Taiwan art collection reflects tumultuous history, better relations with China

Taiwan art collection evokes tumultuous history

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Sixty years later Zhuang Ling remembers it all — the rain pelting down onto the roiling sea, his mother retching from seasickness and, of course, the cargo of priceless art works the freighter Chung Ting was carrying from China to the Taiwanese city of Keelung.

It was toward the end of the Chinese civil war, and Zhuang’s father had been ordered by the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek to help shepherd the cream of the country’s thousand-year-old imperial art collection from the Yangtze River port of Nanjing, ahead of the communist takeover of the mainland.

Today the Chung Ting mission — and two others like it — is memorialized in Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, home to some 93,000 items of Chinese calligraphy, porcelain, bronzes, landscape paintings, portraiture and figurines from Beijing’s Forbidden City. The museum also holds a treasure trove of 562,000 rare books and documents.

In the eyes of the Nationalists the transfer of the art was a patriotic act, taken to save China’s 5,000-year-old cultural heritage from Mao Zedong’s Communists.

For the Communists it was nothing less than a cosmic art theft, a final, desperate move from a discredited political gang.

But with political tensions across the 100-mile-wide (160-kilometer-wide) Taiwan strait now receding, Beijing and Taipei are finally looking at ways of putting the bitterness behind them and sharing their precious artistic heritage.

Beijing’s Palace Museum, the original home of the art works, has announced it will lend items from its own galleries, which hold three-quarters of the total original collection, to its Taiwan namesake to go on show in October.

And while the Taiwan museum is not yet willing to reciprocate — it fears China would unilaterally repossess the art — a recent Beijing visit by senior Taiwan museum staff has opened a dialogue.

That delights Zhuang Ling, now 71. He thinks the return of the transferred art — temporary or otherwise — would be a fitting memorial to his father, who died more than a decade before the reconciliation between Taiwan and China began.

“His biggest wish was to bring these artifacts back to Beijing,” Zhuang said. “It was his most sincere regret that he could not realize this wish during his lifetime.”

Zhuang Ling was 10 years old on the December night in 1948 when his family boarded the Chung Ting. All his life had been spent around the imperial art collection. Father Zhuang Yan was a senior Palace Museum official, and had helped keep the collection out of harm’s way for more than 15 years.

The collection was first evacuated from Beijing in 1931, after a strategic checkpoint in northern China fell to attacking Japanese forces. Over the following 10 years, it was moved from Shanghai to Nanjing, and then to southwestern Sichuan province as the Japanese advance on China moved farther inland.

One of Zhuang Ling’s earliest memories is accompanying a truck carrying some of the art from the Guizhou province city of Anxun to Ba county in Sichuan, near the Nationalist wartime capital. He was 5 years old, and the roads were overflowing with refugees fleeing the Japanese army.

“People were carrying their belongings on poles they balanced across their shoulders,” he said. “At one point we were buzzed by a Japanese spotter plane. Then we crossed a bridge made of thin wooden planks and I heard the planks groan under the weight of the truck. But they managed to hold and we made it across safely.”

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the art works were sent back to Nanjing, as the Nationalist government tried to re-establish its authority. But fighting with the Communists soon resumed — it had been suspended for most of World War II — and intensified over the next two and a half years. By mid-1948 the Nationalists’ situation was desperate, and Chiang Kai-shek decided to evacuate the art across the Taiwan Strait. Zhuang Yan was chosen to accompany the first shipment to Keelung.

“The trip took four days,” Zhuang Ling recalled. “It was windy and rainy, and the vessel rocked hard on the sea. My mother got sick — she fell ill from the boat’s motion even before we departed and hardly ate the whole way. It was a very difficult voyage.”

The art works, Zhuang remembers, were stored in iron and wood boxes, in the main cargo hold, covered by canvas sheeting.

“Some of us were sleeping right on the boxes,” he said. “I knew the artifacts were important, but I was too young to understand that they were the very essence of Chinese culture.”

After the Chung Ting arrived in Keelung, the artifacts were temporarily stored in a railway warehouse before being moved to a sugar cane factory near the central city of Taichung. They remained there until 1965, when the permanent quarters of the new National Palace Museum opened in Taipei. The museum was constructed in the form of a classical Chinese building to evoke the country’s rich imperial past.

The museum’s opening marked the end of any illusions Zhuang or his father had about an early return to the mainland. His father, Zhuang said, had not known that he would never see his homeland again when they left Nanjing in 1948. But the opening of the museum brought him back to earth. He knew he would never return.

Set against a steeply rising hill covered in acacia trees and bamboo groves, the four-story National Palace Museum features beige-colored facades and a sloping green-tiled roof. Its 27 galleries are bright and well-lit, the result of a $21 million facelift that since 2007 has provided an expansive backdrop for the greatest collection of Chinese art in the world.

