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When I’m in Beijing, I always go to visit the Forbidden City, the ancient home of the Chinese emperors, and its museum. If I stay for a long time, I go in all seasons and at different times of the day – as soon as it opens, with the transparent light of the morning. In the evening, when the setting sun makes the red color of the walls more saturated. It’s nice to go there when it rains, being careful not to slip, or when it snows. It’s always very crowded. Despite repeated visits, there are very few views that I think I know – some parts of the palace are labyrinthine, others confuse the steps with an insistent symmetry. At the northern exit there is still the tree from which Chongzhen (1611-1644), the last emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), hanged himself, feeling lost in the face of a popular rebellion that had reached Beijing.
Sometimes new areas are opened to the public, while the objects on display change regularly. It is possible to visit reconstructions of the rooms of particularly well-known figures – such as Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799), whose private room, the Study of the Three Rarities, has been faithfully reproduced. It’s tiny. Upon entering, the emperor had no choice but to sit cross-legged on the yellow and black silk armchair in the right corner, and work at the table without the shadow of distractions. On the wall against which the back of the armchair rests hang three ancient calligraphies, the “three rarities” precisely, compositions by Wang Xizhe (303–361), his son Wang Xianzhi (344–386) and his grandson Wang Xun (349–401), legendary artists to whom the emperor looked for inspiration to improve his (already good) calligraphy.
Today this minimal study of one meter by one and a half meters is looked at from the outside inwards (subverting the emperor’s perspective) and, despite the crowds and the shouting, it is possible to alienate oneself and imagine Qianlong sitting there. To prevent the rustling of the trees from making him look up from his work, he had a red lacquer screen placed a meter from the window, and it is in that space that today we curious people push against each other to look. What did he think? Who knows what effect it has on everyone to be convinced that they are divine, and that they have the right of life and death.
The Forbidden City has no longer been forbidden since 1925, when, after the expulsion of Pu Yi (1906-1967), the last emperor to whom Bernardo Bertolucci dedicated the film of the same name, it became a museum. During the Cultural Revolution it was closed and partly vandalised, but today it receives almost 20 million visitors a year. Since it is a symbol of Chinese imperial greatness, it is nowhere written that the architect of such wonder was Vietnamese, Nguyen An, given – like a package – by the Vietnamese court to the Ming court.
The most precious objects of the Forbidden City, however, are not in Beijing, but in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. To recap how it all happened would be a bit long and would lead us astray, so let’s summarize. The 1912 revolution that ended the imperial era was carried out by the republicans, led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, thus considered the father of the country both in Beijing and among the pro-unification parties of Taiwan. It was he who brought China to be a Republic, although he was an ideological hero and capable of raising funds rather than a hero of arms. Sun also had the advantage of not governing for long (only for three months), and therefore did not have time to do harm and damage the memory of him: he brought down the dynasty, established the Republic, and founded the Nationalist Party (KMT ). Then, after a series of comings and goings, in 1928 Chiang Kai-shek, who considered himself Sun’s adopted son (Sun was only partially convinced of this), became prime minister and generalissimo.
In 1937 Chiang had to deal with the Japanese invasion, which started the Second World War in China, and the imperial treasure kept in the Forbidden City was at risk. For fear that the Japanese would burgle the palace, in fact, the Chinese government decided to move it: the best was put in twenty thousand crates, and taken around the country, depending on the advance of the Japanese: first Nanjing, then Chongqing, and various other locations. With the civil war the boxes continued to move throughout China, this time on orders from the KMT who wanted to take them away from the Communist Party. For this reason, when Chiang saw himself defeated, he decided to flee to Taiwan, taking the imperial kit with him. More than 600,000 priceless objects landed in Taipei in 1949 along with about a million defeated soldiers, who had been promised that the reconquest of China (and the return home of the treasures) would begin from there.
In 1965, with the reconquest set aside, Taipei built the Palace Museum, where the wonders brought from Beijing (preserved until then in a former sugar factory) were put on display on a rotating basis. A few months later, in China, the campaign against the “Four old ways” – consisting of old ideas, old habits, old culture and old traditions – began. It was a disaster. Thousands of objects vandalized and an unknown number of people persecuted, which already presaged the arrival of the Cultural Revolution. When this second, long wave of iconoclastic madness and violence engulfed China, the stolen treasures in Taipei were indeed safer.
On the one hand there was the communist dictatorship which had to create a new man and culture by destroying things and people attached to “the past” (the cooks were also persecuted and in some cases killed, because even cooking had to be collective and revolutionary) , and on the other the nationalist dictatorship in Taiwan, which represented itself as the protective bastion of classical Chinese culture.
The museum had doubled, and there were those who used it as a symbol of the oppressive past to be destroyed – although at a certain point the authorities had closed the doors, to avoid further destruction – and those who instead used it as a dignified culture of which they felt they were heirs.
