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Taipei Palace Museum
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Court Attendants Playing Music
(48.7 x 69.5cm), a painting on silk of the Tang
Dynasty. | Among the more important cultural sites in
China, an imperial style structure situated in the outskirts of Taipei, Taiwan
Province, the Taipei Palace Museum consists of an archaized exhibition
hall, an administrative building, and a landscaped courtyard. The construction
of the museum was completed on November 12, 1965, the 99th anniversary
of the birth of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the great pioneer of Chinese democratic
revolution. Hence the facility is also known as the SunYat-sen Museum.
Some compare the Taipei Palace Museum with the Palace Museum in Beijing, known as the Forbidden
City to most Westerners. Each does possess unique characteristics, but neither
has a complete collection. While the Taipei Palace Museum
houses some 650,000 works of art and artifacts, the Palace
Museum boasts more than 1 million pieces of cultural relics. The two
museums may collectively be viewed as a whole, and only when considering them as
a whole can one gain a thorough understanding of the time-honored and splendid
elements of Chinese culture represented by each.
The 650,000 works of art and artifacts held within the Taipei Palace Museum
consist of imperial collections of the Song (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368), Ming
(1368-1644), and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties, as well as cultural relics
collected, purchased and contributed by average citizens across the nation. They
include nearly 70,000 bronze, porcelain, jade, lacquer, and enamel articles,
10,000 works of painting, callig-raphy, and embroidery, and 570,000 books and
documents, including the Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature.
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The Taipei Palace Museum.
IC | The Chinese royal collection can be traced
back to the early Song Dynasty. Zhao Kuangyin, founding emperor of the Song, placed
emphasis on culture and established the Imperial Academy of Painting. In
976, Emperor Taizong issued an imperial edict to collect paintings and calligraphy
attributed to noted artists and scholars of the previous dynasties, and
in 989 he established a secret library to house the collections. Some of
the collections have been preserved to today and are now in the safe keeping of
the Taipei Palace Museum.
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