Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The interior, however, is miserable: ceilings oppressively low or pompously high, lighting hideous, installation cases designed for security rather than accessible display, wall labels stunningly uninformative. You cannot linger on these inadequacies, however, because spread before you like a fool’s supper is the greatest art of China: Neolithic jades, Zhou drinking vessels, Song porcelains, Qing treasure boxes, and, most exalted of all, an astonishing array of Tang and Song painting and calligraphy. This work, accumulated by emperors over more than eleven centuries of dynastic rule, is still called the Imperial Collection. No Western museum has such a concentration of great work, but then, no Western country has a history as relatively uninterrupted and permanently centralized as China’s.

The Imperial Collection remained in the hands of the last emperor until he was evicted from the Forbidden City in 1924. The next year, when the Palace Museum was established in Beijing, the collection, unseen by the public for a thousand years, was finally put on display. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, however, the collection was sent in twenty thousand wooden crates to Shanghai for safekeeping. It later went to a storage facility in Nanjing, and when the Japanese army was on the verge of taking over the southern capital in 1937, the crates traveled by boat up the Yangtze, by train over the Qinling Mountains, by truck to Hanzhong. Every single object made it to a safe location, despite a sequence of sinking ships and blown-up buildings worthy of James Bond. At the end of World War II the collection was returned to Nanjing, still crated, and when the Communists drew near in 1947, Chiang simply took the best with him to Taiwan, storing it in tunnels hollowed out of the side of a mountain.

There the work stayed except for one year, starting in spring 1961, when some two hundred pictures and objects—including Fan Kuan’s Travelers amid Streams and Mountains and Guo Xi’s Early Spring—toured the United States in Chinese Art Treasures, the show that, Fong said, “single-handedly created modern Western scholarship in this field.” After seeing that exhibition, J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, said to Wen Fong, “If all were to be destroyed on the earth except what we could fit in a single spaceship, some of these paintings would have to be on that ship.” Four years later, Chiang finally opened the doors of the new Palace Museum in Taipei. Despite having lost China’s great cities and most of its population and land, Chiang had retained one great treasure: the Imperial Collection.

People who work at the Palace Museum in Taipei do not leave. They enter it young, their good doctorates barely sufficient to earn entry-level jobs as tour guides. They will grow old within this place, which will be the locus of their social and professional lives. Those lucky enough to become curators will have their books published by the Palace, and directly or indirectly, their books will be about the Palace. They will be trained in the weird history of the collection and allowed into the fabled storerooms, where 99 percent of the works lie in elegant silk boxes, carved wooden cases, or great metal trunks. They will play on the Palace Museum badminton team. “It’s the last vestige of the Chinese feudal system,” one curator said.

This collection does not travel even within Taiwan, which is why the decision to send its greatest objects—475 of the world’s most important works of Chinese art—to the United States became so incendiary. Among the items scheduled to go to the Met were twenty-seven from the Palace Museum’s “restricted list” of particularly exalted pieces, usually displayed for only forty days every three years. Whereas Americans tend to think of a museum primarily as an educational institution that mounts displays for the public, the Chinese think of a museum as a storehouse that safeguards cultural treasures. Art lovers in China enjoy looking at paintings, but beauty is considered incidental to historical value. Sending Fan Kuan’s painting abroad therefore is a bit like lending out the original of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.