golden ear

Chapter 258
"Director Hu, please forgive me for disturbing you!"

Curator Hu greeted him personally, and said with a smile: "Don't be so polite, if it wasn't for Curator Wu, you are busy, you should have come here a long time ago, right?"

Wu Tianyuan and Lin Baili contacted Director Hu in advance. Today, the three of them came to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This is also his first time in Taiwan.

The National Palace Museum in Taipei is located in Waishuangxi with beautiful mountains and clear waters, covering an area of ​​1200 mu.It is a palace-style building designed in the style of BJ's Forbidden City. The purpose of Chiang Kai-shek's construction of the Taipei Forbidden City was to show the orthodox status of its Chinese culture.

"Many friends like to ask me a question, which of the two Forbidden City's collections is better?"

Director Hu joked: "If you simply compare the number of collections, the Forbidden City in the Mainland will undoubtedly win. If you compare the high-quality goods, you have to talk about it!"

The three visited the collection first and chatted while walking. Curator Hu was also a talkative person and began to tell the inside story.

"During the Anti-Japanese War, the culture of the Forbidden City had a "great migration". In 1933, the Forbidden City moved southward with a total of 13491 boxes of cultural relics, and 2972 boxes of cultural relics were later transported to Taiwan, accounting for 22% of the number of boxes moved to the south. Of course, most of them are high-quality goods. 78% are also quite a lot of high-quality products. The Kuomintang transported cultural relics to Taiwan. Due to the sudden change in the war situation, it only transported three times. boxes, and another 1700 boxes were also left in the mainland."

"The National Palace Museum in Taipei has a total of 9120 paintings and calligraphy, 574 paintings before the Yuan Dynasty, and 155 calligraphy works before the Yuan Dynasty. The Forbidden City in the Mainland has about 15 paintings and calligraphy, nearly 420 paintings before the Yuan Dynasty, and 310 calligraphy works before the Yuan Dynasty. The total collection volume is lower than the Forbidden City in Taipei in terms of quantity.”

"In terms of the era of painting, the early collections of the Forbidden City in the Mainland reflect the appearance of painting in various historical periods, especially the two copies of Gu Kaizhi in the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Northern Song Dynasty. The painting style of the period. As far as the paintings of the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song Dynasties are concerned, the Forbidden City in Taipei is larger in number than the Forbidden City in BJ, but the collection and perfect quality of the Yuan Dynasty paintings in the Forbidden City in the Mainland are the highest in the world.”

Curator Hu commented objectively: "As far as the paintings of the Song Dynasty are concerned, the Forbidden City in Taipei has more treasures of landscape paintings than the Forbidden City in the Mainland, but the treasures of figure paintings there occupy an important position. The collection of paintings in the Forbidden City in the Mainland is relatively comprehensive. In addition to scroll paintings, There are also prints, New Year pictures, Qing palace oil paintings, glass paintings, screen paintings, stickers, etc., which are lacking and insufficient in the National Palace Museum in Taipei."

"Taipei's National Palace Museum mainly receives paintings and calligraphy from the old collections of the Qing Palace, while paintings and paintings of many genres such as the "Eight Monsters of Yangzhou", the "Jingjiang School of Painting" in the 18th and 19th centuries, the "Jinling Schools" and "Four Monks" in the early Qing Dynasty, etc. Calligraphy was lacking in the Qing palace, and it is now a national treasure."

"How about the bronze wares?" This was Wu Tianyuan's most concerned question, which was related to the difficulty of exchanging bronze chimes.

"There are more than 1.5 pieces of bronze wares in the Forbidden City in the Mainland, including about 1 pre-Qin bronze wares and more than 1600 pieces with inscriptions; Taipei Palace Museum has a collection of 5615 bronze wares, and about 500 pieces with inscriptions in the pre-Qin period. Each piece is a heavy vessel. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has a relatively small collection and a small number of fine works, but Maogong Ding, Sanshipan, and Eastern Zhou chime bells are very famous.”

Wu Tianyuan felt chills when he heard it, everyone said it was the treasure of the town hall, so the chance of exchanging it was estimated to be very low.Even if Taiwan's system is more relaxed, it will not easily exchange national treasures.It seems that the only way to collect the nine bronzes is to find an opportunity to borrow or jointly exhibit them.

"In addition, the BJ Forbidden City also has 1442 bonsai and 590 pottery. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has no such collection. As for the palace cultural relics, this is not to be compared. The Forbidden City is the emperor's hometown. Cultural relics are hidden everywhere, and we have very few here!"

Wu Tianyuan joked: "It seems that all the good ones were transported to you?"

"You can't say that!" Director Hu said sternly: "When the cultural relics were moved to the south, due to various reasons, not all of them were high-quality goods, and some people who carried the suitcases lacked research on the cultural relics, so they kept the real ones and selected the fake ones. For example, the 5-ton Jade Mountain Stone in "Da Yu Controls the Water" and the unmovable throne of the Hall of Supreme Harmony are all representative products of BJ's Forbidden City."

"Our former dean Zhou Gongxin also answered this question: Simply put, some things that cannot be moved away are also national treasures. There were considerations for the relocation of cultural relics to the south. For the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Song and Yuan paintings and Qing enamel colors are comparable. There are many. And the images of the figures of the Qing Dynasty are all in BJ. And the large pile of porcelain fragments in the Palace Museum in the Mainland are treasures. For example, the two posts in Qianlong's "Sanxi Hall" are in BJ. It can be said that the biggest treasure of the Forbidden City in the Mainland is the Forbidden City , there is no second one in the whole world, so the cultural relics of the two Forbidden City have their own characteristics."

Wu Tianyuan has studied that period of history, and apart from Lao Jiang, there is another person who also decided to relocate the cultural relics at that time, and he is Puyi!
In Puyi's autobiography "My First Half of Life", it describes the splendor of the treasures of the Qing Dynasty.However, from Puyi's ignorance and pseudo-naive writing, the serious situation of cultural relics loss also clearly emerges.

"The treasures collected by the emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasties for hundreds of years, except for the second time, were taken away by foreign soldiers, most of the rest were left in the palace. These were not counted, and even if there were records, no one checked them, so whether they were missing or not. No one knows how much is lost!"

The most serious of these was the situation in the palace where "all the people were stealing", and there were thousands of ways to steal.For example, eunuchs kicked open the door of the warehouse where cultural relics were preserved in the dark at night, broke the door lock, and took away treasures like thieves.

The ministers and officials under Puyi borrowed treasures under clever pretexts, such as requiring collateral, bidding, appreciation, etc., and even asked the emperor for rewards, and tried all means to pretend to take out the treasures legally.

Puyi knew about these things, but didn't know what to do, recalling: "I just thought that other people were stealing my property!"

Even the cost of the dinner was levied everywhere by the Qing court, relying on a large number of gems and pottery as collateral, the ignorant and incompetent Puyi could only watch a large number of cultural relics flow out of the Forbidden City.Puyi is the owner of cultural relics, and also uses cultural relics as a life-saving tool.He took cultural relics as birthday presents and gave them to warlord figures such as Cao Kun, Wu Peifu, Zhang Zuolin, and Xu Shichang.

What is even more incredible is that Puyi also stole more than 1200 pieces of fine calligraphy and painting, ancient rare books and a large number of treasures out of the palace, but only one-third of them were found later, such as "The Picture of Shanghe on the Qingming Festival", "The Picture of Han Xizai's Night Banquet", "Five Niu Tu", "Boyuan Tie", "Mid-Autumn Tie", etc., caused a large number of other precious cultural relics to be lost to the people.

(End of this chapter)