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Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, renowned for its
collection of ancient Chinese treasures, on Wednesday confirmed
reports that its most popular artifact had been damaged—but no one
knows when.
A museum spokesman said one
antenna of the two grasshoppers on a jade cabbage, which was
selected the most popular item in the museum in a 2002 vote, was
snapped off in a long-forgotten mishap.
“The damage has been there for
a long while,” Liu Yu-fen told AFP.
“It can be seen in a 1966
photograph … the damage might have happened when it was
transported from the mainland to Taiwan [in the late 40s] or even
date back to the Qing Dynasty [1644-1911],” Liu said.
She denied press reports that the
damage was inflicted during a rare exhibition in the island’s
Kaohsiung city three years.
Liu insisted that “the value of
the jade cabbage will by no means be undermined by the flaw.”
However, the news shocked the
Taiwanese people, many of whom compare it to the Mona Lisa in Paris.
The cabbage, which symbolizes
purity and prosperity, was first found in the chamber of a concubine
of Qing Dynasty Emperor Guang Xu (1871-1908) and is believed to have
been part of her dowry. It is carved from a single piece of jade
that is half gray and half emerald green.
The item is among the museum’s
collection of more than 655,000 Chinese artifacts spanning 7,000
years from the prehistoric Neolithic period to the last imperial
Qing dynasty.
The National Palace Museum was
founded in Beijing in 1925 and its treasures were moved around the
mainland during the Second World War and the civil war with then
ruling Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) government.
The collection was shipped to
Taiwan in 1948-49, shortly before the Nationalist troops fled to the
island after losing the civil war to Chinese communist forces.
The museum, relocated in
Taipei’s suburbs in 1965, draws more than 1.5 million tourists a
year.
--AFP
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