HONG KONG (AP) — China’s famed Palace Museum began exhibiting artifacts in Hong Kong on July 3, in an effort to build loyalty to Beijing in the former British colony that returned to Chinese rule 25 years ago.
The exhibition features silk paintings and calligraphy works from more than 1,000 years ago in a seven-storey building in the newly developed Harbour Arts District.
The fine art will be returned to Beijing for safekeeping after 30 days, but Chinese Communist Party leaders hope the cultural and political impact of the exhibition will last longer.
Despite this background, museum director Louis Ng said the Hong Kong space is not just a branch of the Palace Museum in Beijing.
“We have our own vision, identity and autonomy in operational and curatorial decisions,” Ng said.
The exhibition’s opening came just two days after Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to what is officially known as a special autonomous region and delivered a speech underscoring Beijing’s control under the “one country, two systems” vision. “
Xi praised the city for overcoming “violent social unrest” – a reference to the massive pro-democracy protests in 2019 that followed a crackdown that stifled dissent and shut down independent media.
A sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing has kept critics of the government who have not yet gone abroad either jailed or intimidated into silence. This makes Hong Kong closely linked to the strict control the Communist Party has imposed on the mainland and in peripheral regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.
Political control increasingly involves cultural and linguistic factors, with the July 1 ceremony being conducted entirely in Mandarin, the national language, rather than Cantonese, Hong Kong’s native language.
The construction of the Hong Kong Palace Museum has been controversial due to the lack of public consultation, which has surprised many Hong Kong citizens.
Wang Daixi, deputy director of the museum, said the exhibition is “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see some of the rarest early calligraphy and painting works in Chinese art history”.
Built in the Ming and Qing dynasties, many of the collection’s best works now reside on the self-governing island of Taiwan, where they were brought after the Communists seized power on the mainland in 1949.
