by Xinhua writers Liu Chang and Fu Shuangqi

    BEIJING/TAIPEI, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) -- Antique restorer Chen Tung-Ho of Taipei's "National Palace Museum" greatly valued his chance to work at the lab of the Palace Museum in Beijing.

    "I have been the first person from Taiwan to have a staff pass of the Palace Museum in the past 60 years. It was a great honor and luck," said the 41-year-old assistant research fellow of the Taipei museum in an interview with Xinhua.

    With the pass, he was able to enter several key labs of the Palace Museum.

    In about two months, Chen indulged himself in examining ancient Chinese porcelains and antique clocks in a quiet corner of the Imperial Palace, or the Forbidden City, which turned into the museum in 1925.

    "In those days, every morning I biked my way to work in the palace. I dared not imagine of this before," he said.

    Towards the end of a civil war in the late 1940s, the Kuomintang (KMT) government shipped 2,972 boxes of about 600,000 items from the Imperial Palace to Taipei when it fled to Taiwan. Based on this collection, Taipei's "National Palace Museum" was founded in 1965.

    This year, the directors of the two museums exchanged visits for the first time and agreed to exchange one or two research fellows between July to mid-September every year. Chen was the first in this project.

    After working for the Louvre Museum in Paris for seven years, Chen returned to Taiwan in 2006 and joined the "National Palace Museum" in 2008.

    He stayed in Beijing from July to September.

    "I brought two research plans to Beijing. One was about porcelains and the other about clocks," he said.

    Almost all the collections in the Taipei museum were valuable intact porcelains, Chen said. "But we need broken pieces so that we can analyze their composition with device."

    The porcelain lab of the Palace Museum is well known for a wide-range collection of broken porcelain pieces unearthed from almost every famous porcelain kiln in the Chinese history, said Miao Jianmin, the lab director who worked with Chen.

    Besides, it also has the latest facilities which could lead to precise dating and better understanding of ancient technologies, Miao said.

    "The two Palace museums have the largest collection of ancient Chinese porcelains in the world. The two can supplement each other as we have the most complete collection and they have the most valuable," he said. "If we work together, no one else would be able to compete us in this field."

    The Beijing museum has a collection of 350,000 pieces of porcelain, while 95 percent of the 25,000 pieces of porcelain in the Taipei museum were royal collections and most of them were the best of their times.

    Another attraction to Chen was the clock collections in the Palace Museum.

    "When the KMT shipped treasures to Taiwan, they had to abandon large floor and table clocks because of their size and weight and took only small table clocks and pocket watches," Chen said.

    Lacking skilled technicians, many clocks in Taipei were not properly repaired, he said.

    He had studied some of the 1,500 clocks in the museum and learned how to maintain and repair them from the 63-year-old technician Qin Shiming who has worked for the museum for 35 years.

    "I was fascinated by the clocks' mechanism. They are very complicated. Mr. Qin helped me understand them more easily," he said.

    He recorded the maintenance and repair process with a camera and planned to reveal the mechanism of different clocks to allow more people appreciate the early technology.

    "Chen plan to publish them. It is a good idea that never came to old people like me," said Qin. "I would like to help."