“It’s a global view of Asia,” said Wang Shih-Sheng, the museum’s chief curator. “Most of our artifacts come from our collection in Taipei, but when planning the project, we decided to look at things from an Asian perspective.”

The Taipei museum opened in 1965 and was used by Taiwan’s Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek as a source of local legitimacy vis-à-vis Mao’s Communists, the victors of the Chinese civil war. The museum was also employed as a tool for imposing a Chinese identity upon Taiwan residents.

Along with the Nationalists came more than 600,000 artifacts from the Palace Museum in Beijing, which was founded in 1925, the year after China’s last emperor, Puyi, who had not held the title of emperor since a short-lived restoration to the throne in 1917, was evicted from the Forbidden City. Before his expulsion, it became apparent that he and his court were selling off national treasures to survive.

Most of the items that survived the difficult voyage to Taiwan were produced by Chinese kingdoms and dynasties or nearby kingdoms, such as Tibet, who paid tribute to and traded with their Chinese neighbors.

Other items, however, came from further afield. Of little political use to the Nationalists, they took on a new significance after the election of Chen Shui- bian to the presidency of the Republic of China, as Taiwan has been called since 1945.