After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many Ukrainian museums wrestled with the question of how to protect their art treasures from shelling and looting.

That got some people thinking in Taiwan.

Just three weeks after the invasion, the director of Taipei's National Palace Museum was asked in parliament whether his house had a contingency plan in case of a Chinese attack.

"In Taiwan, we're used to thinking about natural disasters like earthquakes and typhoons," says director Wu Mi-cha in his Taipei office.

"Up until then we hadn't had any drills in case of war." The first of this kind took place in July.

In addition to employees of the museum, soldiers and police officers also took part.

Experts then recommended "working out even more complex scenarios

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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It is highly unlikely that China would deliberately bomb the museum in the event of war.

After all, the massive building in the north of the Taiwanese capital houses the world's most valuable art collection from the estate of the Chinese emperors.

Because of this, the museum is popularly considered the safest place in all of Taiwan.

Most of the almost 700,000 objects were brought from the Forbidden City in Beijing to safety from the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and ended up in Taiwan as a result of the Chinese Civil War.

China is demanding them back.

One can imagine that from the point of view of the Chinese Defense Ministry, a capture of the museum would be a significant symbolic act.

The Taipei Times newspaper recently reported that the museum was classified as a "national critical infrastructure"

The identification is lost

For the time being, Chinese propaganda contented itself with spreading rumors that Taiwan was planning to bring the most valuable works of art to America and Japan.

As expected, this caused quite a stir on the Chinese Internet.

The rumors were also picked up in Taiwan.

"The worst thing is that our leading media followed suit," Wu says.

He was forced to make a denial.

Wu is also irritated by the fact that his predecessor gave an interview to the Chinese party newspaper "Global Times", even though the nationalist paper had been instrumental in spreading the rumours.

"Dance with the fake news" is what Wu calls it.

You have to know that the Palace Museum is also a political issue in Taiwan.

In the eyes of many supporters of the opposition National Party (KMT), it embodies the legacy of the Republic of China.

When their troops lost the civil war against Mao's communists in 1949, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek had the art treasures brought to Taiwan in thousands of wooden boxes and stylized them until his death in 1975 as a symbol of his claim to continue to govern all of China.

This was all the more true during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao's henchmen raped the country's cultural assets.

Today, most Taiwanese no longer identify with Chinese history.

This also applies to President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

When she took office in 2016, the museum management was also changed, as its director is proposed by the Prime Minister and appointed by the President.

He has ministerial rank.

This reflects the institution's former importance to this day.

There is sympathy within the DPP for demotion to a sub-organization of the Ministry of Culture, but the KMT is vehemently opposed.

Wu's predecessor, Feng Ming-chu, accuses the government of wanting to erase the Chinese origins of the collection.

At the time, there was still cooperation with the Beijing Palace Museum in the Forbidden City.

When Feng left after Tsai Ing-wen took office,