The Ministry of Culture has designated an ancient drawing of local 16th to 17th-century politician Tsai Fu-yi (蔡復一) a significant national antiquity — the first such antiquity in Taiwan’s outlying islands.
The drawing of Tsai is the oldest ancestral drawing in Taiwan, and was listed as a significant antiquity by the Ministry of Culture on Wednesday last week, the Kinmen County Cultural Affairs Bureau said on Thursday.
The review committee’s 14 members unanimously approved the designation, the bureau said, adding that it was another milestone for the county in the area of cultural preservation, after an annual religious festival celebrating the traditional Chinese folk deity Cheng Huang (城隍), the city god, was designated as significant folklore in 2013, also a first for Taiwan’s outlying islands.
Photo courtesy of the Kinmen County Cultural Affairs Bureau
Article 65 of the Cultural Heritage Protection Act (文化資產保存法) says: “Antiques shall be categorized as national treasures, significant antiquities or general antiquities, depending on their rarity and value.”
The Tsai clan in Kinmen greatly values the drawing, a family heirloom, and holds an ancestral offering every year on the winter solstice and the anniversary of Tsai’s death, the bureau said.
The practice is a long-time clan tradition, but in the past few years, offerings using a duplicate image of the drawing have been held to prevent the original from being damaged during transportation, the bureau said.
It said that in 2016, it invited Lu Tai-kang (盧泰康), a professor at Tainan National University of the Arts’ Department of Art History, and Shao Ching-wang (邵慶旺), director of the university’s of Arts’ Historical Object Conservation Research Center, to visit Kinmen to assess the value of the drawing, and both were impressed by its fine craftsmanship.
The two academics believed that the drawing of Tsai is older and more rare than a drawing of Ming Dynasty warlord Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功) on the list of national treasures, the bureau said.
The drawing is estimated to have been done in 1625 during the late Ming Dynasty, while most other drawings of ancestors in Taiwan are drawn in the 19th century during the late Qing Dynasty, it said.
Born in 1576, Tsai wrote an essay of more than 10,000 words at the age of 12, and was commended for his achievements in literature and war, the bureau said, adding that the emperor even awarded him a position equivalent to that of a minister of national defense.
The bureau said that after having acquired the Tsai clan’s consent, it is planning to publish a book and unveil an exhibition featuring the drawing next year.
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