The National Palace Museum, located in Taipei, Taiwan. Nearly every guide to Taipei recommends a visit to the iconic National Palace Museum, and for good reason: it houses over 600,000 artefacts and artworks from imperial China, spanning 8,000 years of history.

That makes it the largest collection of ancient Chinese artefacts in the world (yes, more than in China itself). Originally housed in Beijing’s Forbidden City by the imperial family, the collection was partially evacuated to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War so that the most precious items could be preserved.

The National Palace Museum was originally established as the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City on 10 October 1925.  

Complete inventory inspection has been taken three times in 1951–1954, 1989–1991 and 2008–2012 since the museum started to bring collections to Taiwan in 1948. According to official report, the museum house Chinese calligraphy, porcelain, bronzes, paintings, jades and many other artifacts, with 22% (2,972 out of 13,491 crates) of the boxes originally transported south from the Forbidden City. 

A lot of these artifacts were brought by Chiang Kai-shek before his Kuomintang forces fled the mainland in 1949. The museum has accumulated nearly 700,000 artifacts of significant historical or artistic values. With a collection of this size, only 1% of the collection is exhibited at any given time. The rest of the collection is stored in temperature controlled vaults.

According to en.wikipedia

 

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