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FOCUS ON
THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PALACE MUSEUMIn this issue we focus on the Palace Museum (Gugong bowuyuan or Gugong), which celebrated its 80th anniversary on 10 October 2005. In fact, a museum had been established in the Forbidden City almost a decade prior to 1925, and here we look at the history of that institutional precursor, known simply in English as the 'Government Museum'. The most recent chapter in the Palace Museum's dramatic history has seen vast restoration work and consolidation of the museum's role as a centre of art-historical intellectual enquiry since the appointment of its new director, Zheng Xinmiao, in 2002. As a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Zheng (b.1947) has a well-documented history of active involvement with conservation issues, in association with Luo Zhewen and Shan Shiyuan, both long-term scholars of the museum. As both Director of the Palace Museum and Vice-Minister of Culture, Zheng has written extensively on what he terms 'Gugong studies', a multidisciplinary field of enquiry that encompasses art-historical Sinology dealing with palaces, palace cultures, ritual conventions, collections, archives, architectural history and artefact history (ranging from fine arts to folk arts), to name only the more salient aspects of the field, all centred on the physical monument of the Gugong (Palace Museum) and its antecedents throughout Chinese history. Extending the earlier notion of 'Forbidden City studies', Zheng's 'Gugong studies' warrants extensive discussion well beyond the scope of this newsletter, but under the rubric of this new 'discipline' much exciting new work by younger scholars has been encouraged, produced and published. Here we can only hope to provide an overview of the museum and some of its work. |
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