How China’s Forbidden City treasures were saved during 1930s war with Japan

The Gate of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City in Beijing, 2022.

Ng Han Guan/AP

On the eve of Japan’s invasion of China in the early 1930s, a group of museum curators at the Forbidden City in Peking (now Beijing) gathered together and asked themselves: What would happen to the country’s vast collection of imperial art when the inevitable all-out war between Japan and China begins?

The question then prompted an odyssey that spanned 16 years — through the Sino-Japanese war and World War II. Some 20,000 cases full of imperial artworks were transported across China as war raged on. To avoid Japanese soldiers’ attention, the curators carried the art on trucks, steamships, trains and even bamboo rafts.

The skyline is consumed with fire and smoke in Shanghai, on Oct. 27, 1937.

Associated Press

This part of China’s modern history — little known outside Asia — is the subject of journalist Adam Brookes’ recent book, Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China’s Forbidden City. He spoke with NPR about how he first heard of those who rescued the Forbidden City’s antiquities, and reflected on China’s absence from Western understanding of the history of the Second World War.

Author Adam Brookes first heard about the rescue of the Forbidden City’s treasures from curators at Taiwan’s Palace Museum.

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