Arriving by Ship — Sealed, Delivered, and the Uninterrupted Beauty (乘船而來─封存、遞送與那些未曾中斷的美好)

Between late 1948 and 1949, hundreds of boxes of artifacts packed from palace warehouses drifted across the Black Water Trench by ship, from the mouth of the Yangtze River to Keelung Port, in exchange for the belief that civilization would not be interrupted. They are not cold national treasures, but daily objects touched by hands — the gong (wine vessel), the brushes and inkstones on the desk, the flowing scrolls — but they were carefully wrapped due to the flames of war and drifted at sea, just to allow memory and culture to continue.
More than seventy years later, we "unbox" again, not just to see ancient ritual vessels and celadon, but also to see their dialogue with today's life. Keelung Port once welcomed cultural relics, and also once drifted with the fragrance of bananas and the sweetness of sugar; today it is the coming and going of chips and containers. Behind these goods, the needs and reliance of people in the changing times are reflected, making the port a node where life and memory meet.
The first batch of artifacts was urgently escorted by the Navy's "Chung Ting" (中鼎艦) ship, and the second batch was carried by the "Hai Hu" (海滬輪) belonging to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company. The predecessor of Yang Ming Marine Transport thus played a key delivery role in history. Just at the node of the centenary of the Palace Museum and the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the museum in Taiwan, we look back at the process of drifting and arriving through this exhibition. Mr. Chuang Ling's (莊靈) story becomes a clue — since birth, he followed the cultural relics south. Because he was not a staff member of the Palace Museum, he was not allowed to get close to or touch them. For him, those wooden boxes were both the background of his growth and a familiar yet distant existence.
Today, when we gaze at these wooden boxes again, it is not just a review of history, but also a re-confirmation that "beauty must be properly delivered" — a shipping route that has never been broken and is still continuing today.