TV Documentary : The Palace Museum (故宫)

[aimering]

I've been watching from the very beginning of it and i've got to say it's great!

If you are really interested in the history of china, it could absolutely tell you a lot...

You can buy it from ebay.com.cn or some other online stores. I'm not sure they are dubbed into English, but you can watch CCTV9(Documentary) if you'd like.

第一集 肇建紫禁城

第二集 盛世的屋脊

第三集 礼仪天下

第四集 指点江山

第五集 家国之间

第六集 故宫世故瓷

第七集 故宫书画

第八集 故宫藏玉

第九集 宫廷西洋风

第十集 从皇宫到博物院

第十一集 国宝大流迁

第十二集 永远的故宫

[roddy]

And if you liked that, you might enjoy this - Link to verycd.com in that post.

[bhchao]

I'm kind of fascinated on the possibility of numerous treasures hidden in the vaults of Taipei's National Palace Museum that have never been placed on exhibition yet.

[owshawng]

The National Palace Museum In Taipei is awesome. Everytime we go to Taiwan I insist we go there (3 for 3). The carved jade section is fantastic. The gift shop has very nice replica's of the more famous pieces in the collection.

[skylee]

I agree with #4. I went there every time I was in Taipei.

[Lu]

Me too, they have beautiful things there.

[bhchao]

Art experts say if you want to see the real thing, go to Taipei. The collections in Taipei carry a higher qualitative value than its counterpart in Beijing.

I heard that the treasures underneath Taipei's National Palace Museum have to be kept under a certain temperature.

[bhchao]

Today's story from the NYTimes: Rare Glimpses of China's Long-Hidden Treasures

TAIPEI, Taiwan, Dec. 27 - After four years of renovations that closed two-thirds of the building, the museum housing the world’s most famous collection of Chinese art is reopening this winter and holding a three-month exhibition of its rarest works.

The National Palace Museum, home to the best of the 1,000-year-old art collection of China’s emperors, is often compared to leading Western institutions like the Louvre, the Prado and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But while this museum’s holdings are magnificent, the institution has been known for being a highly politicized place where priceless porcelain sat in poorly lit display cases and where invaluable paintings were kept in a damp manmade cave for fear of Communist attack from mainland China.

That has now changed. Heroic statues of Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan’s former leader, and of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, have been banished. New lighting, air-conditioning, climate-controlled storage vaults and other features rival the newest museums in the West. Even the wall labels attached to the artwork are now written in clear and specific Chinese, English and Japanese.

And after many years of hiding its most valuable and most fragile artworks — those from the Northern and Southern Sung dynasties that ruled China from 960 to 1279 — the museum has brought them out for a “Grand View” exhibition that opened on Christmas. Four of the best known Northern Sung dynasty paintings — one of them on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York — are being shown together for the first time, along with other rare paintings, scrolls and some of the world’s earliest printed books.

The four paintings are magnificent landscapes that tower over visitors but still have the exquisite detail of miniatures. The Chinese characters of the name of one artist are so subtly hidden in the trees of one painting that they went unnoticed until this century. A deputy director of the museum is credited with discovering them, although rumor says that a janitor was really the first to find them, said Ho Chuan-hsing, a museum specialist in early paintings and calligraphy.

Many of the pieces are so fragile that they are never lent to museums elsewhere. Some will only be on display here for half the exhibition: either from Christmas to Feb. 7 or from Feb. 8 to March 25. Museum policy allows these works to be shown only for 40 days, after which they are loosely rolled and placed in a vault to rest for at least three years; the exhibition here will not go on tour.

Art scholars describe the “Grand View” as unique.

To see all of these paintings come out at one time again is just not going to happen,” said Marc F. Wilson, a Chinese-art specialist who is the director and chief executive of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., which lent two rare scrolls to the exhibition here. “These are the foundations of modern Chinese pictorial sensibility.”.......

The Imperial Palace in Beijing, better known as the Forbidden City, became a museum in 1925 as part of a republican bid to prevent the restoration of the last emperor, Pu Yi. When Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists became worried in 1933 about a possible Japanese attack, they secretly sent the collection in wheelbarrows to Beijing’s train station to be transported south, the start of the collection’s 16-year odyssey during war with Japan and China’s civil war.

The Nationalists ended up shipping the most valuable art to Taiwan, where it has remained ever since. The mainland government has since gathered at museums in Beijing and Shanghai a large number of the works that were left behind, together with the fruits of archaeological excavations as well as the purchase or confiscation of mainland collections and gifts from tycoons in Hong Kong and elsewhere......

While the museum’s collection has an international reputation among art connoisseurs, it has been distinctly less popular in Taiwan, and especially among young Taiwanese who feel little connection to the mainland. Slightly more than half the museum’s two million visitors a year come from outside Taiwan, mainly from Japan, Korea and other countries in Asia......

The “Grand View” this winter may also represent the last chance for visitors from the United States and elsewhere to see the best of China’s art without having to push through throngs of mainland Chinese tourists.

Taiwan is negotiating with Beijing officials to allow mainland tourists to start visiting here this spring. While the number of tourists is supposed to be limited to 1,000 a day at first, the tourism industry is expected to press for quick increases in that cap.....

Whoever was in charge of logistics of moving thousands of crates of art across rugged terrain in China to prevent them from falling into Japanese and Communist hands, without damaging a single item, deserves a standing ovation. Not to mention being able to show the most fragile items intact on exhibition 60 years later.

I believe George Yeh handled a significant portion of the logistical work. Yeh was Cantonese.

[skylee]

I must tell you that I was so touched last week when I saw that calligraphy - Su Shi's "Ode of the Red Cliff", his own writing, and his own handwriting. Reading it felt like meeting the master himself. I did not only look at it. I read it, twice, word by word. And also the words at the end written by 文徴明 and 董其昌. I kept bumping my nose on the glass. haha. And there was a teenage girl next to me who, after looking at it for a while, began to recite it in Cantonese. Her boyfriend asked her if she knew what it meant and she said, oh yeah, I've learnt it at school. And I was so pleased. Well if these kids don't get to learn anything at least some of them know 前赤壁賦.

And then I turned to his 黃州寒食二首. I was less familiar with this one. And I find what 董其昌 wrote at the end very interesting. He wrote, "它日東坡或見此書 應笑我於無佛處稱尊也".

Love the NPM.