Books and Museums
Is knowledge important? Cultural knowledge lies at the very center of one of the most notorious geopolitical disputes of the last century.
Readers of Winchester's Knowing What We Know are treated to seemingly endless stories about the history of knowledge transmission around the world. And the picture that begins to emerge in relief from its chapters is one of a high collective value placed on schools, books, encyclopedias, museums, and newspapers throughout history and up to the present that would be scarcely recognizable as an individual value today.
In this section, on China, for example, Winchester places cultural knowledge capital at the very center of one of the most notorious and longstanding geopolitical disputes of the last century. Who alone could or does value knowledge this much and in this way today?
The drums of war had started sounding in 1931. By the early spring of 1933, it was perfectly clear that chaos was about to ravage the country. [The museum's curator] ordered every single precious object in the national museum to be wrapped in raffia, numbered, and cataloged—a process that took from February until mid-May. He had them placed in exactly 13,491 stoutly built crates, which were then commingled with exactly 6,066 other cabin trunks heavy with a trove of equally precious objects from other collections in Peking, and he ordered everything loaded onto a series of five gigantic baggage trains and sent down to what he supposed might be safety, in Shanghai.
There followed a series of secret journeys, on which the number of crates and packages slowly diminished by way of theft and accident and confiscation from baggage caravans and railway trains and freight wagons and junks and hiding places and burial sites and caves and steamships. Even today, a few older Chinese remember and many more remember being told of the frantic rush to get these treasures—unparalleled in worth and irreplaceable as representing the quiddity of Chinese cultures—out of harm’s way and eventually into to a place of permanent sanctuary. The quest took on an importance all its own, becoming far more than the evacuation of treasures and the security of items of great worth. It came to be said that the amassed collection was China, that it was Chinese history, it was Chinese culture—and that wherever it was, wherever it finally came to rest, then that was China.
The stories of how it eventually reached the island of Taiwan and its long-sought sanctuary in the National Palace Museum in Taipei are legion. But the collection’s presence there—seven hundred thousand items, the vast proportion not on display and much said to be hidden away in the museum basements still in its wartime raffia wrappings—has a political, not to say geopolitical consequence. For the adage that "China is her treasures" rings as true today as it did countless dynasties ago, and the fact the treasures of China are currently housed on an island off the mainland coast, and are in the custody of a capitalist and democratically elected government that is manifestly not the government of today’s Beijing—this is seen as an affront to the current Chinese government’s amour propre, a sting that is every bit as painful as was the existence of Macau or Hong Kong or Shanghai or Hankow or Amoy under European rule. The will to have Taiwan returned to the protective and motherly wing of the Chinese mainland is not simply a matter of politics. It is more simply and more surprisingly because of the existence of the nation’s cultural birthright, housed in a museum in the center of Taipei.
