The National Palace Museum in Taiwan houses the world's largest collection of Chinese imperial art. The collection has over 600,000 pieces including calligraphy, porcelain, jades, bronzes, landscape paintings, portraiture, coins, rare books, documents, and figurines from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The treasures were originally the property of the imperial court in Beijing.
The museum was officially founded on October 10th, 1925 in Beijing, the national day of the Republic of China. But the Japanese invasion of northeastern China in 1931 and the Second Sino-Japanese War that broke out a few years later prompted the government to move crates of artifacts to the south. The crates were divided up and moved around China to Nanjing, Shanghai and Sichuan, sometimes only narrowly avoiding Japanese bombing raids.
The Republic of China government relocated to Taiwan in 1949 following the Chinese Civil War, but the government began shipping the art treasures to the island in December 1948, before the war had ended. These are the treasures that are now on display in Taipei's National Palace Museum, a palatial Chinese-style building completed in 1965. The museum is so highly valued that the government made it a ministerial-level institution in 1987.
China still holds that these treasures are the rightful property of the government in Beijing. The museum pieces have rarely gone on display outside of Taiwan because the government is worried that China's diplomatic allies would return them to Beijing instead of Taipei.