Hong Kong Palace Museum: Beijing's Forbidden City treasures find new $450M home

Hey, thanks for watching CNN 10. Our daily 10-minute shows are on pause for the summer, but we will be posting clips like this Monday through Friday until our regular programming resumes in August. So please enjoy, and to get notified of our content, please like and subscribe to this channel and keep up with us at CNN10.com. The Palace Museum stands at the heart of Beijing, and it's expanding into Hong Kong with a building designed to house hundreds of its priceless treasures. The new seven-story, $450 million Hong Kong Palace Museum is dedicated to Chinese art and culture. Its July opening coincides with the 25th anniversary of the city's handover from British rule to China. It's so important for our museum to be able to tell the story. Where does Chinese civilization come from, and how does Chinese civilization connect with other civilizations? Because we're not alone, right? So I think that's important, especially at a time when the world is so polarized and divided. More than 900 artifacts are on loan from Beijing's Palace Museum, exhibited across multiple galleries. In this one, the spotlight is on the history of Chinese ceramics, with a focus on imperial porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Palace Museum has 1.8 million objects, right? Out of that, only 8,000 were designated as grade one objects. Out of 8,000, they gave us 166, 5%, which is a big deal. You have to see it, because only with your own eye, you can really appreciate the exquisite nature of Chinese art. Chinese President Xi Jinping has promoted the glories of China's past as part of his vision for achieving the Chinese dream. In 2017, Xi visited Hong Kong to mark the 20th anniversary of the handover, and oversaw the signing ceremony between Beijing and Hong Kong to develop the museum. At the time, he said he hoped it would promote traditional Chinese culture. As the president's push for cultural soft power is being realized in the city, freedom of expression has been curtailed. Thanks to a national security law passed in 2020, scenes of mass protests are no more, and politically charged artworks like the Pillar of Shame Tiananmen Square Memorial have been removed. The Hong Kong outpost will be the third palace museum in the world. Many of the Forbidden City's other treasures are also on display at the Palace Museum in Taiwan, after some of China's most prized relics were taken to Taipei by retreating nationalist forces in the 1940s. We have these experts from Beijing and China, as well as Taiwan, working together with us in our museum. So I can only imagine that dialogue will continue. I hope that one day there could be an actual collaboration between the three museums. Three museums housing China's priceless national treasures, but only two have the blessing of Beijing, including here, where the capital's influence is already felt. Christy Lou Staudt, CNN, Hong Kong.