The Palace Museum Centennial: A Century of Guardianship and Legacy

BEIJING, Oct. 17, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report from China.org.cn on the 100^th anniversary of the Palace Museum:

Standing with quiet grandeur at the heart of Beijing's Central Axis, the Palace Museum is celebrating its centennial this year. Through a century of trials and triumphs, generations of guardians have remained steadfast in their mission — to safeguard the national treasures and carry their legacy forward.

In the bitterly cold winter of 1924, then 18-year-old Shan Shiyuan, an auditor in the history department at Peking University in Beijing, was invited to the Forbidden City alongside some of his professors and fellow classmates. They were chosen for a special mission — to take inventory of the imperial and private belongings in the Forbidden City. At that time, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty Puyi had been evicted, and the provisional government decided to transform the Forbidden City complex into a museum. The meticulous logging of its treasures was the very foundation of the new establishment. To prevent theft, the workers donned specially designed uniforms without pockets, fastening their sleeves tightly with white straps, leaving their hands exposed in plain sight; in the unheated "cold palaces," they often had to stand for several hours at a stretch. On October 10th, 1925, the Palace Museum was officially founded, and Shan thus became a living witness to how the Forbidden City was transformed from a once-exclusive imperial palace to a public museum. The initial inventory work in which Shan participated lasted for several years, leaving behind the original files recording millions of heritage artworks.

However, these cultural treasures soon faced an unprecedented calamity. In 1931, Japan launched its invasion of China. To protect the treasures from falling into enemy hands or being destroyed in the flames of war, a painful decision was made: some of the most precious collections of the Palace Museum were relocated in batches to Southern China. Zhuang Yan was among those entrusted with this mission. In 1933, he was assigned to escort some other antiques in a new batch — the ten Stone Drums of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), revered as the "No.1 antiques of China," which were then housed at Guozijian, the Imperial Academy. The daunting task required painstaking efforts. Zhuang, gathering a small team, used tweezers to fill the weathering cracks and fissures already on the stone drums with thin layers of damp cotton paper, before wrapping and binding them securely, layer by layer. With such meticulous protection, the drums, weighing over ten tons, survived thousands of miles of perilous drifting, and were transported back to Beijing in the 1950s, completely unscathed, and have been preserved in the Palace Museum until today.

Guarding these artifacts requires not only the courage to "value national treasures as one's own life," but also the meticulous dedication of a true craftsman.

In 1971, Zhao Zhenmao reported for duty at the Palace Museum. Among the heritage artworks he received was a bronze horse unearthed from a tomb dating to the late years of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) — a galloping horse with three legs in midair, its right hind hoof treading on a flying bird. When it first arrived, Zhao found the bronze ware dull and damaged: seven holes gaped along the horse's neck alone, with its mane missing, and its tail broken. After studying a wealth of references on bronze war horses from the Qin and Han Dynasties, Zhao Zhenmao successfully reattached the mane and the tail to the body, filled the holes and crevices with bronze and tin, polished the surface, and recreated patinas at the repaired spots. The restoration could have ended here, but Zhao realized that the three hooves were still hollow, so he drew on his years of expertise and made a paste of raw lacquer and yellow soil, to fill in the cavity inside the hooves, giving the sculpture greater stability and balance. A few months later, the bronze ware was unveiled to the public under the name "Bronze Galloping Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow," and it has since become a masterpiece celebrated around the world. 

Using state-of-the-art technologies to preserve and revitalize the fruits of a civilization has always been the pursuit of these guardians of national treasures. Su Yi obtained her master's degree, then joined the Palace Museum in 2001, and has since witnessed every step of its digital transformation. Each cultural artifact differs in preservation condition, materials and crafting techniques. Based on these features, Su Yi and her fellow researchers have spent years refining the standards and protocols for digital data collection for the antiques. For example, the researchers discovered that the metallic threads in cloisonne pieces reflect light differently as the viewing angle or illumination changes, so in practice, they first used 3D laser scanning to capture the precise silhouettes of the objects, before taking multiple photos from closely spaced positions under carefully calibrated lighting. In the digital environment, these layers of data reveal the fine brilliance of the cloisonne wires with striking realism. Today, over a million artifacts in the Palace Museum have undergone high-precision digital capture.

A century of devotion, a century of guardianship. Looking back across these 100 years, we see generations of guardians dedicated to the inventory, escort, and "rebirth" of antiques — their commitment and perseverance telling the story of how a civilization can be preserved, and its culture passed on with care and conviction. They are like glimmers in the long river of this century-old journey, bearing witness to the unbroken thread of Chinese civilization, and the passing of its enduring flame.

China Mosaic
http://chinamosaic.china.com.cn/

The Palace Museum Centennial: A Century of Guardianship and Legacy
http://www.china.org.cn/video/2025-10/17/content_118129300.shtml 

SOURCE China.org.cn