modern China’s museology, observers said. According to the museum’s archive, less than 0.03 per cent of the collection was lost or damaged through the ordeal – a testament to the meticulous planning and collective resolve of countless workers, scholars, soldiers and ordinary citizens.
USC’s Li noted that the wartime survival of the Palace Museum’s treasures “naturally dovetails with broader narratives of national resilience”. “The treasures’ safe passage and eventual return are often framed as metaphors for China’s own revival: battered by war and humiliation, yet ultimately restored and renewed,” he said. Denton observed that under Xi’s leadership, China has emphasised the anti-Japanese war as part of a global fight against fascism, highlighting “victory” over Japan rather than China’s suffering. “The story of saving the Palace Museum’s collections is thus part of the larger feel-good narrative of victory over Japan that Xi has propagated,” he said. Yin Kou from Wuhan University’s National Institute for Cultural Development, who has researched three decades of Chinese museum policies, said the story fostered a “collective sense of Chinese nationhood”, uniting people through “blood, sacrifice and unwavering spirit”. Schmid said the relics’ southward migration was a “foundational story” for many institutions and museums, adding that safeguarding heritage became intertwined with “safeguarding national identity”. Schmid acknowledged that this concept “might be difficult for my colleagues overseas to appreciate without understanding this narrative of sacrifice, wartime or otherwise”. “Importantly, this memory of cultural preservation under fire or threat lends a heroic, perhaps even sacred, dimension to what might be seen as the otherwise scholarly and seemingly humdrum administrative work of museums,” he said.
While the United States and other countries have reduced cultural funding, China has invested heavily in museums and other initiatives to preserve history, boost national pride, promote technology and build Xi’s vision of a “cultural superpower”. According to Yang Jianfei, head of the cultural industries management department at Communication University of China in Beijing, the Communist Party acts as both a “guardian” and “innovator” to the nation’s heritage. Yang said the party transformed cultural heritage into key resources that showcased China’s path, spirit and strength, promoted Eastern wisdom and fostered understanding of Chinese civilisation’s continuity. As the Palace Museum prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary on October 10, China’s state-led model is thriving, attracting young visitors in particular to exhibitions and displays throughout the country and all through the year. There are four Palace Museums: the original in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei – with a southern branch in Chiayi that opened in 2015 – and the Hong Kong Palace Museum, which opened in 2022. Each one is holding memorial exhibitions to mark the centenary but, unlike the 90th anniversary a decade ago, there are no co-hosted events planned across the Taiwan Strait, with Taipei citing “Beijing’s military threats”.