65 years ago, when the Japanese imperialists launched the "September 18 Incident" in the northeast, in order to protect the cultural relics handed down from the Forbidden City and other places from the looting and war damage of the Japanese Kou, the Chinese government carried out the world-famous cultural relics to the south.
After the Xinhai Revolution, the cultural relics of the Qing Palace were nationalized by the Republic of China. The Antiquities Exhibition Hall, established in 1914, accepts 232,300 cultural relics from the Shengjing Imperial Palace and the Rehe Palace. The Palace Museum, established in 1925, accepts 1.17 million artifacts from Ouchi. Due to the particularity of the cultural relics of the Qing Palace, they have always been regarded as the most important treasures of the country and are closely related to the country.
The picture shows May Day around 1930, when the Taiping flowers were in full bloom, the hospital held a reception in the Royal Garden, and the dean Yi Peiji and General Zhang Xueliang reminisced about the past.
Whether to move south has also undergone a heated discussion.
At the beginning of 1932, Pingjin was in a hurry, and there were great differences and even fierce conflicts between the parties concerned on the issue of whether cultural relics should avoid the enemy and move south. Most people in the leadership of the academy believe that in the middle of the war, if the cultural relics are not removed, it will be difficult to avoid difficulties. When the land falls, it can be restored, but the damage to cultural relics cannot be recovered, and there are international precedents for the relocation of cultural relics in wartime. Especially in view of the history of the Eight-Power Alliance invading Beijing in 1900, when Germany and France robbed the ancient observatory cultural relics to the embassy and then back to China, they strongly advocated that as many cultural relics as possible could be moved.
Another view is that as soon as cultural relics leave the palace gate, safety is lacking in guarantee, so we should wait and see, wait for the changes in the situation, and try not to move. Most people and citizens of all walks of life in Beiping resolutely opposed the relocation of cultural relics from the Forbidden City to the south. They are worried that once the cultural relics of the Forbidden City are removed, it will be difficult to return, and the historical and cultural city of Beijing will survive in name only, so they resist it very much. Some of them distributed leaflets to create public opinion, some claimed to use force to block them, and some contacted the trade union federation to call on transport workers to resist. In response to the opinions of all walks of life in Beiping, the hospital side made a guarantee by Song Ziwen, director and president of the Executive Yuan: Peiping is quiet, and the original objects are still transported back.
Most of the staff of the Forbidden City are locals, and they are resistant to the southward migration of cultural relics, so when the first batch of boxes are packed, they are loaded with some insignificant cultural relics, and the archives account for half of them, and sometimes even stuff the boxes with waste paper to fill the numbers.
Later, the situation deteriorated, and the workers became serious.
The southward relocation of cultural relics was divided into five batches, with a total of 13,427 boxes and 64 packages of cultural relics removed, which began on February 7, 1933 and ended on May 23, 1933. Wu Ying (literary scholar and secretary of the Academy), Yu Tongkui (engineer and director of the General Affairs Department of the Academy), Ma Heng (Jinshi scholar and deputy director of the Antiquities Museum of the Academy), and Cheng Xingling (secretary of the Academy, who served as chairman of the Hunan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference after liberation) served as supervisors of each batch. Antiquities exhibition halls, the Summer Palace, The Lama Temple and other institutions that collect cultural relics of the Qing Palace also relocate cultural relics along with the Forbidden City.
When cultural relics were relocated, the court sent a secret telegram to the Executive Yuan of Nanjing and the local military and political governors along the way, asking them to protect them along the way. In order to avoid Tianjin and avoid japanese attacks, the train took the Pinghan Line to the Longhai Line and then to the Jinpu Line, and detoured south. The trains were all tin cars, and the first two trains were loaded. Machine guns were set up at each port around the roof, and gendarmes were deployed on each car, protected by live ammunition. Except for the special express train, the rest of the trains have to give way to the heritage car first. At each stop, the magistrate sent someone to the car to greet him. At the important gate, the lights in the car are turned off, and the staff in the car are lying in line with their clothes. On both sides of the car, there are teams of horses gathering with the car and running in relay. When the car arrived in the Xuzhou area, everyone saw that the trenches on both sides of the railway were full of soldiers, supporting machine guns, ready to shoot at any time. It turned out that some bandits had received news of the passage of the cultural relics train and wanted to block the road and hijack the car, and the army had already engaged the bandits the night before, and at this time the officers and men were waiting in strict formation to prepare for the bandits' comeback.
After the cultural relics were moved to Shanghai, they were placed on the site of Renji Hospital on Catholic Church Street and stored in Sichuan Luyeguang Company. In August 1936, the Nanjing Cultural Relics Preservation Library was completed, and from December 8 to January 17, 1937, the cultural relics stored in Shanghai were still divided into five batches, all of which were transported to Nanjing. On January 1, 1937, the Nanjing Branch of the Palace Museum was established.
