A century of art, memory and movement
On October 20, heavy rain did not stop a small crowd from climbing the hill to Taipei’s National Palace Museum. They came to mark two milestones that sit at the heart of the institution’s story. One is a 100 year anniversary tied to the day the Forbidden City in Beijing became a museum in 1925. The other is a 60 year anniversary for the Taipei museum’s home in Taiwan, a span that aligns with the traditional sexagenary cycle in Chinese culture.
The centennial looks back to October 10, 1925, when the imperial palace opened to the public as the Palace Museum. Decades later, after a long wartime journey across the mainland, 2,972 crates of art and archives were shipped to Taiwan in 1949. The museum opened its Waishuangxi site in 1965. Today its collection, built from the holdings of emperors and scholars, numbers in the hundreds of thousands and covers more than ten millennia of art and material culture.
Inside the museum on this wet day the tone felt warm and personal. Director Hsiao Tsung-huang welcomed guests at the door, then paused for a brief moment that captured both pride and continuity. He offered a single line that summed up a century of stewardship.
Hsiao, the museum’s director, made the announcement in a short ceremony.
“The National Palace Museum is 100 years old!”
Both Taipei and Beijing are marking the anniversary with their own programs. The date also echoes another turning point in modern Chinese history, the Wuchang Uprising in 1911 that helped end the Qing dynasty and usher in a new era.
What is on display for the centennial
The museum has organized a trio of major exhibitions that anchor the commemorations across its Northern Branch in Taipei and Southern Branch in Chiayi. Together they bring out rarely seen paintings, calligraphy, rare books, ritual bronzes, jades, porcelains, and digital presentations that trace how the collection has been preserved, studied, and shared.
Enduring Legacy: A Centennial Celebration of the National Palace Museum
Enduring Legacy is the core survey and spans both branches. It gathers more than a hundred masterpieces and key documents that tell the institution’s story from court collection to public museum. Visitors encounter paintings and calligraphy long tied to the museum’s identity, along with antiquities that reveal the craft of bronze casting, jade carving, and porcelain making across dynasties.
The show highlights the Song dynasty landscape trinity that defines classical Chinese painting: Fan Kuan’s Travelers among Mountains and Streams, Guo Xi’s Early Spring, and Li Tang’s Wind in Pines among a Myriad Valleys. The Southern Branch is presenting these three works together at Chiayi for the first time. The presentation also includes objects on loan from partner institutions in Japan, including a suite of blue and white porcelains from the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, and items from Kyushu National Museum, pointing to a growing network of cultural exchange.
The narrative extends beyond masterworks. Archival materials chart the museum’s relocations and cataloging projects. Digital experiences let visitors explore brushwork at magnified scale, examine materials, and understand the science behind conservation.
Two Hundred Treasures: Song Dynasty Rare Books in the National Palace Museum
This exhibition opens the vault of the museum’s rare book repository to present the most comprehensive look to date at Song period editions. The Song dynasty was a golden age of printing, with woodblock presses producing refined editions of classics, histories, poetry, and technical texts. On view are more than a hundred volumes that show crisp typography, elegant page design, and the marks of readers across centuries.
For many visitors, the term rare book evokes European incunabula. The Song equivalent predates that concept. These volumes include carefully carved characters, subtle paper tones, and later annotations that trace how ideas traveled from court to academy to private study. The exhibition also highlights new research, including comparisons of variant editions and the study of marginalia and collectors’ seals. It is a chance to see how scholarship reads not only text but also the material evidence of a book’s life.
An Assembly for the Ages: The Legend of the Northern Song Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden
Elegant gatherings were moments when scholar officials met to write poetry, paint, discuss ideas, and keep alive the ideal of moral cultivation. This show brings together paintings and calligraphy by the towering figures of the Northern Song literati, including Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, and Mi Fu, along with later works that looked back at their legacy. A centerpiece is Li Gonglin’s Five Horses, on loan from the Tokyo National Museum and shown abroad for the first time. The painting’s precise line and humane portraiture of horses reflect the artist’s range and the courtly taste of the era.
