To cling to the past and to rope the present is to slander the present; to cling to the present is to slander the past.
In 1949, when the Nationalist government was facing collapse, Chiang Kai-shek secretly plotted to transport a large number of treasures of the Forbidden City to Taiwan. By the end of January, he had arranged for Hang Liwu, then secretary of education and government, to transport two shipments of cultural relics to Taiwan.
At that time, many people fled from Nanjing to Taiwan, so by the time Hang Liwu returned to Nanjing to prepare for the third batch of cultural relics, he could not find even an empty ship. Under the arrangement of Gui Yongqing, commander of the Navy, the third batch of cultural relics finally boarded the "Kunlun" and left Nanjing.
However, the "Kunlun" was originally tasked and not specially used to transport cultural relics, so the ports along the way had to dock. After more than 20 days of stop-and-go sailing at sea, the ship did not reach the port of Keelung in Taiwan until February 22.
The arrival of this last batch of cultural relics symbolizes the end of Chiang Kai-shek's treasure transportation operation. From December 21, 1948 to February 22, 1949, in just 61 days, Hang Liwu transported three batches of 5,522 boxes of cultural relics from the Chaotian Palace warehouse in Nanjing to the port of Keelung in Taiwan. The more than 5,000 boxes of cultural relics were all piled up in the warehouse of a sugar factory in Taichung.
The warehouse conditions of the Taichung Sugar Factory certainly cannot meet the requirements for the protection and collection of cultural relics, and can only be temporarily stacked as a warehouse to solve the urgent need. Hang Liwu also knew that in the long run, some ancient books and rare books would be damaged due to improper storage.
Hang Liwu was a true treasure lover, and he immediately reacted to Chiang Kai-shek's problems. However, at this time, Chiang Kai-shek was busy with a large-scale political purge in Taiwan, consolidating his position, and where did he have time to manage cultural relics.
For the safety of cultural relics, Hang Liwu had no choice but to find a way to build a warehouse by himself. He and the Forbidden City cultural relics experts who came to Taiwan began to search for a suitable address for the construction of the warehouse, and finally they found a highland outside the village of Beigou Village in Wufeng Township, on the edge of the hills on the edge of the Taichung Plain.
After taking a fancy to this place, Hang Liwu went to see Chiang Kai-shek several times to ask for funds. More than a year later, Hang Liwu got the funds to build a warehouse for storing cultural relics. After the warehouse was built, these rare treasures were sealed in Wufeng Township for 15 years.
It was not until the 1960s that the Taiwan authorities remembered that there was a warehouse in Wufeng Township full of treasures. Gradually, Wufeng Township in Taichung became lively again. On the afternoon of March 22, 1963, when the staff conducted a routine inspection of the sealed cultural relics, they found that there was a little water mark on the box in the warehouse, and after opening it, they found that the leaking water droplets were soaked inside, which frightened the staff!
Obviously, the Wufeng Township warehouse can no longer meet the requirements for exhibition and storage, so the cultural relics experts involved in the protection of these fine cultural relics and the former Forbidden City staff collectively wrote to Chiang Kai-shek, hoping to build a new official museum in Taiwan to store these cultural relics.
This time, Chiang Kai-shek did not hesitate, and soon the approval documents for the establishment of the new museum and the special construction funds were issued. In early March 1964, the project officially began in Waisangxi, a suburb of Taipei. On November 12, 1965, the new museum was completed, stored in 3879 boxes of more than 250,000 cultural relics in Wufeng Township, Taichung, and began to be transported to the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
The national treasures that have been slowly moving south for decades have finally settled down. On June 1, 2011, the remaining mountain map of the "Fuchun Mountain Jutu" from the mainland and the useless master volume of the "Fuchun Mountain Jutu" collected by the National Palace Museum in Taipei, after the same picture scroll went through hardships, crossed more than 1,000 kilometers of the strait, which attracted widespread attention from the society and was given far-reaching significance by the people on both sides of the strait.
The general trend of history that must be combined for a long time has been clearly interpreted between the vigorous and powerful brushstrokes and the majestic landscapes. Peaceful reunification of the two sides of the strait is the common aspiration of the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation at home and abroad. The national treasure of the Forbidden City carries the consensus of all Chinese on the inheritance of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, and is the consensus of one ancestor and one China.