However, during the tense stage of the southward relocation of cultural relics, the Palace Museum still participated in the "International Exhibition of Chinese Art" in London, England. At that time, among the cultural relics that moved south to Shanghai, a total of 735 pieces of bronze, porcelain, calligraphy and painting, jade, silverware, embroidery, cloisonné, red lacquerware, folding fans, furniture, and study rooms were selected, which were packed into 80 large boxes, accounting for more than 70% of the entire exhibition. This is the first large-scale exhibition of cultural relics abroad organized by China.
The picture above shows the selection of exhibits and the drying of calligraphy and paintings in Shanghai. The paintings and calligraphy in the photographs are now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei; the boxes were specially made for an exhibition in the UK, which was exhibited at the Royal College of Art in London, England from November 28, 1935 to March 7, 1936.
Only half a year after the cultural relics were moved to Nanjing, the "July 7 Incident" occurred, so it had to continue to move west. The cultural relics were moved west into three roads, south, middle and north, and each road was divided into several batches, and the waterways, railways and highways were used alternately, and they were moved to Ba County, Leshan and Emei in Sichuan. Cultural relics that move west often stay in one place for days, months or even years, and each paragraph is called "one move". In short, the southward migration is still purposefully Nanjing, while the westward migration is completely a war-torn escape. The cultural relics of the Middle Road ended in Leshan, but it was repeatedly bombed by Japanese aircraft, and the storage depot had to be moved again and again. South Road starts earliest, but stops at the latest. From August 14, 1937, he moved to Changsha, Guiyang, and Anshunhua Cave for six years. In the autumn of 1944, Guilin and Liuzhou fell one after another, and Guizhou Province was in danger, so it moved back to FeixianYan in Ba County, Sichuan, at this time it was December 18, 1944, and the next spring was preparing for the return of cultural relics to the east.
The picture shows the cultural relics of North Road entering the river from Hanzhong in Shaanxi Province through the Sword Pavilion of "Zhengrong and Cui Song", and the car passes through the Mingyue Gorge Boardwalk.
When the river is deep, cars cross the river in wooden boats. These photos were taken by Mr. Niu Deming, an employee of the Forbidden City at that time.
The westward relocation of cultural relics began the day after the Battle of Shanghai. When the cultural relics of the Forbidden City were transported to the riverside, the rumbling cannon sound was constantly heard in the east. The steamships employed at that time were British "Swire Ferries", because there were too many people fleeing, and the ships refused to dock. The staff and workers of the Forbidden City explained the truth of the matter to their compatriots, and the people who fled the country knew the great righteousness and immediately gave way to the docks. The ship loaded with antiquities set sail, but the refugees remained on the docks. The shipment of cultural relics continued until December 8, when the cultural relics stored in Nanjing were transported on the Yangtze River docks to be loaded on ships. In the last few days, enemy planes hovered over the docks and strafed, and bullets rained around the cultural relics boxes, and the escorts had to crawl near the wooden boxes, strafe them, and quickly load them. On December 14, the Japanese invaded the Zhonghua Gate.
In addition to withstanding the hardships of war, many accidents have also occurred in the westward relocation of cultural relics. On December 7, 1937, the relics of North Road were unloaded at Baoji Station and transported by car to the temporary warehouse. When the car carrying the relics crossed the tracks, two trains suddenly collided and damaged the car, and a box of yellow porcelain palace bowls and a box of bell covers were shattered. There was also a time when the cultural relics of the Middle Road were temporarily stored in Chongqing, and everyone only cared about moving upstairs, but the floor slab could not afford it, and suddenly collapsed, crushing two pieces of cultural relics. When the cultural relics of the North Road were stored in Baocheng, Shaanxi Province, the guards patrolled with guns and live ammunition, and a grenade in the waist of a soldier accidentally fell to the ground and exploded, three soldiers were killed and injured, and two cultural relics were damaged.
The cultural relics moved south include various types of cultural relics of the Forbidden City, such as calligraphy and painting, gold and stone, ceramics, jade, jewelry, gold and silver products, bamboo and wood ivory carving crafts, textiles, musical instruments, historical relics such as palace supplies, scientific instruments, medicine, weapons, and a large number of books and archives. It can be said that the famous objects known in the palace at that time were all among those who moved south. Such as Wang Xizhi's "Qing Ti in the Fast Snow", the Warring States Stone Drum, and Wen Yuange's "Four Libraries Complete Book". Found in Yongcheng (present-day Fengxiang County) in Shaanxi Province in the early Tang Dynasty, the Warring States Stone Drum has undergone a legendary gathering and dispersion, successively entering the Song and Jin courts, and from the Yuan Dynasty to the Beijing Guozijian, remaining unchanged for 600 years in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Although they are made of solid stone, the erosion of wind and rain for more than two thousand years has long made them vulnerable. When cultural relics were relocated south, people implemented special protection for them, and although they traveled tens of thousands of miles, they were not damaged.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the cultural relics moved westward were successively returned to Nanjing from January 1946 to November 1947. On the eve of the Kuomintang regime's flight to Taiwan, from December 22, 1948 to February 22, 1949, the Palace Museum transported 2,972 boxes of cultural relics moved south to Taiwan in three batches, and in 1965 moved to the newly completed Zhongshan Museum in Taipei as a temporary site.
In the 1950s, the Palace Museum successively transported cultural relics back from Nanjing.