The Palace Museum collection’s move to Taiwan

The Palace Museum was founded in Beijing in 1925. After the Mukden Incident of 1931, the museum packed its finest holdings into crates and from February 1933 sent them south in batches, first to Shanghai and later into a storehouse in Nanjing; during the war with Japan they were moved west by three routes to Sichuan and Guizhou, and it was the end of 1947 before everything was back in Nanjing. In the autumn of 1948, as the civil war turned, members of the museum’s board decided to send a selection of the best pieces to Taiwan. Beginning in December 1948, three shipments carried 2,972 crates from the Palace Museum, along with crates from the Preparatory Office of the National Central Museum, the National Central Library and other bodies. The crates were first kept in the warehouses of a sugar mill in Taichung and in April 1950 moved into newly built storehouses at Beigou in Wufeng, Taichung. An inventory was completed in 1954, and the museum’s own history records that despite the journeys by land and water there was very little damage. A small gallery at Beigou opened to visitors in 1957, but the site was remote, so the government built a new museum at Waishuangxi on the edge of Taipei, which opened in November 1965. The ‘Jiangxi crates’ shown in the museum’s exhibition A Serendipitous Convergence in 1950 are 182 objects handed over in 1950 by the temporary office of the Jiangxi provincial government for safekeeping; they were not part of the imperial collection, and were formally accessioned only at the end of 2025.

Notice the years and place names in labels and wall texts, such as Nanjing or Beigou, and try to put the object’s moves in order.