Palace Museum shows off ceramic wonders
After about two years’ preparation, the Palace Museum’s new ceramics gallery opened to the public in Beijing recently.
The new gallery, in the Hall of Martial Valor (Wuying Dian), on the west side of the museum, is displaying more than 1,000 highlighted Chinese ceramics ranging from 8,000 years ago to the early 20th century.
The Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, was the imperial palace from 1420 to 1911 during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. It houses more than 1.86 million cultural relics, about 370,000 of which are ceramics, mostly from royal families’ collections.
“In recent years ceramics researchers at the Palace Museum have made many academic discoveries through studies of such an abundant collection,” Wang Xudong, director of the museum, said at the opening ceremony of the gallery.
“Through comparative studies with new archaeological discoveries and methods of new technologies, many questions have been resolved. And it’s a good opportunity to better display these achievements to the public, and thus honor the excellence of Chinese ceramics culture.”
Lyu Chenglong, chief curator of the exhibition at the gallery, said that when the outer section of the Forbidden City was opened as a museum after the fall of the Qing Dynast, the first exhibition hall displaying ceramics was in Wuying Dian in 1914.
“To some extent, the Forbidden City’s ceramics gallery has returned to Wuying Dian,” said Lyu, who is also the director of the museum’s department of objects and decorative arts.
The Palace Museum had its first ceramics gallery in 1952, but it was moved around the palace compound later. The Hall of Literary Brilliance (Wenhua Dian) was the last ceramics gallery from 2008 to 2017, and exhibited about 400 artifacts.
“The ceramics collections at the Palace Museum are not only huge, but also include wide ranges of varieties, and many of them are clearly dated,” Lyu said. “That enables us to design an exhibition in chronological order to unveil a continuous development of the artifacts.”