The world's leading Chinese art museum, Taiwan's National Palace, officially reopened on February 8 after almost two years of renovations., offering visitors a glimpse of rare imperial art treasures. The museum houses 654,500 art works and artefacts shipped from the mainland in 1948 just before Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan.
The museum had intended to remove public notices explaining that the exhibits originally came from the former imperial palace in Beijing, known in the West as the Forbidden City and on the mainland since the Communist takeover as the Palace Museum.
This created fresh tensions between Taiwan and China, with Beijing complaining that such alterations were an attempt to purge the vast treasure trove of its mainland China heritage. (Source: Reuters, Feb 8, 2007).