The treasures of the National Palace Museum are back! The exhibits of the Splendors of Imperial China exhibition, whose departure overseas aroused such great controversy last year, returned safely to Taiwan on 20 April. After examining them, a Ministry of Education inspection team pronounced that all 452 items were in the same condition as when they had left. From 16 to 25 May a special "welcome back" exhibition was held to allow local residents to see for themselves.

Over a period of 13 months starting from 12 March 1996 the exhibition Splendors of Imperial China, staged collaboratively by the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was on display at the Metropolitan, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. During that time it received a constant stream of favorable reviews from over 300 news media organizations including CNN, the New York Times, Time and The Economist.

According to figures published in Britain's Art Newspaper, while Splendors was at the Met it attracted an average of 8112 visitors daily, making it the world's most popular exhibition in 1996.

In a report entitled "China's Patrimony," published not long after the exhibition opened at the Met, the New York Times described it as "an invitation to banish politics from the mind and put art in its place." It continued: "Chinese emperors collected these works over 11 centuries. Some of the pieces predate them-the elaborate wine vessel from the mid-ninth century BC, for example, and the curious reddish bronze vat, or liang, from AD 9 that was intended to enforce a new set of volumetric standards. In complexity, both works are years ahead of their Western equivalents. Nor was there a Western equivalent of the enormous workshops that, in centuries to come, filled these emperors' warehouses." For these emperors, "art was more than esthetics. It was China's patrimony."

The article continues with a potted history of how the collection came to Taiwan: "The collection remained private for 1000 years, unseen by the public until 1925, when, a year after the eviction of the last Emperor from the Forbidden City, the Palace Museum was established in Beijing." After being moved several times during the war with Japan and then the Chinese civil war, on Chiang Kai-shek's orders the finest pieces were taken to Taiwan where they were stored in tunnels in a mountainside, until the National Palace Museum was built in Taipei. However, the New York Times report concludes, "this tumultuous history flees the mind when one is faced with a 12th-century Ru-ware bowl [or] a 13th-century portrait of Kublai Khan dressed very much as the Mongol ruler he was. . . ."

The Wall Street Journal commented that since most Chinese artifacts in the collections of US museums are relatively late pieces, the fact that so many early works could be exhibited was especially valuable. The New York Daily News even said that unless the Great Wall were transported to Fifth Avenue, it would be hard to imagine an exhibition that could surpass this one.

The Splendors of Imperial China tour has unquestionably been a successful cultural exchange event. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Professor Arthur Waldron of Brown University recalled his first encounter with Chinese art at another such exhibition over 30 years ago, long before he embarked on his career in Chinese studies: "I was overwhelmed," he wrote. We are sure that many people who cannot themselves come to the NPM in Taipei will, like Professor Waldron, have been overwhelmed and moved by this rare opportunity.

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Splendors of Imperial China, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was the world's most popular art exhibition of 1996. The exhibition's name in Chinese on a banner outside the Met, in calligraphy by National Palace Museum director Chin Hsiao-yi, made for an impressive sight. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)

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Exhibition venue

Total visitors

Daily average

Metropolitan Museum of Art

426,747

8,112

Art Institute of Chicago

139,344

2,402

Asian Art Museum

137,000

2,536

National Gallery of Art

179,389

N/A

Source: The Art Newspaper; National Palace Museum