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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Adam Brookes, "Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City" (Atria Books, 2022)
Description: The two parallel Palace Museums in Beijing and Taiwan, and their separate collections of thousands of precious artworks and artifacts from imperial times, reflects a key moment in the 1940s when the Republic of China and the People’s Republic became distinct entities. But the very survival of these vast troves of porcelain, sculpture, jade, paintings, books and many other items up to that moment was far from guaranteed given the epochal events unfolding across East Asia in the early part of the twentieth century.In Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of C...