If you want to know how many "family foundations" the Forbidden City has
Recommended for children to read
"I am the "gatekeeper" of the Forbidden City"
Let's listen to Shan Jixiang
Tell the story of "Those Things in the Forbidden City"
"I am the "gatekeeper" of the Forbidden City" tells the story of Shan Jixiang's in-depth implementation of the concept of "coming alive" during his tenure as the director of the Palace Museum, leading all the Forbidden City people to make the Forbidden City culture close to people's lives through unremitting efforts, making the Palace Museum a museum that "comes alive" and realizing the solemn promise of "handing over a magnificent Forbidden City to the next 600 years in its entirety". The content involves the cultural inheritance, cultural relics protection, management reform, academic and education, brand building, cultural dissemination and exchange of the Palace Museum.
Shan Jixiang said in the book: "As we all know, the Palace Museum is a museum, and since it is a museum, it must have its own collection of cultural relics. The Palace Museum not only has rare fine works collected by the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, but also rare fine works scattered in various places newly collected after the establishment of the Palace Museum, especially after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Therefore, we have always known that the family of the Forbidden City is quite rich. At the same time, the collection of newly collected artifacts is increasing, changing every year. This requires us to clean up and tidy up. ”
As early as 1934, President Ma Heng's report clearly pointed out that the collation of cultural relics collections "is not determined to be fundamentally improved, and it is difficult to build a foundation for permanent perseverance." In fact, the cleaning up of cultural relics in the Palace Museum has never stopped. Historically, the Palace Museum has carried out four cultural relics clean-up work from 1924 to 1930, 1954 to 1960, 1978 to the end of the 1980s, and after 1991.
After the first clean-up of cultural relics, a total of more than 1.17 million items were registered in the 6 parts and 28 volumes of the "Forbidden City Item Inspection Report".
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the task of cleaning up cultural relics collections has become more arduous, in addition to the original cultural relics collections, it is also necessary to clean up many cultural relics collections transferred from other museums and cultural relics departments, a large number of personal donations, and the collection of many scattered old collections of the Forbidden City.
By 1990 and 1997, the Palace Museum had built the first and second phases of underground warehouses, and more than 900,000 cultural relics originally stored in the above-ground warehouses had been moved to the underground warehouses, and the cultural relics stored in the ground warehouses had also been properly adjusted.
After the arrival of President Zheng Xinmiao in 2002, the Palace Museum carried out the 5th cultural relics collection cleanup from 2004 to 2010, which is also a more comprehensive cultural relics cleanup work. The cleanup of the cultural relics collection lasted for 7 years, which is the largest since the establishment of the hospital. After a comprehensive and systematic census and collation, the number of cultural relics in the Palace Museum has increased from nearly 1 million to 1807558 pieces (sets), of which 1684490 precious cultural relics, 115491 general cultural relics, and 7577 specimens. This is the first comprehensive and scientific figure in the number of cultural relics in the collection of the Palace Museum since its establishment.
For a long time, the complete information of the Cultural Relics Collection of the Forbidden City has never been released to the public, resulting in not only the public, but even some professional researchers who do not have much understanding of the overall situation of the Cultural Relics Collection of the Forbidden City. Since 2010, on the basis of the clean-up of cultural relics collections, the Palace Museum has launched the compilation and printing of the "General Catalogue of Cultural Relics of the Palace Museum", published the "Collection Department of the Palace Museum", and successively published them to the public, serving the needs of people's research and viewing, and practicing the mission of public education and social service of the museum.
After several generations of efforts of the "Forbidden City people", the cultural relics collection of the Palace Museum has basically achieved a sound management system, consistent accounts, accurate appraisal, perfect archives, timely filing, proper storage, convenient inspection, and truly achieved one-to-one correspondence between physical objects and catalogs. Therefore, at the beginning of 2013, the Forbidden City announced the general catalogue of the cultural relics collection of the Palace Museum, and opened this number and the information of the collection to the public, which is "bright family foundation" for the public, so that everyone knows what the collections of the Palace Museum are, and at the same time, it is also subject to social supervision and let the society evaluate our work; for academics and professional researchers, the academic resources of the Palace Museum are disclosed, so that it is more convenient for them to carry out research in all aspects.
The general catalogue of the collection on the palace museum's website
As of December 31, 2016, the total number of cultural relics in the Palace Museum's collection has risen from 1807558 to 1862690, of which 1683336 are precious cultural relics, 163969 general cultural relics, and 15,385 specimens.
Compared with the data of 2010, the collection of cultural relics has 55,132 more. If divided by category, the collection of three types of cultural relics increased the most, including: 726 Qianlong imperial manuscripts and rulers; 16511 oracle bone cultural relics; 4425 ceramic cultural relics and 7808 specimens. Some of them were newly collected over the years, some were donated by people from all walks of life, and a considerable number was newly discovered during the process of cleaning up the collection. These more than 1.86 million cultural relics can be said to be complete in system, covering ancient and modern, with excellent quality and rich categories.
In the process of visiting, there are always some ordinary viewers who have this misunderstanding: the collection of cultural relics in the Forbidden City is from the Qing Dynasty. In fact, the collection of the Palace Museum is a collection of cultural relics from various periods and regions, and even the collections of Qing emperors are often relics of the former dynasty with a long history.
More than 1.86 million cultural relics are mainly cultural relics collections, ancient construction collections and ancient books and documents. Needless to say, take the ancient books and documents, the Forbidden City has about 600,000 ancient books and documents, including Wuyingdian inscriptions, Yuanming and Qingjia carvings, Ming and Qing dynasty manuscripts, local chronicles, palace special collections, palace archives, inner house drama books, ethnic ancient books, etc. Among them, 240,000 book editions are very important, so the Palace Museum is also the museum with the largest collection of book editions in the world.
Ancient construction collections and ancient books and documents, together with 23 categories of cultural relics collections, constitute all 25 categories of collections of the Palace Museum. This classification method, taking into account both the texture of the collection and the use of the collection, is a classification method that integrates the two, and in the national museum collection classification system, its number of categories should be the most comprehensive, and its classification method should also be the most characteristic. This is mainly because our collection is indeed very large and quite diverse.
Title: "I am the "Gatekeeper" of the Forbidden City"
Author: Shan Jixiang
China Encyclopedia Press
Text/Guangzhou Daily, New Flower City Reporter: Wu Bo
Photo/ Guangzhou Daily, Xinhuacheng reporter: Wu Bo
Video/Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng Reporter: Wu Bo
Correspondent: Rope
Guangzhou Daily New Flower City Editor: Liu Liqin