The NationalPalaceMuseum in Taiwan houses the world's largest collection of Chinese imperial art. This collection has over 600,000 pieces including calligraphy, porcelain, jades, bronzes, landscape paintings, portraiture, coins, rare books, documents, and figurines from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The treasures were originally the property of the imperial court in Beijing.
The Republic of China (ROC) was founded in 1911, when revolutionary forces ousted China's last imperial dynasty. For a time, the imperial treasures stayed in the ancient palace, the Forbidden City in Beijing, but many were damaged, stolen, lost, or even given away as gifts. In 1914, the ROC government relocated the priceless artifacts to the outer court of the Forbidden City, where they were put on display to the public.
That exhibit was eventually inaugurated as the NationalPalaceMuseum in 1925. But less than ten years later, Japan invaded northeastern China, causing the government to move around 20,000 crates of artifacts to avoid the devastation of war. The crates were divided up and repeatedly moved around China, sometimes only narrowly avoiding Japanese bombing raids.
The ROC government relocated to Taipei in 1949 following the Chinese Civil War. President Chiang Kai-shek brought about 3,000 crates with the contingent of soldiers and government officials. These are the treasures that are now available for public view in Taipei's NationalPalaceMuseum. The museum is so highly valued that the government made it a ministerial-level institution in 1987.
Mainland China still holds that these treasures are the rightful property of the government in Beijing. As a result, the museum pieces have rarely gone on display outside of Taiwan because the government is worried that Mainland China's diplomatic allies would return them to Beijing instead of Taipei.