In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, there is a scene in the Forbidden City after the 1911 Republican Revolution in which the already abdicated last emperor P’u-i (John Lone) warned his two chief eunuchs with these words: “I’ve recently learned that many pieces from the imperial collections were on sale in the antique stores of Peking!” Palace eunuchs were notorious thieves of imperial treasures. The Forbidden City, first built from 1406 to 1420, was not only the world’s largest palace complex for the twenty-four successive emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, but also the home to the magnificent imperial collections of art and artifacts. When the Forbidden City was turned into the Palace Museum in 1925, a twenty-eight-volume inventory of the imperial collections listed more than 1,170,000 items. In 1933, to protect these treasures on the eve of the Japanese invasion, the finest of them were packed into 13,500 crates and bundles and shipped out of Peking for safe-keeping. In 1948–49 before the Communists’ takeover, the Nationalists selected 232,629 items in 2,972 crates and shipped them to Taiwan. Finally in 1961 the building of the National Palace Museum was completed in Taipei as a home to the shipped treasures,...