National Treasures or Just Old Stuff? The Palace Museum's Evacuation to Sichuan

Abstract

Early twentieth-century nationalist intellectuals and politicians in China promoted museums as sites for ‘awakening’ the masses from their pre-national slumber. Museum hagiographers since that time often imply that the new museums were successful in those terms, and that the Chinese people fully supported the modern, usually state-supervised museums and their nationalist goals. However, as this essay shows, by examining the evacuation of the Palace Museum artifacts from Beiping [Beijing] to Sichuan during the War of Resistance with Japan (1937-45), we see that on the contrary, the Chinese people were hardly convinced that antiquities belonged to the nation-state.