The National Palace Museum, home to one of the world's biggest collections of imperial Chinese treasures, does not plan any joint events with China for its 100th anniversary due to Beijing's military threats, its director said today.
The museum was re-established in Taiwan in 1965 after the Republic of China government lost a civil war with Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) communists and fled to Taiwan in 1949, taking with them thousands of cases of antiques once owned by China's emperors.
Photo courtesy of the National Palace Museum
A competing institution remains in Beijing, the similarly named Palace Museum.
Speaking to reporters at the museum, National Palace Museum Director Hsiao Tsung-huang (蕭宗煌) said cooperation with Beijing's museum needed both sides to be willing to work together.
"Whether it is fighter jets, navy or civilian ships going up and down the Taiwan Strait, there is no opportunity like there was before for mutual friendliness or cooperation," he said, referring to China's almost daily military activities around Taiwan.
"We'd be happy to see it, but at the moment the other side has not taken the initiative to talk, and we even more cannot take the initiative to talk to them," Hsiao added.
The Palace Museum in Beijing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Instead, Taipei's museum is to send some of its collection to Prague and Paris this year, with the Qing Dynasty Jadeite Cabbage, one its most famous pieces which rarely leaves Taiwan, going on display at the Czech Republic's National Museum.
Next month, the National Palace Museum is to also host an exhibition of French impressionist and modernist art from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The National Palace Museum holds more than 690,000 items. More than 80 percent of them are from China's last dynasty, the former Qing court, which was overthrown in 1911.
A second branch of the museum opened in Chiayi County in 2015, and is being expanded to enable the public to see even more of the collection's artifacts.
It is to have a special focus on some of the museum's rarest pieces which Taiwan terms "national treasures."
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