GREAT NATIONAL TREASURES
OF CHINA
Ever since its establishment, the National Palace Museum has been seen as the principal repository and guardian of the mainstream of Chinese culture. We have published many specialized works on various categories of our collections, which include antiquities, painting and calligraphy, books and documents, and these works have served to spread the fame of our collections. Yet such works, intended as they are for scholars and specialists, do not adequately fulfill the task of introducing our holdings to the general audience. In an attempt to fill this gap, we published A Selection of Masterworks in the Collection of the National Palace Museum in 1972. Since that work is now more than ten years old, we recently decided not merely to update it, but to bring out an entirely new book of the national treasures in our collection, in order to better illustrate the vast scope of Chinese art and culture as represented by the Museum's collections. A junior member of our staff, Ms. Chang Sing-sheng, who has a thorough educational and family background in Chinese art history, has revised the text of the earlier work, correcting errors and omissions, and has re-designed its format and presentation.
The categorical divisions of the earlier work have been preserved here in their broad outline, but their order has been slightly rearranged. New illustrative examples in each category have been selected, and all illustrations are now in full color. The explanatory text in Chinese and English has been revised and combined in a single volume for the readers' convenience, allowing them to gain a more accurate impression of the broad range of our holdings.
All the items herein, whether carvings, porcelain, calligraphy, paintings, books or documents, represent the priceless heritage of our Chinese ancestors, and in their cultural unity present a unique contrast to the cultural heterogeneity of other major museum collections of the world. There are also a few works by foreigners such as the eighteenth-century Italian Jesuit missionary Giuseppe Castiglione, but even these were done under Chinese cultural influence and thus have become a genuine part of our native heritage, amply illustrating the ability of our culture to absorb and digest a wide variety of elements.
In the face of the Japanese military threat to Peiping in the early 1930s, a large number of antiquities from the Peiping Palace Museum were removed to Shanghai and later to Nanking. They spent most of tile war years in Szechuan province, being returned to Nanking after the Japanese defeat; renewed communist insurgency soon necessitated the removal of many of them to Taiwan in 1948-49 to become the core of our present collection. This journey of thousands of miles, under conditions of great hardship and difficulty, is a unique chapter in tile annals of the world's museums, and yet again powerfully illustrates the great strength and resilience of our Chinese cultural heritage. It is with this extraordinary background in mind that we now take pride in presenting to the public this revised introduction to that glorious heritage.
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