The National Palace Museum in Taiwan has a unique historical background. Its collection derives mostly from the holdings amassed by Chinese emperors over the course of a thousand years. Starting in 960 AD and extending over the Sung, Yüan, Ming and Ch'ing dynasties, 51 emperors sat on the throne in Chinese history. Each dynasty inherited and amassed collections of ancient ritual objects and works of art while also serving as patrons of the arts and crafts, creating over the centuries one of the richest and greatest treasure houses of the East. Surviving numerous wars and disruptions, this court collection unprecedented in both quantity and quality eventually would form the core of the Palace Museum, which was established for the public in 1925 by the government more than a decade after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911.

In 1933, to avoid the threat of Japanese aggression, the essence of this collection of imperial objects was packed into 19,557 large wooden crates and moved south from the Peking Palace Museum to Shanghai and then on to Nanking. With the full-scale eruption of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, these crates of cultural objects were shipped via three routes further inland to Szechwan for safekeeping. At the conclusion of the War, they were returned to Nanking. Not long thereafter, however, civil war broke out between Nationalist and Communist forces, resulting in the most important 2,972 of these 19,557 crates being moved to Taiwan in 1948-49 along with the Nationalist government. More than a decade after the fall of the mainland, a new home was constructed in 1965 for these treasures in beautiful Wai-shuang-hsi on the outskirts of downtown Taipei. Its name became known as the National Palace Museum.

In this private collection that once belonged to the Son of Heaven, there were some things about ancient culture that even the owner (the emperor) did not know. Many of these ancient ritual objects were treated as cute playthings and curiosities by the emperor. Even a sacred jade pi disc, once used in prayers to the gods and ancestors in ancient times, was converted into the base for a stand to support an underglaze blue porcelain with dragon decoration. Likewise, a jade kuei tablet with engravings of ancestral and eagle-spirit imagery was turned upside-down and carved with seals and poetry of the emperor and placed in a wooden stand to serve as a decorative object. The contents of the imperial poem indicate that the Ch'ien-lung Emperor felt it was a jade pendant carved with an eagle on one side and a bear's head on the other.