Cross-Straits attempt to reveal imperial mystery
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Antique restorer Chen Tung-Ho of Taipei's "National Palace Museum" greatly valued his chance to work at the lab of the Palace Museum in Beijing.
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Antique restorer Chen Tung-Ho from Taipei is learning to repair watches of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) from Qin Shiming, a veteran worker at the Palace Museum in Beijing. |
"I have been the first person from Taiwan to have a staff pass of the Palace Museum in the past 60 years. It was a great honor and luck," said the 41-year-old assistant research fellow of the Taipei museum in an interview with Xinhua.
With the pass, he was able to enter several key labs of the Palace Museum.
In about two months, Chen indulged himself in examining ancient Chinese porcelains and antique clocks in a quiet corner of the Imperial Palace, or the Forbidden City, which turned into the museum in 1925.
"In those days, every morning I biked my way to work in the palace. I dared not imagine of this before," he said.
Towards the end of a civil war in the late 1940s, the Kuomintang (KMT) government shipped 2,972 boxes of about 600,000 items from the Imperial Palace to Taipei when it fled to Taiwan. Based on this collection, Taipei's "National Palace Museum" was founded in 1965.
This year, the directors of the two museums exchanged visits for the first time and agreed to exchange one or two research fellows between July to mid-September every year. Chen was the first in this project.
After working for the Louvre Museum in Paris for seven years, Chen returned to Taiwan in 2006 and joined the "National Palace Museum" in 2008.
He stayed in Beijing from July to September.
"I brought two research plans to Beijing. One was about porcelains and the other about clocks," he said.
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