Cross-Straits attempt to reveal imperial mystery
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About 95 percent of porcelains in Taipei's "National Palace Museum" come from the Palace Museum in Beijing. |
Almost all the collections in the Taipei museum were valuable intact porcelains, Chen said. "But we need broken pieces so that we can analyze their composition with device."
The porcelain lab of the Palace Museum is well known for a wide-range collection of broken porcelain pieces unearthed from almost every famous porcelain kiln in the Chinese history, said Miao Jianmin, the lab director who worked with Chen.
Besides, it also has the latest facilities which could lead to precise dating and better understanding of ancient technologies, Miao said.
"The two Palace museums have the largest collection of ancient Chinese porcelains in the world. The two can supplement each other as we have the most complete collection and they have the most valuable," he said. "If we work together, no one else would be able to compete us in this field."
The Beijing museum has a collection of 350,000 pieces of porcelain, while 95 percent of the 25,000 pieces of porcelain in the Taipei museum were royal collections and most of them were the best of their times.
Another attraction to Chen was the clock collections in the Palace Museum.
"When the KMT shipped treasures to Taiwan, they had to abandon large floor and table clocks because of their size and weight and took only small table clocks and pocket watches," Chen said.
Lacking skilled technicians, many clocks in Taipei were not properly repaired, he said.
He had studied some of the 1,500 clocks in the museum and learned how to maintain and repair them from the 63-year-old technician Qin Shiming who has worked for the museum for 35 years.
"I was fascinated by the clocks' mechanism. They are very complicated. Mr. Qin helped me understand them more easily," he said.
He recorded the maintenance and repair process with a camera and planned to reveal the mechanism of different clocks to allow more people appreciate the early technology.
"Chen plan to publish them. It is a good idea that never came to old people like me," said Qin. "I would like to help."
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