The National Palace Museum is an art museum in Taipei City, Republic of China, in northern Taiwan. It has a permanent collection of over 650,000 pieces of ancient Chinese artifacts and artworks, making it one of the largest in the world. Most of the collection are high quality pieces collected by China's ancient emperors.
The National Palace Museum should not be confused with the Palace Museum (note the absence of the word "National"), located inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, capital of the People's Republic of China. Both institutions share the same original roots, which was split in two as a result of the Chinese Civil War.
The National Palace Museum was first established as the Palace Museum in Beijing on October 10, 1925, shortly after the expulsion of Puyi, the last emperor of China, from the Forbidden City by warlord Feng Yü-hsiang. The articles in the museum consisted of the valuables of the former Imperial family and were moved from place to place in the 1930s and 1940s to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army.
During the final years of the Chinese Civil War, the museum essential works collections were selected for removal, under the orders of general Chiang Kai-shek, from Beijing's Forbidden City to Taiwan. With the victory of the Communists, the National Palace Museum was split into two (the part on the mainland, like all other such institutions, lost its "National" designation). The part in mainland China is centered on the Forbidden City.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the National Palace Museum was used by the Kuomintang to support its claim that the Republic of China was the sole legitimate government of all of China, in that it was the sole preserver of traditional Chinese culture amid the social change and Cultural Revolution in mainland China, and tended to emphasize Chinese nationalism. In recent years, the museum has focused more on local and minority cultures and has included some materials on loan from the People's Republic of China.
In English, the institution in Taipei is distinguished from the one in Beijing by the additional "National" designation. In common usage in Chinese, the institution in Taipei is known as the "Taipei Gugong", while that in Beijing is known as the "Beijing Gugong".
The National Palace Museum has also been controversial in Taiwan with many supporters of Taiwan independence regarding it as an unwanted symbol of China-centeredness.
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