The wooden crates — some 60 odd in number — lie strewn across the polished concrete floor in a dim and cordoned-off corner of the ROM’s Galen Weston exhibition hall.

Over the next three weeks, the bolted boxes will disgorge treasures — artifacts that will open a dazzling window into one of history’s most secretive and opulent sanctums.

“Right in this place we are standing there will be the robes and the seals that were used by the last emperor,” says Chen Shen, senior curator of the Royal Ontario Museum’s East Asian collection, as he stands amid the scattered containers.

“In this space, you will see artifacts of a place that only the emperors and their closest relatives would be allowed.”

Those emperors — 24 in all — ruled China for the final 500 years of a dynasty that spanned more than three millennia.

And they set up shop in Beijing’s Forbidden City — a rambling and mysterious complex the Toronto museum will chronicle in an exclusive exhibit that opens March 8 and runs into early fall.

Dubbed The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Emperors, the exhibit will be the centrepiece of the ROM’s centennial celebrations.

It’s a fitting choice to headline the museum’s 100th anniversary, says Shen, who is also the exhibit’s lead curator.

“The ROM has the most comprehensive, most prominent Chinese collections . . . in North America and even outside of China,” he says.

Indeed, the museum’s interest in Chinese culture and artifacts had solidified well before the facility opened its doors to the public on March 19, 1914.

The museum’s Far East focus actually found its source in the fascination with Egyptian history that was sweeping the West at the turn of the last century.

Charles Trick Currelly, one of the museum’s founding fathers, was an avid Egyptologist who was busily collecting mummies, sarcophagi and other treasures along the Nile during the ROM’s formative years.

But with an insight that would shape the museum’s antiquarian endeavours over the coming century, Currelly hit on the notion that Egypt could best be understood by comparing and contrasting it with another ancient civilization: China’s.

Shen notes that the first Chinese artifact acquired by the ROM was a 2,000-year-old Han dynasty vase purchased by Currelly in a Cairo antiquities shop in the early 1900s.

Since then, the ROM has amassed some 35,000 East Asian artifacts, with many of the world’s most precious on display in its sprawling Chinese galleries.

Begun in 1406 under the Ming dynasty, the Forbidden City took some 14 years to complete.

Its final imperial inhabitant, Puyi, abdicated in 1912 and was the subject of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning 1987 epic The Last Emperor.

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The Forbidden City was laid out in concentric complexes, which became more and more exclusive as they moved in towards the centre.

“The inner cities . . . were really the realm of his family, his concubines, his empress, (the) empress dowagers and (eunuch) servants — many, many servants,” Shen says. The emperor “was the only one allowed to be a real man in the inner city.”

The exhibit will be set up to lead visitors through the complex’s increasingly rarified strata, culminating with artifacts associated with the emperor’s private lodgings. This inner sanctum exhibit will include a golden-frilled robe worn by Puyi, who was known as Xuantong during a reign truncated by revolution.

Another central attraction, unpacked and pieced together for a press viewing last week, is an imperial throne that once sat in one of the Forbidden City’s concubine quarters.

Unlike many of the packaged museum blockbusters that have come through Toronto only to travel elsewhere, the new exhibit is an exclusive collaboration between the ROM and Beijing’s Palace Museum.

“All the artifacts have to be returned to China within a year,” Shen says.

Shen says the exhibit will focus mainly on the daily lives of the emperors as they were lived in various parts of the city’s concentric segments.

Along with a number of the ROM’s own acquisitions, the show will include 250 artifacts from the Palace Museum, some 80 of which have never been seen outside of China.

Said longtime Palace Museum curator Hongjun Fang, in town helping to oversee the exhibition: “I have been working in the Palace Museum for nearly 40 years and some of the objects coming here, it’s the first time I’ve seen them.”

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