Taiwan digitizes its Palace Museum

[Randy W]

from the Smithsonianmag

 

This Taiwanese Museum Just Digitized Its Massive Collection of Chinese Art

 

70,000 images are available for download via the National Palace Museum’s website

 

 

In 1948, amidst the chaos of China's civil war, Nationalist forces evacuated thousands of priceless artifacts from Beijing to Taiwan. The preemptive decision proved timely: By the following year, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party had seized power. In lieu of this regime change, the evacuated collection never returned to its home country. Instead, the artifacts remained in Taiwan’s National Palace Museum.

Now, the Palace Museum, which houses one of the world’s largest collection of Chinese artifacts and artworks, is opening its (digital) doors to a new audience. BBC’s Kerry Allen reports that 70,000 high-resolution images of items ranging from paintings to antiquities are available in a new digital archive. It’s free to download the images, as well as accompanying background information about artifacts.

. . .

Much of the museum’s collection comes from the original Palace Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Established in 1925, the museum housed remnants of imperial history, with most artifacts dating to the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. A.J. Samuels of Culture Trip writes that during the 1948 evacuation, 608,985 items were transported from Beijing to Taiwan. Since its official opening in 1965, the Palace Museum has expanded its holdings to more than 690,000 artifacts.

Collection highlights include the Jadeite Cabbage with Insects, a small piece of carved jadeite said to represent fertility, and Zhang Zeduan’s Along the River During the Qingming Festival, which Marc F. Wilson, a Chinese specialist and the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, describes to the New York Times as “China’s Mona Lisa."