The Taipei Palace Museum, located at Double Brooks outside of Shilin of Taipei City, Taiwan Province, is a famous museum of history and cultural arts in China. Built along mountains, the Museum is a palace-style architecture, with white stone railing and sky-blue glazed tiles.
Shortly before the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the Beijing Palace Museum authorities decided to evacuate its collection of cultural relics to Nanjing. In 1948, the Nationalists were considerably weakened, and with the imminent takeover by the Communist armies, the Nationalists began their retreat to Taiwan. Between the end of 1948 and the dawn of 1949, the Nationalists picked relics to fill 2,972 crates for shipping across the Strait. A rival Palace Museum was set up in Taipei to display these antiquities.
Constructed in 1965, the Taipei Palace Museum is equipped with modern facilities and a great number of collections of national treasures in Chinese history. After the Nanjing Central Museum was merged into the Taipei Palace Museum, the number of cultural relics in the Museum was increased to 242,592 from the previous 230,863. Including articles received one after another through donation, collection and purchase, the total number of cultural relics kept in the Museum is about 600,000 now.
The Museum has different exhibition halls of bronzeware, stoneware, jade ware, calligraphy and paintings, etc. It has staged exhibitions like the Exhibition of Bronzeware and Ritual Articles of Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the Development of China's Stoneware, the Exhibition of Historical Documents of the Republic of China, and so on. The Museum has also carried out roadshows on irregular intervals.
Publications of the Museum include Treasures of the Imperial Palace, National Gem, and Four Great Painters of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), etc.
Edited by chief editor Li Guixiang.
