History of The Forbidden City - After The Revolution

After The Revolution

Opposition to Puyi staying in the palace grew during the Beiyang government of the Republic of China.

In 1923 Reginald Johnston, Puyi's English teacher, told Puyi about eunuchs smuggling treasures out of the palace and selling them in antique shops. Puyi ordered an audit of the palace's collections. Before it began, a fire consumed the gardens of the Palace of Establishing Prosperity (建福宫) where the bulk of the Qianlong Emperor's collection of art works was stored. In his memoir, Puyi claimed the fire was started by the eunuchs to conceal their embezzlement. This fire further fuelled public sentiments against Puyi's continued occupation of the palace. The gardens were not rebuilt until 2005.

In 1924, Feng Yuxiang took control of Beijing in a coup. Denouncing the previous agreement with the Qing imperial house, Feng expelled Puyi from the Palace. On October 10, 1925 (Double Ten Day), the Palace Museum was established in the Forbidden City. The large amount of treasures and curiosities housed there were gradually catalogued and put on public display.

Soon, however, the Japanese invasion of China threatened the safety of these national treasures, and they were moved out of the Forbidden City. Starting in 1933, important artifacts were packed and evacuated. They were first shipped to Nanjing and thence to Shanghai. However, the Japanese forces soon threatened Shanghai. The Executive Yuan decided to evacuate the collections to the remote west. The artifacts were split into three lots. One took the northern route towards Shaanxi. One was shipped up the Yangtze River towards Sichuan. The final lot was transported south towards Guangxi. The pace of the Japanese advance forced the artifacts to be moved quickly to escape bombing and capture, often with just hours' notice. In the end, all three collections reached the relative safety of Sichuan, where they stayed until the end of the war.

Meanwhile, the Japanese army captured the Forbidden City in Beijing, but were only able to remove a few large bronze tubs and a few pieces of cannon. Most of these were recovered after the war, in Tianjin.

At the end of World War II in 1945, the artifacts were moved back to Nanjing and Beijing. Remarkably, none were damaged or lost.

In the late 1940s, with the Kuomintang losing the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the artifacts from the Forbidden City and the National Museum in Nanjing to be moved to Taiwan. In the event no artifacts were shipped from Beijing, but many of the best collections stored in Nanjing were shipped to Taiwan, and today form the core of the National Palace Museum in Taipei.