Today things have changed a lot: the Communist Party represses the memory of the destructive moments of the Maoist era, establishing itself as the sole guardian of Chinese culture. Taiwan, on the other hand, shows these splendid antiquities to the public in a museum affected by the classicist-militaristic style of Chiang’s times, with traditional elements reproduced in a square and heavy way. For a few years now, the Beijing government has begun to say that the treasures must be returned, without however ever using the word “repatriated” because it would be an implicit recognition that Taiwan is a state in its own right. Taipei is so frightened by the idea of a Chinese coup that it has suspended all loans, and does not lend any objects to any exhibition, because it is not certain how it would end if China asked for their return to a third-party museum.
Since 2021, according to what the Taiwanese authorities claim, China has launched a rather aggressive digital disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the management of the museum, in particular accusing the curators of having broken six precious porcelain cups. Last year, a hacker attack on the private server of the Taipei museum led to the theft of around 100,000 very high resolution scanned images, illegally downloaded and put up for sale on the Chinese platform Taobao at very little.
When I’m in Taipei I always go to the Palace Museum. The container leaves something to be desired, but it truly has extraordinary masterpieces, shown in rotation so you always see new things: there are the most mysterious ceramics, called ru, produced for a short period in 1100, during the Song dynasty (960-1279), with an opalescent lacquer with a secret formula, never reproduced. Or the beautiful Palace Concert, an anonymous painting from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in which ten ladies play, drink tea and wine around a table, with a little dog dozing nearby – all of them have paid great attention to how to style their chignon, according to the fashion of the time. There are extraordinary bronzes belonging to the first dynastic cycles (starting from 1600 BC) and there is the museum’s Mona Lisa, a jadeite cabbage that drives visitors crazy and has become the symbol of the museum (reproduced on all the merchandise, from post-it notes to umbrellas). It’s a touch surreal, perhaps, but the cabbage represents a symbol of purity and fertility – as well as a work of trompe l’oeil very respectable.
When citizens of the People’s Republic of China are given permission to travel to Taiwan (a permission Beijing denies, as a financial punishment, if Taiwan has politicians in power who don’t like the Communist Party), the museum becomes crowded with Chinese like the Forbidden City . The Taiwanese? Less, because a gap is beginning to open between the inhabitants of Taiwan and classical Chinese culture. The museum is halved: the opulent and unmissable brick box that had once contained the immovable treasure from the Chinese capital, and the splendid contents of the Taipei museum.
To further complicate matters, however, two other Forbidden City museums have emerged in recent years. One in 2016 in Taiwan, in the central-southern city of Chiayi, to create a “Bilbao Guggenheim effect” – that is, to attract visitors who only stop in Taipei here. The building is a little awkward to reach, but very beautiful: the work of Kris Yao, it is inspired by the brush strokes of Chinese calligraphy to create almost aerial solids and voids. The objects are selected from those transported to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek, with some more recent acquisitions or donations. The other objective of the museum is to insert the art of classical China into an international context thanks to ad hoc exhibitions. When I went, an exhibition contrasted artistic developments at the Chinese court with those that occurred in Korea in the long Joseon period (1392 -1910), to demonstrate that China was not culturally isolated but in a cultural dialogue with neighboring countries. Another exhibition focused on the history of textiles throughout Asia in various periods. In the timelines detailing the salient moments in the world, and in Asia in particular, they had managed to never write the word “China”.
In 2022, a fourth Forbidden City museum, or Palace Museum, opened, this time in Hong Kong. Designed by Rocco Yim, it represents a mix between a gold ingot and a sacred bronze from the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC). No, it’s not his best work. This is the most explicitly political museum of all: every object is on loan from Beijing and there is no local curatorship, because this too is decided in Beijing, just as art experts and historians are sent from Beijing. Naturally, the cost of the museum is also entirely supported by Beijing, which defined it as “a gift” to Hong Kong. Its stated aim is to ensure that Hongkongers, with their well-known rebellious spirit, become prouder of classical Chinese culture, and more patriotic. Nothing was asked of anyone to create it: Carrie Lam, the unpopular chief executive of Hong Kong from 2017 to 2022 (selected by Beijing through local representatives), announced Beijing’s decision and explained where the museum would be built. End of the debate.
Construction began in 2019, the year of protests in Hong Kong, but it opened to the public in 2022, when Hong Kong was still under anti-pandemic restrictions and reeling from the National Security Law that expanded Chinese control. That too, a law decided and written in Beijing, was presented as “a gift” to Hong Kong to prevent new prolonged and difficult protests, and eradicate anti-central government sedition… the parallel writes itself, even too much so. And this is how Chinese historical and political events have led to a museum in the Forbidden City that periodically doubles in size, driven by conflicting political forces. Who knows if it will continue to replicate itself, in new incarnations, which could lead to a fifth, or a sixth, museum of the Forbidden City, now patriotic, now nationalist, now monumental, now internationalist…
