Forbidden City art objects to be shown in Japan

TOKYO, Sept. 21 Kyodo

About 100 works of art from Beijing's Forbidden City that were secretly preserved at the Nanjing Museum will be shipped to Japan for public viewing in major cities from October, a Japanese commercial television station reported Monday.

Tokyo Broadcasting System Inc.(TBS) said the exhibition is scheduled to tour Tokyo, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Osaka and Hiroshima.

According to TBS, the objects are part of a collection which had been taken to the museum in the mid-1930s from the Forbidden City to avoid damage from wars.

They include a flask decorated with blue floral and dragon patterns from the Yonglo reign of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), said to be a masterpiece testifying to the highest level of China's pottery, and a gold seal from the Jiaqing reign of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

Some of the 100 art objects are believed to have once belonged to the Chinese emperors. And many of them have been kept in tightly sealed boxes, TBS said.

According to the report, in 1933, shortly after the Manchurian Incident and Japan's occupation of Manchuria, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the ruling Kuomingtang party, ordered some 20,000 boxes of cultural objects, including 13,000 from the Forbidden City, to be removed from Beijing to Shanghai, Nanjing and Taiwan.

After the war, most of the art objects were taken back to the Forbidden City, but some 2,000 boxes were kept unknown to most collectors and remained at the Nanjing Museum, TBS said.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Kyodo News International, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group