The exhibition makes clear that the legend of the Western Garden is not just a story about a single event. It is a touchstone for how artists imagined friendship, talent, and duty. It also shows how later generations copied, reinterpreted, and sometimes challenged the models set by the Song masters.
Why the Song masterpieces matter
The Song dynasty (960 to 1279) shaped the look and language of Chinese art. Painting, printing, ceramic technology, and calligraphy reached new heights. Scholars in public office pursued art as a serious branch of moral life. Landscapes became a way to think about humanity’s place in a vast order, while books carried knowledge to broader audiences with a clarity that earlier manuscript culture could not match.
Fan Kuan’s Travelers among Mountains and Streams stands as a summit of Northern Song vision. Tiny figures and a mule train cross a river at the base of colossal peaks. The painting invites slow looking. Layers of ink texture create crags, pines, and mist that seem to breathe. The message is not only scenic. It is philosophical, a view of scale in which human plans must fit the rhythms of nature.
Guo Xi’s Early Spring chooses the season when winter loosens its grip but new growth has not fully arrived. The forms evoke thaw, wind, and the sound of water. Guo wrote about “the order of mountains” and how a painter could suggest weather and time of day. In this work, void and mass balance each other to suggest air and depth without resorting to a single point of perspective.
Li Tang’s Wind in Pines among a Myriad Valleys stands at a turning point. The brush defines rocks with broken, ax cut strokes that give forms an edged energy. Pines twist and cling to slopes as if tested by a living gust. The picture looks back to the clarity of Northern Song structure and forward to later Southern Song focus on intimate views.
The rare books show why the printed page is central to Song culture. Woodblock printing supported the spread of the Confucian classics, poetry anthologies, and practical guides. Page layout balanced columns and margins with a logic that guided reading. Marginal notes by later owners reveal how a book passed from one hand to another. For visitors who know Chinese characters, the carving of strokes has an artistry of its own. For those new to the subject, the exhibition provides lucid context on materials, tools, and the lives of readers who once turned these pages.
From imperial treasure house to public trust
The Palace Museum in Beijing was founded in 1925 when the Forbidden City became a public institution. That move marked a shift from court possession to stewardship for society. During the 1930s, escalating conflict forced staff to pack and send crates of treasures south and west to protect them. After the war, part of the collection remained in Beijing. Part later came to Taiwan as the Nationalist government retreated in 1949. The Taipei museum opened its permanent complex in 1965 and added a Southern Branch in Chiayi in 2015. Across this long arc, the goal has stayed the same: safeguard, study, and share.
Wartime evacuations and those who kept the crates moving
In 1933, as invasion threatened the capital, more than 13,000 crates left Beijing by rail, river, and road. Escort teams endured bombings, disease, and harsh terrain while keeping inventories intact. That effort preserved a core of Chinese art that had survived centuries inside palace walls. After the war, early staff who later helped establish the Taipei museum carried those habits of discipline to a new home across the strait. Family stories from that era speak of lives built around the safeguarding of scrolls, albums, bronzes, and books. The museum’s current exhibitions acknowledge those journeys and the people who made them possible.
Parallel centennials and international recognition
The centennial is being marked in both Beijing and Taipei. A related event at the United Nations in New York unveiled a commemorative stamp sheet and opened an exhibition titled Endless Vitality. The UN Postal Administration issued stamps with floral designs inspired by objects in the Palace Museum collections. Officials at the ceremony spoke about the role of museums in connecting cultures and preserving shared heritage.
Geng Shuang, charge d’affaires of China’s permanent mission to the United Nations, described what the stamps represent.
“The newly issued UN Postal Administration stamps not only mark the 100th anniversary of the Palace Museum, but also showcase the enduring charm of Chinese culture to the world.”
Atul Khare, UN Under-Secretary-General for Operational Support, spoke about the public mission of museums.
