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Museum diplomacy: Directors of rival museums in China and Taiwan to trade visits

The first ever visits will give officials at Beijing's National Palace Museum, in the Forbidden City, a close-up look at some of the 654,000 pieces of jade, scrolls, pottery and bronze war Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang took when they fled to Taiwan sixty years ago.

Curators from the National Palace Museum in Taipei will head to Beijing for a chance to examine some of the 600,000 not-so-spectacular pieces of art that were left behind by the Nationalists and are now stored in China's capital.

China has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong's Communists won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek's KMT fled to the island...

Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)