TAIPEI, Taiwan -- For a wonderful six years earlier this century, ordinary people had the opportunity to see the Chinese emperors' personal collection of art displayed in their palaces in Beijing's Forbidden City.
But war, civil war and cold war have since cut the extraordinary 900,000-piece collection in two, with the bulk of it buried in bomb-proof bunkers under a mountain in Taiwan, only a fraction coming to light each year for exhibitions. The emperors' palaces in the Forbidden City remain empty, with little to remind visitors that they once housed one of the world's greatest art collections.
Now, a cultural thaw between mainland China and Taiwan could xTC result in the collection at least temporarily being reunited and put on display in the Forbidden City. Despite political tensions, cultural contacts between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits are increasing dramatically, and hurdles that once confined the collection to Taiwan's bunkers are being lifted.
Last month, the highest-level Chinese cultural delegation to date visited Taiwan, and the two sides agreed to exhibit recent mainland archaeological finds in Taiwan. For their part, art experts from Taiwan have visited the mainland and are being asked to help with excavation and preservation of their common historical heritage.
Meanwhile, the museum that houses the collection in Taiwan is considering an expansion that could double its size and is planning 20 special exhibits next year that will bring to light rare masterpieces. Resolved legal problems have also allowed for its largest overseas exhibition: a 400-piece show in four U.S. cities in 1996.
The bulk of the collection -- about 700,000 pieces -- is housed in the hilly suburbs north of Taipei in the National Palace Museum. To get an idea of why Taiwan's share of the treasure inspires so much interest, a museum official pointed out that it holds some of the most famous works of art spanning China's thousands of years of history. It's like the Louvre, British Museum and the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, rolled into one -- although with an exclusive focus on Chinese art.
The museum's most famous possession may well be Fan Kuan's painting "Traveling Amid Mountains and Gorges." About 900 years after it was painted, art students still copy it to learn the basic rules of Chinese landscape.
Curator Chin Hsiao-yi said a joint exhibition on the mainland is being held up because China has not yet guaranteed that Taiwan's half of the collection would be returned if it were displayed in China.
"The mainland knows we are 100 percent sincere that if their artifacts come to Taiwan, they will be safe and returned. However, we are still working on an assurance that we will get the same treatment," Mr. Chin said in an interview.
The difficulty stems from the collection's history -- and China's view that Taiwan is its illegal owner. It was taken over by the Republic of China after it expelled the last emperor, Pu-Yi, from the Forbidden City in 1924. A year later, the republic opened the collection to the public.
Unfortunately, this brief access ended in 1931, when Japan annexed Manchuria and the collection was taken to Shanghai for safekeeping. With Japan's invasion of China in 1937, the republic's Nationalist government under dictator Chiang Kai-shek had the collection packed into 20,000 boxes and sent to remote Sichuan and Guizhou provinces. Later, during the civil war that Chiang eventually lost, he had the cream of it moved to Taiwan.
Although the Nationalists have been given credit for saving the collection, mainland China has treated the collection like family jewels inherited by an estranged relative. Officially, they are still in the family, but the wrong person owns them.
As Mr. Chin points out, this dispute remains unresolved, but signs are that it is easing. Taiwan used to hesitate sending the collection overseas for fear that other countries might seize it and send it back to China. Those legal problems have now been ironed out, paving the way for the U.S. exhibition in two years to New York, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco, as well as a smaller one next year to France.
A frequent criticism of Taiwan's care of the collection is that although it is very secure, the museum is relatively small. Only about 2 percent of the collection comes to light at any given exhibition.
Mr. Chin noted that the museum is nearing completion of a new library that will house 280,000 volumes of court documents and rare books from the Qing dynasty. In addition, the museum is considering a major expansion that could see it double in size.