The museum’s collection spans some 8,000 years, from well-preserved Neolithic jade carvings to late Ching dynasty paintings and figurines. All told there are 6,000 bronzes, 5,200 paintings, 3,000 works of calligraphy, 12,000 pieces of jade, 3,200 examples of lacquer and enamel ware, as well as assorted carvings, fans, rubbings, coins and textiles.

On a recent weekday afternoon the museum was crowded with visitors, many from mainland China. Their presence reflected the efforts of Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou to develop better relations with Beijing.

In a historic exchange, the director of the National Palace Museum in Taipei traveled to the Chinese capital in February, and the curator of the Palace Museum in Beijing came to Taiwan in early March.

Beijing curator Zheng Xinmiao announced that his institution would lend its Taiwanese counterpart 37 items relating to the 18th century Ching dynasty emperor Yong Zheng, including portraits of the emperor and his concubines.

But at least for the time being a loan from the Taiwan museum to China seems unlikely.

National Palace Deputy Director Fung Ming-chu says the mainland refuses to guarantee that items would not be seized by Beijing. Another sticking point, she said, is Beijing’s insistence that the Taipei museum drop “national” from its title, reflecting China’s belief that Taiwan remains part of its territory.

“Until these problems are solved there will be no art from the National Palace Museum going to Chinese institutions,” she said.

If so, the biggest losers will be the hundreds of millions of Chinese unlikely to visit the fine Taiwan collection.

“What stands out most is the quality of our art,” Fung said. “This is no accident. Zhuang Yan and the others who selected it knew exactly what they were doing. They only chose the best.”

Start, for example, with the 11th-century artist-writer Su Shih’s sublime calligraphic poem “The Cold Food Observance,” which reflects his anger at being fired from an imperial post and exiled to a remote town. Stripped of rank and privilege, he laments his reduced circumstances, symbolized by the end of the elaborately cooked banquets that were once a common feature of his life.

“Since I have come to Huangzhou, three years of cold food have already passed,” Su writes, using neat and easily readable brush strokes. Then, as anger overcomes him, he widens and enlarges the strokes to show his bitter feelings.

Another museum highlight is the exquisite collection of 12th-century Ju Ware porcelain, renowned for its celestial green color, a shade known in Chinese as “the color of the sky after rain.” A low-slung bowl in the shape of a lotus is an example of this genre’s seamless combination of beauty and functionality.

According to museum spokeswoman Sylvia Feng-I Sun, the museum’s most popular piece remains a jade carving of a bokchoy cabbage by an unknown craftsman during the Ching Dynasty, which began in 1644 and ended with the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912.

The piece, 7 inches (18.7 centimeters) long and 3 1/2 inches (9.1 centimeters) wide, exploits the natural colors and texture of a slab of white and green jade to render the cabbage — and an insect at its tip — both lifelike and arresting.

“Our curators don’t really think it’s the most beautiful piece in our collection,” Sun said. “But visitors from China are enchanted by it. They say they have to see it.”

Zhuang Ling’s entire life has been surrounded by the Chinese imperial art collection. After accompanying it across the Taiwan Strait in 1948, he lived next door to it, first in central Taiwan, and then, after the establishment of the National Palace Museum in 1965, in Taipei.

His father died in 1980 after rising to the rank of deputy museum director, but Zhuang himself remained in museum housing until his mother passed away in 2007 at the age of 101. He recently retired from his work as a cinematographer for a major Taiwanese television station.

Now he lives with his wife in a large, classically appointed apartment in the leafy Taipei district of Beitou. His eighth-floor balcony looks out toward the tumult of Neihu, one of the nerve centers of Taiwan’s high-tech miracle.

But Zhuang seems curiously removed from all that action, caught instead in an earlier Confucian world of hierarchy, discipline and self-restraint.

A classic Chinese inkstand and writing brush share his heavy patio desk with several sheets of recently completed calligraphy. And amid the hundreds of volumes of Chinese language books and the eclectic art collection, the furniture is arranged just so, to convey the order and simplicity central to the classic Confucian ideal.

Zhuang’s alert, mobile eyes take on a special brightness as he takes out an 80-year-old black-and-white photograph of his father, standing with a group of well-known Chinese intellectuals, some dressed in traditional Chinese robes, some wearing conservative Western clothing.

Examining the picture with Zhuang, a visitor asks whether after 61 years of exile he has finally become acclimated to living in Taiwan.

Zhuang just shakes his head.

“I’ve been with the imperial artifacts since my birth,” he says. “I have deep feelings for them. Now they’re in the National Palace Museum. That’s my only home.”