Highlights
Autumn Viewing in the Forbidden City: An Interview with Dickson Hall
In late 2016, The Forbidden City Publishing House released a colour edition of a catalogue of the early paintings in the Palace Museum, Beijing that had originally been published in the late 1980s. The catalogue, Chinese Paintings in the Palace Museum (4th–14th Century), is unique in that it was written in English by a Western scholar with unprecedented access to the paintings, and in that it was intended as a guide for Westerners visiting the regular autumn display of the works. The author, Dickson Hall, was one of the first Westerners to study at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).
Encountering the Majestic: Imperial Portraits and Qing Court Rites
For the July 2022 opening of the Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM), an unprecedented number of over 900 precious treasures were loaned from the Palace Museum for display in the opening exhibitions. While some of these treasures have never been exhibited before, many have been widely presented in past exhibitions. It therefore became both a challenge and an opportunity for curators to find new and innovative ways to represent and reinterpret them. Take, for example, the por-traits of emperors and empresses.
For the Love of Broken Porcelain
In 1960, while planting a rose garden on the grounds of a 600-year-old palace in Delhi, members of the Horticulture Branch of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) dug up a large hoard of broken blue-and-white dishes and bowls. These ceramics were thought to be Mughal porcelains. While this was duly noted in a brief entry in the ASI’s journal, Indian Archaeology 1961–1962: A Review, the discovery was regarded at the time as unimportant. The porcelain was put into storage, and the exact location of its discovery was forgotten. However, the collection was and remains the world’s largest collection of Yuan dynasty (1260–1368) blue-and-white porcelain.