| dc.description.abstract | Nowadays, both the Palace Museums in Taipei and Beijing provide a variety of publications, including exhibition catalogs, reproductions, and all kinds of cultural creative products. However, perhaps not many people know that in the early 20th century - before the Palace Museum spilt into two due to complicated political reasons – the Beiping Palace Museum also developed its own golden age of publications.
Based on this, this thesis is about to investigate the history of the Palace Museum before it settled in Taiwan. There are two main focuses of the research: the history of how Forbidden City turned into a museum and the historical reasons behind it, and the other is the types and compilation of the early publications of the Beiping Palace Museum. In order to make better elaboration, the periodical Palace Museum Weekly is selected as the main investigation subject. The formation and the contents of the Palace Museum Weekly both are special and unique, which make it outstanding compared to other early publications of the Beiping Palace Museum. For example, its layout is similar to pictorial journal and the contents are diverse.
Furthermore, after thoroughly analyzing each layouts of the Palace Museum Weekly, this thesis presents different perspectives from previous studies which only outline rough observations and always highlight the impacts of the Palace Museum Weekly to the art development. This thesis offers an opinion that the compilation of the Palace Museum Weekly was actually in an immature stage. Through a deep observation of formation, including releasing frequencies, dates and pricing, and the contents, this thesis provides more concrete examples to elaborate the effort of the Palace Museum Weekly’s committing to popularize the Qing imperial collection. Besides, the publication also serves as official newspapers, for example, cheaper price, highly frequency and longer term of the releasing, and the contents more focusing on the news of the agencies. Some of its contents, such as Minguo figures printed on the cover, and the photos of the letters wrote by people who led Manchu Restoration, also reflect the political states at that time. Therefore, the publication was also used as an approach to defend the legitimacy of the Nationalist government and its right to inherit the cultural heritage.
Besides, this thesis also attempts to locate the historical status of the Palace Museum Weekly through reviewing the early 20th century China. There were a variety of publications which promoted Chinese art and historical relics. By this, we can understand that the existence of the early publications of the Beiping Palace Museum was not only an independent publication but actually also correlated with the social trends of advocating the preservation of antiquities or so called ＂national essence.＂ Also, the readers are able to learn that there was the time when a variety of new types of photographic reproduction techniques, including lithography, copperplate printing and collotype printing were widely used in the reproduction of arts and antiquities. | en_US |