In 1931, following the September 18th Incident in China, the Japanese occupied three provinces in Northeast China, including Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang. It wasn’t long afterward that they turned their attention to Beijing, with an eye firmly set on the large collection of priceless cultural artifacts housed at the Palace Museum, located in heart of the city. Having failed an earlier attempt at looting the cultural relics back in 1894, during the first Sino-Japanese War, they came better prepared this time. The future of China’s most prominent museum and its vast collection was balanced on a knife edge.

Today, we are going to take you back almost a century ago and offer you a glimpse at the largest-scale migration of cultural relics from China’s most prominent museum, the Palace Museum, formally the imperial residence at the Forbidden City.