Page 267 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

Conclusion

Today, the 362 ceramic objects sent by the Nationalist government to the

exhibitions in Shanghai, London, and Nanjing are still housed in the collection of the

National Palace Museum. But now the National Palace Museum is no longer on the

grounds of the old imperial palace in Beijing. Rather, the museum’s collections are

stored in a replica of a “traditional Chinese” palatial structure in the Shilin district

outskirts of Taipei, Taiwan. They were taken to Taiwan between 1948 and 1949, years of

embittered battle over control of mainland China. When the Nationalist Party moved

their political base across the straits, it also physically transferred over to Taiwan for

safekeeping most of the artworks and what some, if not most, art historians laud as the

best of the imperial collections,. The National Palace Museum in Taipei (Gugong

bowuyuan) is still known today as the world’s largest and preeminent collection of

“Chinese art.” Few would argue with the notion that the best of Chinese porcelain is also

in the Taipei location.

In 2006 and 2007 the National Palace Museum opened its doors after a four-year

renovation project in which the permanent galleries were architecturally reconstructed

and the object-displays reconfigured. The overarching narrative of ceramic history in

China, however, has remained for the large part unchanged since the museum’s doors

opened to the public in the 1960s. A walk through the six second floor gallery rooms

(Rooms #201-209) that display ceramics highlights roughly the following timeline of

ceramic development (Figure 1). Potters of the Six Dynasties (221-580 AD) through the

T'ang dynasty (618-907 AD) used low temperature lead-based glazes, often in yellow,

green, and white colors to decorate daily use objects such as funerary and ritual figurines

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