National Palace Museum

The National Palace Museum's story begins in Beijing and continues in Taiwan. The museum was officially founded on 10 October 1925 after the Qing imperial collections in the Forbidden City were turned into a public institution. War and political upheaval later led to the evacuation and relocation of major parts of the collection.

The Taipei museum opened to the public on 13 November 1965 at Waishuangxi. Official NPM history explains that holdings from the Palace Museum and the Preparatory Office of the National Central Museum were joined there, forming the museum now known as the National Palace Museum.

Use current collection numbers carefully. The official collection statistics page lists 699,150 artifacts as of May 2026, including national treasures, significant antiquities, rare books, archival documents, bronzes, ceramics, jades, paintings, calligraphy, textiles, and more.

A visit is therefore not simply about famous curios. It is about court culture, collecting, evacuation, preservation, and rotation. Because works on paper and fragile objects cannot stay on display indefinitely, what you see is always a selected chapter from a much larger archive.

The National Palace Museum is not just a museum in Taipei; it is an institution shaped by the history of the Qing imperial collection, the Forbidden City, wartime evacuation, and the relocation of major holdings to Taiwan. That background explains why the museum's objects carry political and cultural weight beyond their material beauty.

Its founding date in 1925 belongs to Beijing, when the former imperial collections became a public museum after the end of dynastic rule. The Taipei opening in 1965 marks a second institutional life, with Palace Museum holdings joined to material from the Preparatory Office of the National Central Museum.

The collection is especially strong in Chinese painting, calligraphy, ceramics, bronzes, jades, rare books, documents, and court objects. A guide should not reduce it to a few popular works. Its value is cumulative: the museum lets visitors trace taste, ritual, bureaucracy, craft, scholarship, and imperial collecting over long periods.

Because only a fraction of the collection can be shown at once, the main text should avoid promising that any single famous object is always on display. The most reliable guidance is to explain the collection's origin, scale, and categories, then encourage checking current exhibitions through the official museum site.