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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 1 |
< Back The Qing Imperial Collection, ca. 1905-1925: Emotions, Ideas, and Events Cheng-hua Wang Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica Since the last years of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), the Qing imperial collection has been a catalyst for arousing nationalistic emotions and has stood at the center of the broader discourse on art exhibition and heritage preservation. Around 1905, as imperialist aggressions against China continued, the imperial collection located at the palaces in Shengjing 盛京 (outside the Great Wall in Manchuria) triggered a sense of cultural crisis among late-Qing intellectuals. Some officials proposed the establishment of an imperial household museum following the example of Japan. It was evident that the traumatic memories of imperialist pillage of the Qing palaces that occurred in 1860 and 1900 were still vivid in their minds. After the establishment of the Republican government in 1912, the Qing imperial collection was discussed in newspapers in terms of the changing political situation and the image of the Qing imperial family. The Qing imperial collection has never been treated disinterestedly as a subject purely limited to the realm of art, as we can still see today in both China and Taiwan. This paper deals with the full spectrum of emotions, ideas, and events revolving around the group of objects which we now term “the Qing imperial collection.” It begins with the question of how “the Qing imperial collection” became a definite group of artworks and an analytic category in intellectual discussions of art exhibition and heritage preservation. In fact, what the Republican government took over from the Qing court and palaces were actually diversified categories of objects difficult to be classified according to standard definitions of art or fine arts. Here, a comparative perspective on the content and significance of imperial collections in the long course of Chinese history helps make sense out of the Qing collection. Second, this paper discusses public opinion of the Qing imperial collection, which must be investigated in the context of the image of the Qing dynasty and imperial family in the early Republican era. The paper attempts to address the issue of how the Qing imperial collection was inscribed with the traumatic memories of China’s humiliation in the modern world and became a symbol of China’s modern fate. The third theme of the paper is the governmental policies of heritage preservation, including both the Qing and the later Republican governments. Previous research on the Qing imperial collection and its modern transformation basically looks at the collection from the perspective of the establishment of the Palace Museum in 1925. Actually, the significance of the Qing imperial collection goes beyond the founding of the most important museum in China. Also, the establishment of the Palace Museum as a public forum and space should be treated as a process, not a beginning or an end, of a longer search for the meaning and position of the Qing imperial collection in modern China. |