“Museums are places where culture lives, where stories are told, and where people come together to learn and connect. They preserve our past, help us understand our present, and inspire our future.”
Speakers also noted the Palace Museum’s place on the UNESCO World Heritage List and the value of exhibitions and research as a bridge across communities. The Taipei museum’s centennial program fits that outlook, with loans and collaborations that bring new audiences into contact with old masterpieces.
Digital tools and the visitor experience
The National Palace Museum is expanding how visitors can explore its holdings. A 3D collection gallery allows close study of objects that are difficult to display for long periods. E books, digitized archives, and rare book databases open the study of the collection to students and researchers who cannot travel. Exhibitions incorporate digital viewing to reveal layers of brushwork and repair that are invisible to the naked eye.
The centennial program also weaves in partnerships. The Northern Branch highlights the museum’s evolution with contemporary interpretive tools, including artificial intelligence supported displays that help visitors compare versions and trace motifs across centuries. The Southern Branch balances a focus on Asian art and culture with major loans and new displays that bring the museum’s best known paintings to Chiayi.
Practical details matter for a celebration of this scale. Both branches publish opening hours, ticketing, and free entrance days on official pages. Free admission applies on several dates each year, including New Year’s Day, the Lantern Festival, International Museum Day, World Tourism Day, and National Day. Joint tickets and travel packages with airlines, Taiwan High Speed Rail, and partner hotels are in development to make a two branch visit easier for domestic and international travelers. For the latest schedules and visitor information, see the museum’s centennial site at theme.npm.edu.tw/npm100/en.
Global outreach and new audiences
The centennial is not confined to Taiwan. From September 11 to December 31, 2025, the National Palace Museum presents 100 Treasures, 100 Stories at the National Museum in Prague. It is the museum’s first ever exhibition in the Czech Republic and a window onto Taiwan’s approach to cultural heritage. The selection includes the beloved Jadeite Cabbage, a small carving that turns a natural piece of mottled jade into a head of cabbage with a locust and a katydid. The piece has become a symbol of talent and restraint, a celebration of how artisans work with the material’s veins rather than against them.
Curio cabinets from the Qianlong court show global reach through materials and motifs. A Qing dynasty handscroll of Along the River During the Qingming Festival recreates city life with tiny figures crowded onto a wooden bridge, vendors and boatmen, and a panorama that rewards slow looking. Bronze mirrors that cast dramatic patterns when caught by sunlight suggest the marriage of science and art in early China. Calligraphy inspired by Su Shi’s Red Cliff odes ties literary memory to landscape. Each work sits inside a story chosen to connect with audiences far from the museum’s home.
Key Points
- Taipei’s National Palace Museum marked a 100 year anniversary linked to the Palace Museum’s founding in 1925 and a 60 year milestone for its site in Taiwan.
- Three major shows anchor the program: Enduring Legacy, Two Hundred Treasures on Song rare books, and An Assembly for the Ages focused on Northern Song literati art.
- The Southern Branch in Chiayi is presenting the trio of Song landscape masterpieces by Fan Kuan, Guo Xi, and Li Tang together at that site for the first time.
- Li Gonglin’s Five Horses is on loan from the Tokyo National Museum and is being shown abroad for the first time.
- Song rare books are displayed in the most comprehensive presentation of the museum’s holdings of that period, highlighting the golden age of woodblock printing.
- The museum traces a journey from the Forbidden City to Taiwan, including wartime evacuations and the 1949 transfer of 2,972 crates.
- Parallel centennial events include a UN stamp release and exhibition in New York that spotlight museums as bridges across cultures.
- Digital tools, 3D galleries, and databases expand access to the collection, with new interpretive displays at the Northern and Southern Branches.
- Free entrance applies on several annual dates, and joint tickets with transport and hotel partners are in the works.
- International outreach includes 100 Treasures, 100 Stories in Prague, featuring icons like the Jadeite Cabbage and Along the River During the Qingming Festival.
